Meaninglessness

[Fist and Faith]

Yeah, that's a good point. The old scenario: Be a good person because God says to, and because it will lead to a certain eternal existence; or because you think it's the right thing to do, despite no reward for, or punishment for not.

[Cambo]

Transience may grant even greater meaning by virtue of its impermanence

I've gone round and round with this in my head. Which is greater, effortless eternal immanent meaning, or transient, effortful, created meaning? Apples and oranges, perhaps?

[Fist and Faith]

There's no effort involved. It's just there.

[DukkhaWaynhim]

We can be invested with a sense of purpose by our upbringing. Whether the underpinnings given for this upbringing are 'be a good person' or 'be a good Christian' is almost entirely irrelevant. Having said that, 'Pay it Forward' has always sounded a whole lot nicer -- more genuine-- to me than 'Pay it Forward or Else...'

Good deeds are best all by themselves. Good deeds that come with conversion messages seem like a sales strategy.

dw

[TheFallen]

The old scenario: Be a good person because God says to, and because it will lead to a certain eternal existence; or because you think it's the right thing to do, despite no reward for, or punishment for not.

Yes, it's a moral issue with Christianity - "christian" acts can hardly be considered selfless if they're being performed with a view to a self-interested long game - achieving eternal bliss and avoiding eternal damnation. For this very reason, I've for a long time considered atheistic humanists - or to put it more simply, those people who perform selfless acts or who do good deeds solely for their own sake and who can't have a post-death agenda - to be the most morally courageous of us all.

Of course, to Christians, this doesn't mean that God is uninvolved. The following from Jean Anouilh's L'Alouette - a play I studied long ago about Joan of Arc. Joan has been arrested on charges of heresy and is being interrogated by the Church:

CAUCHON: So then, Joan, you excuse man all his faults, and think him one of God’s greatest miracles, even the only one?

JOAN: Yes, my lord.

PROMOTER (yelping, beside himself): It’s blasphemy! Man is filth, lust, a nightmare of obscenity!

JOAN: Yes, my lord. He sins; he is evil enough. And then something happens: it may be he is coming out of a brothel, roaring out his bawdy songs in praise of a good time, and suddenly he has thrown himself at the reins of a runaway horse to save some child he has never seen before; his bones broken, he dies at peace.

PROMOTER: But he dies like an animal, without a priest, in the full damnation of sin.

JOAN: No, my lord; he dies in the light which was lighted within him when the world began. He behaved as a man, but in doing evil and doing good, and God created him in that contradiction to make his difficult way.

I wonder if Rus would agree with Joan's views in the above extract?

Similarly, an atheistic humanism actually stacks up with Av's point of view here, which I can't help agreeing with...

But consider...transience may grant even greater meaning solely by virtue of its impermanence

The light that burns twice as bright does indeed last half as long. In my book, transience does make for things being more meaningful within our own necessarily transient and mortal frame of reference. The absolute and objective - if it exists - can look after itself. All we can do is do the best by ourselves and our values during our brief period on the stage - that's where we'll both create and find meaning.

*** Added edit because Dukkha posted while I was typing ***

Having said that, 'Pay it Forward' has always sounded a whole lot nicer -- more genuine-- to me than 'Pay it Forward or Else...'

Good deeds are best all by themselves. Good deeds that come with conversion messages seem like a sales strategy.

I couldn't agree more.

[Cambo]

There's no effort involved. It's just there.

What causes it to be "just there?" See, to my mind, a meaning that is transient must have been created. All finite things have a beginning and an end, right? But it always takes some kind of effort (or force, or energy, what you will) to create anything.

Or are you saying transient meaning isn't created, but simply arises?

[Fist and Faith]

Maybe. Or maybe it's just a matter of how we define "effort"? It doesn't take effort to feel love, nor to think that's the meaning of life.

[Cambo]

Doesn't take effort on your part, no. But some chain of events occurred to cause you to come to that belief. Perhaps effort was the wrong word. Thing is, now I don't know what the right word is.

I'm searching for the dinstinction between meaning that comes to be, and meaning that always was. And yeah, perhaps for you the distinction is that one exists and one doesn't .

