We haven't had a good debate in a while. Who has an idea to get us fighting debating again?

Stahrwe, on whether or not we should raise a kid with religious vs atheistic? teachings. Wayne is a great proponent of the theistic viewpoint.

Who has raised a child as an atheist, and who has raised a kid as a theist? What are the results? We've had many years since atheism has been more widely accepted, and there should be some people who can contribute to the discussion.

I didn't raise my three kids as atheists (or theists). The subject of God just never came up much. Christmas was all about Santa Claus and presents. We didn't say grace at the table, although we would when we visited the grandparents.

Not surprisingly, none of my (three) children have turned religious. My son-in-law is not religious either, though his parents were. Not believing in God seems to be the default state for many households. I don't say that is good or bad, but I suspect it's true.

What are the results? My children are awesome. I'm proud of the way they all turned out. How did they not turn into murderers and rapists and thieves, I don't know.

I think the important debate is whether religion should be reformed or opposed. My view is that it is far better to work to reform religion to construct a version of faith that is compatible with reason.

Is it better to abandon religion entirely or recognise that it should remain central to human culture? I have no interest in debating with literal believers because they are generally stupid and wrong when the basis for their literal belief is put to the test of reason. Religious claims are metaphorical. Belief is more a matter of emotional comfort than rational philosophy.

So I prefer constructive conversation about how to reform religion, recognising that such discussion generates less popcorn heat than a fundy-atheist stoush. That is not to say that the hypothesis of a personal eternal entity outside our universe who intentionally governs human life can be disproved, but rather that belief in such a God is far better explained by the psychology of projection than by divine revelation from an actual entity.

The psychological and cultural reasons for belief are central to the sociology of myth, which is a key scholarly problem. Human evolution is far better served by building on the precedents of religious wisdom, seeing their claims as parables for real perceptions, than by arrogantly dismissing these traditions as the worthless product of false consciousness.

If you don’t need to grow spiritually. If you don’t feel the need to seek enlightenment, you can’t be interested.

If you are born with a burning desire for a deeper spiritual life, your soul is hungry and you can’t (not) search or stop searching. And the light comes from all directions!

My Mum was a spiritualist, interested in the phenomena, but not religious.

My husband of 54 years is an atheist and he is a wonderful man. I’m not so wonderful, and the spiritual seeking is like a wall between us but I can’t stop seeking. If I could say ok soddit, I’m not seeking any more, I would, but I’ve tried and I can’t because it is a hunger. It wouldn’t do for us both to be so heavenly minded that we’re no earthly good , now would it?

I've never understood this "spiritual" stuff so when I hear people talk about seeking spiritual fulfillment it confuses my mind. To me this simply means they are craving the chemical response they get when they experience deep awe or appreciation for something. I get the same sort of chemical reaction from my intense appreciation of music, art, nature and inspirational people. I experience the goosebumps, happy tears and overall bliss that religious people experience but without the metaphysical element.

I don’t think I call it ‘fulfillment’. It isn’t about getting a high. It’s about enlightenment. It’s wondering about what life is about.....seeking meaning?

If we are immortal souls? If we reincarnate and keep coming back until we are good enough to move on to a higher state of being. If there is such a thing as karma.

It is interesting to read the mystics of all religious traditions because they all describe the same sort of experience.

It just seems to be the most important question to me because all the pain and suffering, all the grief, can’t be for nothing.

So I continue to research, which consists of reading the writings of mystics and philosophers and meditation and, I suppose, prayer. Prayer which doesn’t mean petitioning the almighty and talking to God.....but listening and perceiving on a different level. If we have a sixth sense or are telepathic naturally, it seems a shame not to use or develop it.

It’s not about getting a buzz, but about finding peace.

I don't personally understand "enlightenment." When I learn about the world I consider it education not enlightenment. And I also don't understand what could be meant by "what life is about" or what "meaning" means. Life isn't about anything. Life doesn't have meaning. For meaning to exist there has to be a conscious being that assigned that meaning. So the meaning of life is whatever each of us assigns to our life. There is no meaning outside of us as individuals.

I'm assuming you think there is a meaning to life that comes from outside of our brains. A meaning that existed before each of us was born and a meaning that will persist after each of us die. To me this is senseless.



I want evidence for immortality before I will consider it. At this point there doesn't seem to be any evidence so to me it is simply wishful thinking. Is an oak tree immortal? How about a kangaroo? Why should we be any different than other lifeforms? I don't see any reason to believe we are.



There just isn't any evidence for this. But there is a ton of evidence that mankind has made up myths as long as we have been able to do so. So which is more likely? Humans created the myth of reincarnation or it is actually a real thing? Again, there is no evidence.



I see good people suffering horribly and bad people living happily. I see no evidence for karma. Do you?



They all make up answers to unanswerable questions.



Why not? Who says? Living creatures compete for limited resources and in the process of competing there is usually a winner and a loser. The pain and suffering of the loser isn't for nothing. It is for the gain of the winner. Life goes on due to the struggle between living creatures. I agree... it sucks.



