Getting random stuff organised
There is clearly a deep-seated and widespread tendency towards megalomania in some members of the human race. Many, many people seem to desperately need to feel that they are in some sense important to the universe. The whole of religion, in fact, can be seen as an expression of the desire to be regarded as …
Continue reading “We’re just not very important. Sorry and all that.”
‘Living’ is not the sort of thing that can have a purpose. An individual life — of a human, or another animal, or a plant — can be said to have a purpose if it is largely or wholly devoted to satisfying some specific human demand or requirement; thus the purpose of an orange tree’s life might …
The question was about ‘purpose’, but of course this applies just as well to other vague terms like ‘meaning’ or ‘point’. Nothing has a purpose, in the absence of a sentient mind that can give it one. To a sentient mind, many things have purposes, and most of them have multiple purposes. But the only …
One very common tactic used by religion to establish its credentials is to make up supposedly ‘important’ questions, and then pretend that it has the ‘answers’ to these. One of the smartest things that religion ever did was to pretend that there is a ‘purpose’ to life, and put itself forward as the supplier of …
Continue reading “What, according to atheists, is the purpose of existing?”
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