If life has no meaning, then no meaning has truth

A Facebook acquaintance had posted a status update recently, expressing doubt that there's really any point to all of this.
Here is our PM exchange:

Me -> acquaintance
I recall that we talked a few years ago about Jesus, and I'm just wondering what you've thought about with respect to Him over these last few years, related to your recent status update. If there really is no point, what's stopping you from turning to Jesus?
If you say that you don't think He exists, I'd offer two thoughts:
1) When was the last time you asked Him whether He exists with a truly open heart? Only you know the answer to that.
2) If there's no point, are you really worse off repenting of your sin and putting your trust in Jesus than staying an agnostic or whatever?

(I say #2 just as a thought exercise, I am convinced that Christianity is the only rational worldview and has more than enough solid argumentation in its favor.)

Anyway, I'd love to talk if you want.

Peace,


Acquaintance -> me

Yeah man I have done tons of research into religion. I find that the actual purpose to Jesus' teaching is that we all have a connection to the divine. The problem is that religion has been misguided into a ruleset to control the population. I invited jesus into my heart many years ago and only found that the bible was not a great translation of the original stories and that half the story was deemed unfit by the council. it seems that there may have been a conspiracy to hide information from the masses from the beginning. I understand that this may be far fetched to you as you are comfortable with your religious views. However, my research has expanded far beyond simple faith and now has left me feeling that the world is so far gone from real truth that we are doomed to face the inadequacies of our mistaken worldview.

Me -> acquaintance

We talked about this approx 3 yrs ago, and you gave me the same answer, heavy on the conspiracy theories and devoid of much of any factual basis. The misguidance and partial misuse of a system doesn't make the system wrong, it could be true but twisted by people, meaning that the truth is there to be found.
You're probably confusing translation with transmission, b/c for one thing, translating from Greek and Hebrew to English is very straightforward. And seriously, I mean no disrespect to you; rather, I'm pleading with you. If you don't even know the word to describe what you're trying to say, shouldn't that tell you that you don't have nearly enough info to make a decision about a topic that's so important as your eternal soul?

You apparently prefer to deceive yourself thinking all of this foggy gobbledygook when you yourself just admitted that life has no meaning. If life has no meaning, then truth has no meaning and there's no reason to seek truth. Indeed, there's no reason to complain that life has no meaning. So why do you do it?
You do it b/c you know that you've done wrong and that you are liable to answer for your lawbreaking before God, but you don't want to dwell on it b/c it makes you feel too guilty and you don't want to repent before Jesus.

Actually, my religious views as you call them don't make me very comfortable at all in a lot of ways, b/c they remind me that I have a long, long way to go if I am to be like Jesus. Indeed, I'll never get there until I die, when God will make me like Him, but it won't be b/c of anything I've done.

Anyway, why would anyone (indeed, SHOULD anyone) hold to a worldview that they know bereaves them of any meaning in life when they could have a different worldview that DOES provide meaning? You might answer "Well, I don't think that other one is true", but if life has no meaning, so what? Your worldview is the ultimate "So what?" May the Lord have mercy on you for that.

Peace,

Sad, so sad is the lost state of this person and so many others.
See also here.

Wallowing

Oh, what a smorgasbord!
And at least one more (anon) who missed the satirical irony of the previous post. We'll get to that.
Thanks to Kyle who has stepped in to aid my aching fingers.

Paul C said:

Any moral statements I make are subjective.

Yes, I know. It's been my point for posts and posts now.

You have never denied that this is the case

Exactly. I've affirmed it vigorously.

you only argue that you find subjective moral statements inadequate

Inadequate to prescribe or proscribe actions to anyone else. Such as raping children. You can't tell anyone whether that action is OK or not OK, they should or shouldn't.

So we can live quite happily by our positions, as JN has said, with subjective morals;

Well, you SAY you can, but I don't believe you. You slip into objective moral language so often that it's about the most obvious thing I've ever seen that you can't.
But that's never been my argument, so it doesn't matter to me whether you can or can't.

Genesis 3:22 states: "And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil", clearly indicating that, prior to eating the fruit of the tree, Adam and Eve did not know good and evil.

And you didn't deal with the counterexamples I cited.
Unless you think the author had a brain aneurysm between 3:20 and 3:22, recovered several yrs later with no memory of what he wrote, and returned to continue on with no memory of the preceding, you need to find another interpretation. Your ineptitude is part of the point I was making. And it's not a knock on you - you're an atheist! Why *would* you learn proper biblical hermeneutics? I'm serious.

These are not predictions, they're merely observations and opinions.

Why aren't they predictions? Make your argument.

If humans are in fact inherently sinful, then it is not a prediction to say that humans are sinful

I said that FUTURE people will be sinful. That's a prediction. Of the future.

We're a pretty poor show

You mean, YOU THINK we are a poor show. You have no objective moral statement on this topic.
(See what I mean about your slipping?)



the JN said:
So I have not made any claims to moral fact.

Which was my point for this whole post.

no factually correct moral standards.