While you read the writings of mystics and philosophers why not toss a science book in the mix? There are people out there who have devoted their lives to understanding how the natural world works and they are called scientists. I'm not convinced you have a lot to gain by reading what the mystics thought.



Prayer has always appeared to be a one-way discussion to me. I have prayed and then listened. The silence was deafening. If you hear a response I posit that the response is your imagination and wishful thinking.



The key word is "if" and I don't think we have such an ability. So developing an ability that we don't even posses seems like an impossible task.



I hear you. But I do think you're getting a bit of a buzz.

Life doesn't have meaning. For meaning to exist there has to be a conscious being that assigned that meaning.

This is absolutely not true. We are conditioned to think of God as personified.... The Creator. But what if the meaning is within us? Another level of existence as the Buddhists teach.

And ..... as you well know.... I do read science books now and again. I have grown to admire Richard Dawkins enormously. Carl Sagan also. They are both excellent at teaching about the mechanics of life and how we function. I can’t help being more interested in the ‘why’ than the ‘how’ life works. You say so confidently that life has no meaning and you can’t know that.....that is your opinion only.

Ok, as I tend to do when I go to sleep thinking about somebody I care about, I wake up knowing what to say.

Chris, you say you prayed, then listened and heard nothing. Well, I suggest you try meditation by visualising a candle flame burning in perfect stillness, no draughts. Just sit still and comfortable. Don’t look for any phenomena. It will just still your mind. Then, you will perceive the life of the spirit. If you hear voices, go see a psychologist. That’s not what we’re after. Nor is it getting a thrill or nirvana high. It is about being, still, quiet and aware. We need this in present times.

I beg to differ. I think you have concluded this for purposes of avoiding questions you would rather not engage.

Start with morality. Iris Murdoch once put the question (in the voice of a fictional character) as whether right or wrong really matter. (Mattering is so close to meaning that I use them interchangably. If you think I have muddled something by doing so, I will try to sort it out.) That is, is there any reason to avoid doing wrong to others besides the penalties that society affixes to such deeds?

If your answer is "No" then you are a "hard nihilist." We are all just individual animals seeking pleasure and shunning pain, and societies which punish harm to others do better than those who don't, so it makes sense to go with the flow. But don't hand out any of that "mattering" claptrap as if people are expected to go against their nature by actually believing that right and wrong matter in some timeless, objective truth.

If that's your view, we have a rather unusual discussion to get into. But more commonly, nihilists just believe that right and wrong are matters of personal judgment, and there could not possibly be any objective way to adjudicate between, e.g. the claims of the slaves and the claims of the masters, or the claims of pillaging invaders and the claims of the peasants raped and slain by them. This is compatible with a "social compact" theory of morality, in which we agree on some (ultimately arbitrary) rules in order to make things run better. I am assuming you are in that category.

So next notice that "making things run better" is a quasi-objective standard. That is, like "if you eat a lot of sugar and fatty baked goods, your chances of getting diabetes go up" it is at least potentially definable and verifiable. You might still not want to cut down on sugar, but there is an objective reference to go by: a cause-effect relationship that stands outside people's preferences or subjective reactions.

We can have lots of fun debates about which rules "make things run better," but as those sort themselves out, the standard of the Golden Rule emerges as a pretty clear guideline: things run better if people live by rules that they can agree apply to themselves if they want them to apply to others. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If we then apply Rawls' "veil of ignorance," so that you have to chose whether, e.g. slavery will be allowed without knowing whether you will be slave or master in such a system, we have a philosophically sound and objective basis for deciding rules of right and wrong.

Now we turn to the matter of ruling purposes in rather than just ruling out wrong things. We have to decide whether there is any objective basis for adjudicating what is "worthwhile". That is the question about meaning. A meaningful life is one that the person can verify (and also sense intuitively) is worthwhile.

Now, since there are obviously so many different ways to do life right, one is tempted to slip back into nihilism with a declaration that the whole question is arbitrary and irredeemably subjective (soft nihilism) or even "meaningless" (as in, cannot possibly correspond to an issue that can be made intelligible - hard nihilism).

Note that if the hard nihilist is correct, then it really doesn't matter whether you live your life trying to die with the most toys, or trying to have sex with the most partners, or trying to gain psychological dominance over the most enablers. It's just a matter of (individual) preference. (Of course this makes reference to an implicit standard, like "what makes life worthwhile is whatever makes you happy." The true implication of the hard nihilist position is that it doesn't matter if you are into cutting yourself one day and sniffing glue the next day, and writing graffiti on the wall a third day. Randomly jumping around from one enthusiasm to the next might bother your shrink but it doesn't matter.)

Once again, we have a position that people tell themselves, as a matter of rhetoric, but almost nobody follows. People continue to sense that if they pursue some objectives they will feel better about themselves as persons of worth if they follow them. Soft nihilist rhetoric claims that such personal meaning is "made" or "chosen" by the individual. The implication is that it is, at least objectively speaking, arbitrary.

