Existence: What is the point?

I meant no affront to you, I simply stated the same thing you just did. As my OPINION clearly offends you I will refrain from expressing it.

Have A Nice Day

 

Cute..

 

Acquired knowledge applied to our daily existence more often than not improves that existence.

NOt surprised from a religious perspective knowledge is associated with sorrow. In fact its a predicate for all abrahamic religions if the "garden of eden" myth is to be believed.

 

Ah. Another philosophical opinion.

 

Yes we can truly tell how much concern Christians have for their fellow human beings by the fact that our Christian nation provides decent healthcare and a minimally decent housing for all it!'s citizens while absolutly refusing to sell arms and weapons to ruthless regimes to supress their people. Thank heavens Our Christian nation isn't the largest arms merchant in the world and doesn't engage in unnecessary wars for financial gain.

 

To be sure. Makes me wonder what language was like before the Tower of Babel.

Didn't Stalin spend most of his life daily becoming a better tyrant than he was the day before?

 

If I could understand duck nature, frog nature, hawk nature, goose nature, snake nature, bobcat nature, fish nature, deer nature, turtle nature, black bear nature, coyote nature, I think that the possibility of understanding human nature and human existence might come within my grasp tangentially. But my addiction to sunrises wouldn't change. And my life wouldn't change much at all if any. Don't think twice, it's alright, blowin' in the wind.

 

My experience with intelligent people is different. Increased knowledge and understanding does not make you happy. The more you know, the more you realize you don't know.

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” — Confucius

Depth of understanding and awareness of the universe can bring peace, but it is not a happy, carefree, existence.

That usually comes more by avoiding the Big Questions of our existence.

 

Great things are done when men and mountains meet. This is not done by jostling in the street. ~William Blake

“We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls.” ~Mother Teresa

 

I would suggest that increased knowledge and understanding does not necessarily make you happy. Its merely one of many factors that contribute to each individual's subjective definition of happiness.

 

Correct, what is the unintended consequence?

 

I don't usually agree with Sartre, but I do in this instance. Life has no ultimate purpose or meaning but the one that you give it. But that's a great thing when you think about it. It means you get to decide what the ultimate purpose or meaning is and you aren't just some worker ant toiling away to provide for the queen ant and her offspring.

 

Yeah, the meaning of life is to just continue on. We can verify this, each of us. It is objective. And apparently it was in that first self replicating molecule at the very outset, and continued forth as that evolved into a single cell organism, which evolved into the more complex life forms. It is in all things, all things that live, that are alive. But why? Why not the opposite? We cannot find the reason by grinding up organisms and studying them. Science cannot answer this question for the whole is more than the parts.

 

The whole of my computer is more than the sum of its parts, I suppose, because it functions as a unit to do a lot of complex things. Individually, though, its parts are useless.

 

How do you know science cannot answer why?

 

The "hole in the soul" is separation anxiety and the longing to rejoin with wholeness, the Source.

Plato changed matters more than Alexander, but that involved other kinds of changes which, of course, may not have impacted human evolution.

 

The bold was a quote bv another poster..

How has the philosophy of Plato or any other changed the life of half the worlds population struggling to survive?

 

If Plato never existed, I wonder whether the lives of those struggling to survive would be better, worse, or unaffected. Maybe someone who has extensive knowledge of philosophy, including Plato's, can try to answer that question.

My view is that Plato's positive/optimistic influence affected people in positions that could lessen prevailing hardship.

Alexander was a failure at conquering the world. Plato succeeded, in a way.

 

I don't know where your this understanding is coming from. There's no empirical evidence showing anything remotely that it is so! Unless you have invented the technology to get into human minds of those lived thousand years ago back to the point where religions were created!

So this "understanding" is a FAITH from speculation, for those who believe to take it as a "FACT"! Christianity (not all religions are so) is about how facts can only be obtained through human witnessing. Human witnessing remains the only viable way left for humans to get to a possible truth!

This resembles (but not completely) a historical event. Say, what did you eat in last Christmas dinner? There won't be any empirical evidence, not because you didn't eat anything but because it's out of human capability to acquire empirical evidence of this kind! The only viable way left for humans to get to this piece of truth is by believing in human accounts of witnessing. If a reliable eyewitness joined the the dinner with you that day and wrote it down what you ate, we can thus know what you ate. The is the only way, there could be no other way round, especially in ancient times.

 

I don't think that man created gods to 'evade uncomfortable truth about death & eternity'. I think it was more the inability to explain the world around them. See HADD - 'hypersensitive agency-detecting device'.

 

Because IMO, it cannot be explained at the atomic or molecular level, using philosophical materialism as the begin point, the assumption.

 

We cannot possibly know what can and cannot be proved or discovered by science, we do not even know what science will look like in a thousand years time. Indeed we are still arguing over whether some sciences of the last 150 years can actually be called science.

 

First, let's not fall into the "god of the gaps" fallacy.

We humans are more than just our intelligence. We have the most advanced social structure of all the animals. It is actually one of our greatest assets. A large (100+) group of humans with clubs can easily take on a lone human with a handgun. Human intelligence, social networking and language evolved together. As our intelligence grew, our societies became more complicated which required better language and more intelligence.

As for justice and morality, they are products of evolution. Groups that created rules and punished those that broke the rules were more stable than those that did not, which allowed the whole group to succeed.

 

Sure it is, when you think about it just long enough to satisfy your craving for lies.

 

If you choose your own purpose in life, how is it a lie?