Right. So it's not a fact that raping a little girl is morally objectionable.
Is this not what I've been saying?

I was expressing the incompatibility of my opinions with Yahweh's supposed opinions.

And why should anyone care about your opinion on what YHWH said? I'm serious, not being sarcastic. You deny any rationally compelling fact that could persuade someone of the truth of your position; you deny any moral force to a statement such as this. Why even express it?


Rintintin said:
why even give us the opportunity to make a mess of it in the first place?

B/c He wanted to.
Lots of reasons, but that's the primary.
He is merciful, patient with sinners, hateful and wrathful to sin, compassionate, and salvific.
All of these attributes of God would have gone unexercised, unglorified, in a world without the Fall and Redemption.
Etc.

So he gives A+E no capacity to understand good and bad

Which is not the case, so let's go ahead and lay this to rest.

places a tree that he doesn't want them to eat from right in the exact location they live,

Along with hundreds or thousands of other trees.

then is angered when they did something bad even though they had no way to actually know what good and bad were.

Rather, then is angered when they did something bad despite His direct command not to do it.


Anonymous said:
Rho says this because he has made up what other people think and since Rho is always right, it must be what they actually think.

Wow, look who read the first paragraph of the post and neglected to read the rest!

Good grief Rho, try listening to what people are saying instead of telling us what we must be thinking.

Try reading the post and THEN commenting on it.

A world of endless grey mud

I'm the Jolly Nihilist, and I approve the implications of this message.
Let us further our descent into the buzzing despair...

I deny the existence of truth with respect to moral issues.

It is thus not true that raping little girls for fun is morally wrong.

there is no clear way to discern what facts might be relevant in judging an action virtuous or wicked.

Their ages notwithstanding.

Are facts of happiness and suffering relevant to moral concerns? Possibly, but that has not been proved, and I see no way it possibly could be

So we must carry on without, and be jolly.

Existence is meaningless and all our actions, in the final analysis, have no enduring consequence.

So whether you're a Democratic activist or a pædophile, it makes no difference. At all.

The cosmos cares nothing for us—as a species or as individuals—and, as such, there is no reason to attach great significance to our silly doings.

I've replaced God with "the cosmos", and neither one cares, so... screw it.

However, our brains are sufficiently evolved to grasp some truths, however tentatively: truths of science, history and mathematics come to mind.

At least, I think they are sufficiently evolved for that.
And I must be very tentative about thinking that our brains are sufficiently evolved to grasp some truths. That might not be true.
Which means it might not be true that there are no moral truths. And it might not be true that I'm jolly, or that I'm a nihilist, or that evolution occurred, or that evidence is a useful guide to truth. But it's NOT tentative that I'm confused, b/c I'm sure enough about these things to make all these dogmatic assertions. Everything is unsure except where I declare certainty to exist.

Second, given the fortunate happenstance of our species' evolution

Which use of "fortunate" shows that I cannot live consistently with the portrait I've just painted.
What I meant was that I'm glad our species has evolved so I can express this utter despair. There is no purpose nor fortune, so pardon me for misspeaking.

Human rights…civil rights…natural rights…these are invented ideas, with no known scientific basis.

Thus they can be discarded at will and whim unless there is a mighty power around to keep the rights we've made up from being discarded.
But we could have evolved in such a way to consider that raping little girls or murdering Jews and Gypsies is a fundamental human right. It didn't happen to turn out that way, but heck, why not?

Luckily, as citizens of the United States, rights were invented for us and spelled out in our Constitution.

There I go with that "luckily" talk again. You'll have to pardon me, since this is rather depressing.
It's my own invented right to talk myself out of suffocating under this stinking muck I talk up so much.

Because our government operates thereunder, these rights always shall be protected (unless they are amended away or a tyrannical government

And either way is neither right nor wrong. So it really doesn't matter.

I advocate abortion rights without restriction.

B/c it's neither more right nor more wrong to kiss a baby than to jab a scalpel into her hypothalamus and dismember her.

I advocate the immediate termination of the Iraq debacle.

B/c it's neither more right nor more wrong to bomb innocent civilians than it is to rescue them from a dictator.
Wait, did I say that right...?


(Edited "evolution" to "evidence". Oops.)

Why does that scare you so much?

Paul C has unwittingly graced us with a further clarification of the horror of atheism's logical conclusions that I've been exploring.

My words are in green, his in purple.

So, raping and murdering little girls is only wrong for a person b/c he doesn't like it, not b/c it's Wrong with a capital W.

Why does that scare you so much?

And, on atheism, there's no point to life. At all.

Why does that scare you so much?

And as an added demerit, you can't say that raping little girls is objectively wrong, and that's just straight up horrible.

Why does that scare you so much?

I guess the source of all your attacks on atheism is fear, isn't it? Not fear of atheism, obviously - that would be silly - but fear of the world. Why do all these things scare you so much?


If you have to ask, my friend, I don't know what I can say to help you understand. But at least the clarification of the difference between our two worldviews is proceeding on schedule.