But once again, if you watch what people do, they behave as if they have an inner compass that tells them some ways to live are more worthwhile than others. Now obviously some of that inner compass comes from the way we were raised. If you are German (and some other ethnicities), then reversals of Carnival may be seen as a healthy and mind-clearing activity. But the key observation is that we construct rationales to explain why it might be a good idea for everybody to flirt with everyone else's partner for one day out of the year, for example. That is, we make reference to a sense of an external standard.

A nihilist considers these rationales to be fundamentally illusionary. As if we were all trying to decide what the cloud shapes really look like. But the fact that we don't live as if they are illusionary suggests that it may be the nihilist's claim which is meant to obscure truth, and it is worth asking why the nihilist is engaged in such misleading of the self.

The truth is, "Life's a bitch, then you die," doesn't make for a very satisfactory philosophy of life. And since most of us agree that some things do make life more worthwhile than others, we have an "intersubjective" process (I learned this word thanks to BookTalk from Yuval Noah Harari) of trying to discern which guidelines are helpful and which are not, to discern how to tell whether some way of living is worthwhile.

The fact is, of course, that no discernment is ever so effective that it can tell you with exactitude that you have chosen the most worthwhile, meaningful life for yourself. Most people in most times are good natured about this, laughing off the very different conclusions people reach. "Nought's as queer as folk" as the character in "Full Monty" put it, quoting some North England saying no doubt. But by the same token if you laugh off the whole question, you are likely to put yourself in the position of doubting whether you have lived in a worthwhile manner.

Christians have fairly recently begun using the term "incarnational" to talk not just about our beliefs about Jesus but also about finding harmonious standards of meaningful life that allow for the differences in people. Different people have different roles to play in the grand scheme of living meaningfully. Some are meant to walk with others as accompaniment in difficult times. Some are meant to help others with gifts from the money they have made. Some are meant to practice a musical instrument until they can make it create beauty. Some are meant to bang on about philosophical subjects on the internet. Etc, etc, etc. The idea is that we don't just "discern" meaningful living, we also make it happen, by living well within whatever pattern we are cut out for, or happen to have fallen into.

If allowing for personal differences means to you that meaning in life is "subjective," fine, but never make the mistake of thinking it is "arbitrary." At the very least, it is intersubjective in a way that takes into account individuality.

Standards of meaning are hazy and difficult to weigh against one another. I look at that as part of the fun. Like figuring out how to play chess well, only it's life that we are trying to get the hang of. But it is totally misleading to assert that we "make up" the criteria for making life meaningful, as if we could sit down and say, "yesterday I thought that helping my fellow humans makes life worthwhile, but today I think wearing a really interesting combination of pink and blue makes life worthwhile."

C S Lewis gives the example of a woman whose son is a muderer. Natural mother love would make her want to protect her son against all odds, but she will know herself that she should hand him over to the authorities.

I think this is connected to the roots of virtue. Where did our ideas about virtue arise? Nature or nurture?

We do not make up the criteria that makes life meaningful. There are things that are meaningful to each of us. But "meaning" is a concept that requires relating experiences. There is no meaning without a framework of experience. There is no framework of experience that exists outside human consciousness. Which necessarily means "meaning" is a human construct. It's one of the myriad tools we use to associate various concepts, and not a penny more. "Meaning" is subjective.

In order to ascribe meaning to a thing, you need to have a framework. But there is no framework outside our experience. So, 'meaning' most certainly exists for us, and we use it as a relational glue. But when you view humanity from a third party perspective, there is no such thing as meaning.

So when we discuss "what life is about", we imply an objective assessment, but are restricted to a subjective assessment. It's semantics, but semantics matter in philosophy. There is no objective answer to what life is about. Such a question is meaningless.

You can analyze "meaning" from within, but we have no place to put it when analyzing it from the outside. It's meaningless, from an objective framework. It is a free-floating human construct. As concrete(and fluid) as morality. But that's another discussion I think. We share 99% of our genomes across the population, and we share 90% of our morality the same. Neither is objective nor certain. They flow with the times and whatever works is what dominates the era.



Harry, why do you not do harm to others? Most of us have empathy, and that is enough. If our empathy is lacking, we have sympathy. If our sympathy is lacking, we fear getting caught(social embarrassment). If fearing getting caught is not enough, we fear imprisonment or punishment. Where is the dividing line between a soft nihilist and a hard one? What's the difference between you and I? This all misrepresents what actually happens in our minds.

Sometimes we each come across experiences that test us. The moral trampoline that pushes us back up into civility has many layers. I think you're too black and white to view it as merely nihilist or not. The true test of where we reside on the spectrum comes from real world testing - how do we respond to stressful situations? How much does our empathy push back? Our fear of embarrassment? Our fear of imprisonment? Our fear of eternal hellfire? Our knee-jerk reaction to the voice of our mother in our heads?

Yes, it’s fear that keeps us in order. I can see that.

Thank you. Spare the rod and spoil the child though?

We behave and conform because of fear of the consequences of not doing so?

Not always, sometimes we just want to feel comfortable. I am fortunate to be physically comfortable but I can only feel comfortable in my head if I believe there is a point to life.

It isn’t fear exactly. I want it all to make sense, and it doesn’t. That is the challenge.