Could the universe have been created for no reason?

Yet another person claiming that nothing could possibly have any meaning without their god. If I may share what I had written years ago to another such statement, which is quoted in angle brackets at the beginning:

quote:

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>>The point I was trying to make in my original email is that is if the Bible is NOT (accurate and literal) then I don't see what difference it makes (to me) once I'm dead how I lived life.<<

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Completely and utterly and blatantly untrue. I just cannot comprehend how anybody could seriously think such a thing!

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First, if there is an after-life but your biblical literalism simply got it wrong, then it would still be highly probable that how you lived your life would have a DIRECT effect on what will happen to you once you're dead. True, you'd be very surprised with it, once the Maya had worn off, but then I truly believe that if an after-life exists then a lot of people are going to be very surprised, especially evangelical Christians.

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Second, even if there is no after-life, how you had lived your life would STILL matter, long after you're dead. Why are you thinking only of yourself? You are a FATHER, a parent! Even if there is no heaven nor hell nor next life for you to go to when you die, how you lived would still matter very much. How you raised your children. How you treated others. Whether you helped or hindered them. What you built; what kind of legacy you left behind. All that matters very much!

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At my father's memorial service, I mentioned what we had learned of the ancient Germanic beliefs as brought out by the Hildebrandtslied [**] and I pointed out that our county was filled with his legacy (he was a master carpenter) and that his memory would live on through the family that he had raised and through their families and so on, for long after his death. It still matters how he had lived his life!

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[** Footnote: The Hildebrandtslied (Song of Hildebrandt) is the oldest piece of Germanic literature known to us It tells the story of an aging warrior, Hildebrandt, about to do battle with a much younger warrior. As was customary, they told each other about themselves, the younger one first. As the younger warrior introduced himself, Hildebrandt realized that he was his own son. This created a dilemma for him, because a Germanic warrior gained immortality in one of two ways: through his reputation and the tales of valor that the other warriors would tell of him and through leaving behind sons to carry on his name. Whichever action he took next, he would lose immortality. We do not know what happened next, since we only have a fragment of the poem.]

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But let's go back to the subject line of your email: "RE: If evolution is right... ". If evolution is right and our bodies are little more than a way for our genes to reproduce themselves, then it STILL matters VERY MUCH how we live our lives. Because if we do not produce offspring and provide for them in such a way as to enhance their survival and their ability to produce their own offspring, thus propogating our genes into the future, then we will have failed. That includes ensuring that society and community will be able to enhance their survival, thus benefitting the entire gene pool we are a part of. How we live our lives affects the propogation of our genes, so it still matters. In fact, it matters even more, because it directly affects ALL future generations. It cannot matter much more than that!

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But let's return to your selfish perspective, your asking "but what's in it for ME?". Why bother to live a life worth living? Sounds so ridiculous, once you actually ask the question, doesn't it? And the answer sounds so obvious: because living such a life is worth it! How could anybody really think that it doesn't matter?

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You're so worried about being bored, but you wouldn't be if you were to stop being so self-centered and started thinking about others instead of only about yourself. Atheists do believe in living in peace and harmony and we do seek that. Of course, it doesn't help that we are constantly villified by religous zealots who accuse us of believing the most ridiculous things, like you just did.BTW, I have personally suffered outright and blatant religious discrimination to the extent of being summarily and wrongly expelled from a "public" organization, denied all due process that was guaranteed by that organization, and witnessed my plight being roundly mocked by the organization's other self-righteous members. In other situations, I have been threatened with physical violence by "good Christians" zealous to demonstrate the intensity of their "Christian love" for me, solely because my beliefs were different from theirs.Yes, atheists do indeed want to live in peace and harmony. It's the religous zealots who don't want to.

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)

Well let's see. We value seeking the truth and being truthful. And we consider lying and deliberate deception to be immoral. We also find hypocrisy to be repugnant.Our observation of most creationists -- especially the zealots and the professionals -- is that they shun the truth and go to great lengths to avoid being truthful. All their claims of "scientific evidence" are lies which they continue to repeat even long after those lies have been been exposed to their face a thousand times. And they persist in using those lies to deliberately deceive others. And all the while they hypocritically claim to love the truth and to serve the "God of Truth" and they proclaim that they have the only claim on morality, even though their actions are profoundly immoral.And after having done all those immoral things and much more and much worse, creationists have then tried to convert me to Christianity. Sorry, but I do not see how anyone with more than a single moral fiber in them could even begin to consider such a thing.

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)

Your statement to which I was responding demonstrated otherwise.BTW, there's no need to put one's moniker in quotation marks. Unless your intent was ridicule. If that was your intent, then I would suggest that you simply ask me about my moniker. If you instead don't ask and simply proceed thinking what you're obviously already thinking, then I can assure you that you are dead wrong. I would hope so. Bear in mind that that would include not projecting your own beliefs onto them. Such projection is yet another demonstration of being self-centered. I was relating my repeated experience with creationists for over 20 years. There have been a few, very few exceptions, but the vast majority of those creationists have conducted themselves exactly as I described.I have also met and been friends with many other Christians, most of whom do not follow the "creation science" path. Good and bad among them, just as is found in all groups regardless of religious beliefs.If you do have morals, then do please practice them. And be as truthful as you can be. But please stop your self-centered projections that lead you to claim that nobody else is moral nor truthful. Understand that you do not have any monopoly on morality. Taz is just speaking from hard-earned experience. Your conduct fits the pattern of far too many others he has -- we have -- encountered repeatedly for far too long. Others who have promised to seek information with an open mind and who had then done all they could to not honor that promise. It's the old "duck theorem" in action.The ball is in your court to prove him wrong. Will you?Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)