[DukkhaWaynhim]

Are familiar with the term 'meme', used most recently to describe concepts/ideas spawned and/or perpetuated over the internet?
I think meaning could be seen as something abstract, that is invested into ideas, and like language can arise, evolve, aggrandize, and dissipate over time and across cultural/ religious/ geographical continuums. Meaningfulness is a fairly subjective and time-dependent determination, since what is important to you may be nothing to someone else, or even yourself at a different time in your life.
Transcendent meaning, if it exists, does so outside of our minds, since it is theoretically more durable than any one individual, even though it may, too be subject to, or bounded by, transient earthly factors -- though any inklings of transience would be hotly contested by absolutists, as that would be heresy.

dw

[aliantha]

Cambo, you might be reaching for something close to Jung's archetypes -- universal experiences that are hardwired into us. Altho Jung was speaking pretty much in terms of symbolic ideas/language, if I understand the concept correctly.

[Avatar]

Nah, while I agree that effort is the wrong word, I think I know what Cambo means. It's not effort in terms of expenditure. It's more like making the choice to assign a particular meaning. Maybe it's that moral courage TheFallen refers to above.

It's the opposite of just accepting whatever meaning you're told or taught, and choosing/discovering/making a meaning for yourself.

--A

[Cambo]

Nah, while I agree that effort is the wrong word, I think I know what Cambo means. It's not effort in terms of expenditure. It's more like making the choice to assign a particular meaning. Maybe it's that moral courage TheFallen refers to above.

It's the opposite of just accepting whatever meaning you're told or taught, and choosing/discovering/making a meaning for yourself.

--A

THANK YOU Av! While I still can't think of a single word, you expressed that much better than I was.

Responsibility comes into it as well. IMHO, it's downright irresponsible to your own wellbeing to accept received truths without question. Andthe truths you choose, discover or make are the opposite of the Immanent, Eternal meaning I believe in, because that meaning exists independently of us (we are the dependents in that relationship). The transient meanings we assign to our lives are ours.

PS not that memes and archetypes are very interesting things, with some relevance to the topic, but I see them as producing group or social meanings rather than individual meanings.

[Avatar]

Agree they're ours. Just think they're the only ones.

Probably agree about the memes producing social meanings...if it wasn't shared and contagious it wouldn't be a meme.

When you consider the term was coined in the context of genetics, where the most popular (widespread) gene survived, it's about the social spread of ideas. Christianity for example has been one of the most successful memes of the last few thousand years.

That isn't to say that memes can't inform/influence individual meaning though. Nor is it to say that a meme can't be an individual meaning too. Whatever you believe true is true. Whether only you believe it, or everybody believes it.

--A

[rusmeister]

1. When, exhausted by illness, I sense that the end of my earthly existence is approaching: Lord, have mercy upon me.

2. When my poor heart, beating its last, is languishing and pining in the pangs of death: Lord, have mercy upon me.

3. When for the last time, my eyes fill with tears at the thought that with sins throughout my life I have offended Thee, O God: Lord, have mercy upon me.

4. When my rapid heartbeat speeds the departure of my soul: Lord, have mercy upon me.

5. When my face‘s deadly pallor and my cooling body strikes fear into those dear to me: Lord, have mercy upon me.

6. When my vision darkens, my voice is cut off, and my tongue is petrified: Lord, have mercy upon me.

7. When awful ghosts and visions cause me to despair of your mercy: Lord, have mercy upon me.

8. When my soul, startled by memories of past transgressions and fear of Thy judgment, flags in the battle with the enemy of my salvation, an enemy struggling to lure me into the realm of the dark of tortures: Lord, have mercy upon me.

9. When my body is covered with a deadly cold sweat, and my soul, painfully suffering, begins to leave the body: Lord, have mercy upon me.

10. When the darkness of death closes off from my darkened sight all of the things of this world: Lord, have mercy upon me.

11. When all sensation ceases in my body, when my veins and sinews are benumbed, and my muscles petrified in death: Lord, have mercy upon me.

12. When human speech and earthly sounds no longer reach my ears: Lord, have mercy upon me.

13. When my soul stands before Thy Face, O God, awaiting Thy ruling on my fate: Lord, have mercy upon me.

14. When I stand to receive the righteous sentence of Thy Judgment, that will determine my fate: Lord, have mercy upon me.

