There is no point.

To live it

the meaning of life is to find meaning in your life

Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.

Don't be a dick.

That sums up the whole of the Bible.

I wish that was all the bible said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt84uBuGKNk

Well, the dicks in the Bible get turned into ash, taken by a massive flood, burned down with their city, marked on the forehead for the rest of their life making everyone hate them, you know... seems self-explanatory to me.

Obviously you haven't read the whole bible...

Biologically speaking, the point of life is simply to create more life. All of our natural drives are geared toward staying healthy enough to reproduce, and to protect our offspring until they can reproduce.

So the point, ultimately, is sex. Sorry obiobi to inform you, that you are missing the point.

Correct. There are millions of books that are much more uhh... recent... and relevant to my life.

to do good works, to fulfill your calling, whatever it may be.

To quote Being There, life is a state of mind. To quote myself, life in and of itself has no intrinsic point. So, everyone has to find their own point and reason for existence. Take my dog...her whole reason for existence is to get belly skritchies and nab my peanut butter when I'm not looking. Makes her happy and suits her just fine. Unfortunately, we humans tend to look for deeper meanings, the curse of self-consciousness I suppose.

In the laconic words of the Westminster divines, "Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever."

In more detail -- this entails enjoying God through His creation and revelation, most importantly through the joyful duty of loving our fellow men and God.

Really? REALLY?!?!!? Come on...**42**.

Seesh, I can't believe it took this long...

That's actually the answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything! So, bonus for you, eh?

OK...really, it's to survive and crush your opponents, to gather more than everyone else, to pass on your genetic code, and fuck the little guy, especially anyone with mutations or disease.

Well...that what atheists that believe I came from the sludge believe, anyway...

To keep life going and try to help the generation that follows be slightly better than your own. If you want to find a bigger point than that my guess is you'll be disappointed

"What is the point of life?"
Survival, of the individual and of the species

In the laconic words of the Westminster divines, "Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever."

In more detail -- this entails enjoying God through His creation and revelation, most importantly through the joyful duty of loving our fellow men and God. Well put semck. Wouldn't it be extremely depressing to be an atheist/agnostic?

NigeeBaby (438 )
03:28 PM
+1
"What is the point of life?"
Survival, of the individual and of the species
That's depressing. It's inevitable that we're all going to die one day and that the human race won't last forever, so your life is meaningless?

"It's inevitable that we're all going to die one day and that the human race won't last forever, so your life is meaningless?"

Yes.

If you remove religion from the picture, how does your life have any meaning?

I think part of the point of life is finding one.

So that's what religion is for? It's a systematic approach to deny the inherent truth in all known biotic processes? It's a way to make life out to be something more than it is? It's an astronomical anomaly that can only exist under certain conditions based on what we know. How does religion change that?

Life is way too big and complex to put into a simplified religion and it is way too small and unimportant to the rest of the universe(s) to think that it should be something great and revered.

And I know you don't agree. (And see, I could throw in something about how an intelligent religious person would realize how flawed religion is, and then note that intelligent and religious are oxymorons, but I'm just so far above that.)

"Well put semck. Wouldn't it be extremely depressing to be an atheist/agnostic?"

Well, slyguy, it often seems to me that it would, yes; on the other hand, I don't actually observe atheists to be abnormally depressed people, at least as a class. Sometimes one hears an ex-atheist claiming he really was depressed by these ideas and hid it. Sometimes one hears similar opposite things from ex-religious people. I've also had ex-atheists tell me that they were very happy as atheists. So the emotional impact of one's religious beliefs (or lack thereof) seems quite complicated and perhaps not uniform.

"Life is way too big and complex to put into a simplified religion and it is way too small and unimportant to the rest of the universe(s) to think that it should be something great and revered."

This, I aver, is a rather silly (though very common) argument. It simply assumes without argument that spatial size is the correct metric for importance. It is not. To paraphrase I-can't-remember-whom, a six-foot man is not more important than a three-foot-man, and the metric does not gain any greater relevance for importance at larger scales.

One might instead, for example, choose to use complexity as a measure of importance. By this measure, life on earth is by far the most important thing we know of in this universe.

I'm not saying that I've given an argument for why complexity and not spatial scale should be used. I'm just saying you haven't given the opposite, but just casually assume it (and it appears for all the world to be a very silly assumption).

There is way too much that we don't know to judge what is important. Space is mostly comprised of nothing - at least as far as we've seen - and the field of astronomy is really only 100 years old plus Galileo, Copernicus, and a few other crazy people that got suppressed, ironically due to religion. That said, basing importance around spatial size is probably silly, but it's no less silly than saying that complexity is an accurate measure of importance if for no reason other than that the solar system and known universe survived before life on Earth and it will most certainly survive afterwards and hasn't been changed in the slightest on an overall scale by our appearance.

I do concede that thinking on the universal - the biggest possible - scale is probably not the most productive way of life, nor is it necessarily the best for finding "happiness," but it makes a clear impression and suggests that our individual selves are of very little importance to the way things are. It would take quite the pessimist to live as if that were the case though (even if it truly is), and that I am definitely not.

tl;dr .. why argue about the meaning of life when you can eat good food, see cool things, and have sex. Seriously.

"but it's no less silly than saying that complexity is an accurate measure of importance if for no reason other than that the solar system and known universe survived before life on Earth and it will most certainly survive afterwards and hasn't been changed in the slightest on an overall scale by our appearance."

So? Maybe those things barely mattered at all before, and now they matter a lot. Before you even begin having this discussion, you should really define what you think makes something matter. That's the only way to get somewhere. For you, apparently, existence of large things is the ultimate scale of import. Fine. I think most would and all should disagree, but up to you of course.