A replacement philosophy

By Dethblight ~

After I left Christianity, I spent quite some time looking for a "replacement philosophy". A philosophy is a nice thing to have... it's a nice neat little package we can show to the world when they ask us what we believe. It is the distilled essence of who we see ourselves to be. Everyone else has an ism, so we feel like we need one as well. Even with atheism, many people treat it as a belief system, or a summary of beliefs, rather than the lack of belief that it actually is. But maybe that's the problem. It occurred to me about two months ago, that maybe I don't need an ism, or a replacement philosophy.

Ironically, once I stopped looking for a replacement philosophy, one kind of fell into my lap. Once I stopped looking for a replacement philosophy, I stumbled onto the same basic idea that Epicurus and Bentham had before me. It seems to me, that once you remove God from the equation, life becomes meaningless. Most people, if you say "life is meaningless" automatically see this as a bad thing... but is it really? Well, let's look at what that really means.

Meaningless is only bad if you've come to expect everything to have meaning. In order for anything to be meaningful, someone or something has to assign meaning to it. So if there is no God to assign special meaning to life, existence, etc, then those things are... well, they just are. And that's the trick, not trying to figure out how life can have meaning without God, but rather realizing that something does not have to have meaning to be good. That relies on a subjective viewpoint.

However, if nothing has any value assigned to it, then things are only valuable in and of themselves. I'll say it again, because it is absolutely key... if there is no force to assign meaning to a thing to make it good or bad subjectively, then the only value that thing has is that of which it is self-possessed. Things are only good insomuch as they cause or promote pleasure, and things are only bad insomuch as they cause or promote pain. It is that simple.

The great secret of life is no big secret at all. It's been sitting there in plain sight for anyone who is interested to see. If it's not hurting anyone, and it makes you happy... go for it. Now I could drag this on for pages and pages like any REAL philosopher would... defining pleasure, defining pain, examining ambiguous cases... but there's no need for all that. This is a very basic, common-sense type thing, and in most situations, it is quite clear whether a thing is causing pain or pleasure, and which one it causes more of.

Call it what you want... "live and let live", "can't we all just get along", whatever. Now if I could just come up with a quotable quote to summarize years and months of serious "soul-searching" (haha) and self-examination... how about: "Only once you have realized that life is meaningless, does life start to take on true meaning." (hey, that's pretty good!)

Comments

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

So Just How Dumb Were Jesus’ Disciples? The Resurrection, Part VII.

By Robert Conner ~ T he first mention of Jesus’ resurrection comes from a letter written by Paul of Tarsus. Paul appears to have had no interest whatsoever in the “historical” Jesus: “even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, we know him so no longer.” ( 2 Corinthians 5:16 ) Paul’s surviving letters never once mention any of Jesus’ many exorcisms and healings, the raising of Lazarus, or Jesus’ virgin birth, and barely allude to Jesus’ teaching. For Paul, Jesus only gets interesting after he’s dead, but even here Paul’s attention to detail is sketchy at best. For instance, Paul says Jesus “was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” ( 1 Corinthians 15:4 ), but there are no scriptures that foretell the Jewish Messiah would at long last appear only to die at the hands of Gentiles, much less that the Messiah would then be raised from the dead after three days. After his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus—an event Paul never mentions in his lette

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo

ACTS OF GOD

By David Andrew Dugle ~ S ettle down now children, here's the story from the Book of David called The Parable of the Bent Cross. In the land Southeast of Eden – Eden, Minnesota that is – between two rivers called the Big Miami and the Little Miami, in the name of Saint Gertrude there was once built a church. Here next to it was also built a fine parochial school. The congregation thrived and after a multitude of years, a new, bigger church was erected, well made with clean straight lines and a high steeple topped with a tall, thin cross of gold. The faithful felt proud, but now very low was their money. Their Sunday offerings and school fees did not suffice. Anon, they decided to raise money in an unclean way. One fine summer day the faithful erected tents in the chariot lot between the two buildings. In the tents they set up all manner of games – ring toss, bingo, little mechanical racing horses and roulette wheels – then all who lived in the land between the two rivers we

Why I left the Canadian Reformed Church

By Chuck Eelhart ~ I was born into a believing family. The denomination is called Canadian Reformed Church . It is a Dutch Calvinistic Christian Church. My parents were Dutch immigrants to Canada in 1951. They had come from two slightly differing factions of the same Reformed faith in the Netherlands . Arriving unmarried in Canada they joined the slightly more conservative of the factions. It was a small group at first. Being far from Holland and strangers in a new country these young families found a strong bonding point in their church. Deutsch: Heidelberger Katechismus, Druck 1563 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I was born in 1955 the third of eventually 9 children. We lived in a small southern Ontario farming community of Fergus. Being young conservative and industrious the community of immigrants prospered. While they did mix and work in the community almost all of the social bonding was within the church group. Being of the first generation born here we had a foot in two

Morality is not a Good Argument for Christianity

By austinrohm ~ I wrote this article as I was deconverting in my own head: I never talked with anyone about it, but it was a letter I wrote as if I was writing to all the Christians in my life who constantly brought up how morality was the best argument for Christianity. No Christian has read this so far, but it is written from the point of view of a frustrated closeted atheist whose only outlet was organizing his thoughts on the keyboard. A common phrase used with non-Christians is: “Well without God, there isn’t a foundation of morality. If God is not real, then you could go around killing and raping.” There are a few things which must be addressed. 1. Show me objective morality. Define it and show me an example. Different Christians have different moral standards depending on how they interpret the Bible. Often times, they will just find what they believe, then go back into scripture and find a way to validate it. Conversely, many feel a particular action is not

Search This Blog