15. When my body, abandoned by my soul, becomes a quarry for worms, and a mass of corruption, and finally, my entire body turns into a handful of dust: Lord, have mercy upon me.

16. When at Thy Second Coming the sound of the trumpet awakens all, and the book of my deeds is opened: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon Thy sinful servant [name]. Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commit my spirit. Amen.

[aliantha]

You've got kind of a preoccupation with death going on there, rus.

Re your #15: Why do you care what happens to your body after you die? Your soul is already gone. It's not like you'll need it for the Judgment Day -- I mean, I know some sects believe that to be true, but I don't think it's an across-the-board Christian belief, is it?

I wonder whether today's casket designs and embalming processes have made this concern pretty much moot. Not that you'll look the picture of health when you're dug up in a couple of hundred years or whatever. But the idea of embalming is to slow the rot.

(Personally, I want to be cremated. I'll never be worm food! )

[Fist and Faith]

Not sure what point you're making, rus.


Me too, ali. I like the funeral pyre you see in movies. Up on the... what's it called of sticks, lit from beneath. That's the way to go!

[Cambo]

I reckon it'd be cool to copy Hunter S. Thompson, and have my ashes shot out of a cannon.

[rusmeister]

You've got kind of a preoccupation with death going on there, rus.

Re your #15: Why do you care what happens to your body after you die? Your soul is already gone. It's not like you'll need it for the Judgment Day -- I mean, I know some sects believe that to be true, but I don't think it's an across-the-board Christian belief, is it?

I wonder whether today's casket designs and embalming processes have made this concern pretty much moot. Not that you'll look the picture of health when you're dug up in a couple of hundred years or whatever. But the idea of embalming is to slow the rot.

(Personally, I want to be cremated. I'll never be worm food! )

Well, Ali, I wonder how many people seriously see themselves as actually dying, and consider what their thoughts and feelings would be at that point; how would we feel about these things happening to us right now? (At least the things that I highlighted - things difficult for a materialist to deny must happen to us).

It's good to make a distinction between what is called "morbidity" (define, please) and what we call "the memory (conscious awareness) of (our own) death". IOW, that there is a healthy way of living in the light of one's own death.

Anyway, I think that people who talk about enjoying the now (living for the moment) are those who have given least thought to this. But again, I'd make a careful distinction between treating now as important in the light of eternity and the animalistic "now" 'of wolf thought' (which I borrowed from Pini's "Elfquest") which does not really think about the future (above all, one's own), acting as if we will live forever.

So yeah, I wonder how the person who pins all their meaning on this life contemplates the moments that must come to us described above - when we are in the process of dying and being cut off from this wonderful world?

[Fist and Faith]

Wow! rus, I never thought of it that way!

Gimme a break. Anyone who has not come to the same conclusions you have can't possibly have thought as deeply about is as you have. The weather must be nice way up there, so high above the rest of us.

[TheFallen]

I'm somewhat cynically reminded of Chicken Licken syndrome - being so perturbed about future outcomes that one doesn't dare do anything at all.

I'm quite sure that anyone with at least average intelligence has considers his/her own mortality at more than one point, but IMHO it'd be entirely unhealthy to dwell on this constantly to the extent that such consideration affected everything else that we think or do.

Now Rus will probably say that this is just burying one's head in the sand, but that'd be wrong. I've always been entirely uneasy with apparent scare tactics being used by certain religions, seemingly in an attempt to use fear to gain converts - and the "you're gonna rot and be eaten by worms unless you grab God's escape rope" is only slightly more subtle than the "you're gonna burn in Hell for all eternity unless you believe the right stuff" schtick.

As I've said elsewhere, to me it's atheistic humanists that are the most morally courageous of us all... people who attempt to "do right" without any metaphysical agenda, without any striving for some promised eternal bag of candy. Even if somewhat more negative, Dylan Thomas's famous viewpoint shows far more moral courage than a fear-inspired obeisance to some creed or other:-

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Not being obsessed by our own transience is not de facto avoiding the issue, it's not necessarily being animalistic and only "living in the now". It's being alive and active, happy and sad, good and "sinful", caring and selfish - in fact it's being essentially all the things that make us human in spite of (or just as probably, because of) our inevitable awareness of our brief time upon the stage.