Omegasevx

LS, I know exactly what you're saying. But so what?

So life and the universe has no inherent meaning and we're bags of chemicals born to die... that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to find our own meaning to our lives. Knowing that love and sadness are chemical reactions in your brain doesn't make them any less bitter/sweet. Those same reactions fuel every emotion you've ever felt.

You write from a third person perspective, as though you or someone will one day witness this end of humanity's dreams and philosophies. At some point you have to realize that you have 70-85 years to be alive, tops, and then you are gone. What will you do with the time you have? Sitting around thinking about how its all for nothing? The atheists I know are nothing like that.

I think of human beings as a great Shakespearian tragedy. Sad and tragic at the end, yes, but all the more beautiful because of it.

Vitalstatistix

It is not beautiful or ugly. It just is. I tried posting about it here & I can write up the argument here if anyone's interested in picking it up. Roughly all this talk about meanings/values is just subjective. You can take whatever you want from it. Some of us come from a system where their sense of 'meaning' was constructed in dogma. When they finally give up the superstitions, they don't know they have to piece it together all over again on their own.

Thomas II

So you rather have continuation even if it is all a fictional story? :huh:

Why would anyone want a continuation of the god of the Bible, with all the barbaric stuff related to it?

Why would anyone want the continuation of Torquemadas, and Inquisitions, and witch hunts, and Crusades, and religion mixed with political power?

Why would anybody want the continuation of abuses perpetrated by perverted arrogant clerics?

Thomas II

It's not like they told me days or weeks ahead that she had died. They called me about two hours after she died and after I took my famous shower.
I asked "At what time exactly did she die?"...They told me...And it was EACTLY the same time I was taking my shower...
How do I know exactly?
Because we keep a clock, a foot in diameter, in the bathroom, so nobody is late to school, so believe me I KNOW at what time I was taking the shower.
It happened as stated. But why is it so hard to understand?
So the fact that it happened is out of the question.
What could be debatable is how did these series of thoughts originate in my mind...

Steve Schlicht

This reminds me that I've done an actual selective memory test here at IIDB that, frankly...I had forgotten about.

Here is the link (I went by "ronin" back then):

Selective Memory Test

Make of it what you will.

I do find the human mind and the concept of time to be very interesting experiences.

Steve

spamandham

I don't think you appreciate the possibility that EVERYTHING you remember about that event could be manufactured by your mind and never actually happened. It is possible they called and told you about her death, and at that moment, the shower memory had not yet been planted in your head (because it never actually happened). That night as you slept, you had a dream about the phone call, and in your dream you "recalled" the shower event, including looking at the clock in the shower, asking what time she had died, etc., and then the next morning remembered the event with these new details invented by your brain added in.

I'm not trying to say this IS what happened, I'm just trying to get you to think, is there anything other than your own memory of the shower event that you can use to confirm it actually happened? Looking at a clock doesn't help, because that could easily just be part of a false memory. Remembering thinking about it when you got the call she had died doesn't help either, because that could also just be part of a false memory.

For example, did you tell someone about it before you received the phone call, did you write it down before you went to sleep etc.? If there is no way to confirm it actually happened other than your own memory of it, then maybe it never actually happened. Even if you told someone else about it, they may not remember exactly when you told them about it. If you told them the next day, then it's already too late. One dream cycle is all it takes to produce a false memory.

At any rate, I merely wanted to suggest it as a possibility, I'm not trying to convince you that's what happened. So I leave it to your discrtion to make that determination of whether or not the evidence precludes it.

Lógos Sokratikós

Sorry about your grandma. And yes, amor est vitæ essentia! If not, what else? What else can matter so much?

Lógos Sokratikós

Unbeatable

The beauty of meaning derived from dogma, especially dogma that your brain is soaking in before you're capable of rational thought, is that you don't necessarily see all the seams from where people over the course of a few millennia have put the pieces together. Of course, if you're here, you were un/fortunate enough to see them in the end, and now you're faced with the task of replacing the old illusion with a new one. But now, you don't have the benefit of ignorance or passivity. You have to try to perform the magic trick and sit in the audience watching it at the same time. How does a person manage to do that?

Steve Schlicht

Once the veil of illusion is removed one has no more need for boring magic tricks and it is then that one can begin to experience reality in plain view.

But Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man...

Steve

Vitalstatistix

I figure it still works whether or not you know what is actually happening. It helps that you're human therefore you have to do it. I seem to also have split it into two, but I think of myself more as the audience than the performer.