The Meaning of Life

Oct 12, 2013 //
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Before I left for India, people asked me if I was looking for something, trying to find myself, or the answers to the universe, or whatever it is old Indian dudes with amazing beards are supposed to know about. Luckily, I already know all the answers, so I didn’t have to shell out the 700 rupees it would have taken to get some mystic to tell me that I need to exercise my loins more (this literally happened to someone in my group).

So, the meaning of life. I always used to think it was fairly simple: boning. Or to put it slightly less crassly, perpetuating our species. We are biological creatures, and our natural drives are telling us all at once that we need to go out and make sure that there are future generations. This line is a poor way to pick up women, by the way, and I would recommend flowers.

So what’s the problem with the meaning of our personal existence depending on the future of the species. Well, for one, our species might not actually last all that long. We might kill each other; there’s the whole asteroid thing and we might not have Bruce Willis around to save us; global warming could flood the planet; the sun is going to go out eventually if we’re even still around for that. Anyway, even if by some miracle we escape this death trap we call Earth, and the inevitable heat death of the universe turns out to be a myth, what kind of meaning is there if you don’t get to appreciate it? Has anyone ever even met their great-great-grandkids outside of hillbillies who are grandparents at 23? I say there is no meaning if we don’t actually get to experience it, or if we never know if it was fulfilled or not. Keep in mind, I’m talking about the species on the whole; having children and loving them and finding meaning there is possible, but that meaning isn’t coming from your desire to perpetuate the human race. I’ll get to that later.

There’s also the religious belief that we live to serve God. There is a problem with that beyond the question about God’s existence, and that is I absolutely reject the notion that the meaning of life is submission. I think even God would reject that belief, as He would have been the one to give us free will in the first place.

The last idea I’m going to reject before I give the correct answer (read: my answer) is the notion that the meaning of life is to do good works. Be nice to one another, and generous, and remember to hug your mom. All that hunky dory nonsense you might see on a poster with a picture of a sunrise on it. There is absolutely no logic to back this up, other than the fact that it gives hippies the warm fuzzies in their bowels. And the day I let hippies decide the meaning of life is the day my brain aneurysm finally kicks.

So, what’s the meaning of life? The answer came to me when I was feeling a smidgen down over one thing or another a while back. I couldn’t sleep, and so around 2am, after having deliberated over why I was upset, I actually wrote down a memo in my phone to commemorate my experience. I knew that this too would pass, and one day the inevitable heat death of the universe would make all my problems disappear, but even with all that, I still felt like shit. Why?

When things fail, when we feel hopeless, powerless, and alone, when we lose everything, when we feel as though we can’t go on, we search for meaning in our lives. We look for a purpose. Something that tells us that things will work out, that there is a reason for optimism in this life. We seek solace in God, in karma, in a just universe, in fate and destiny; where somehow our failings and our suffering mean something. That there is a plan. That despite all the terrible things that happen, they don’t matter because there is something greater at work.

What if none of that was true? What if there is no God, no justice, no great destiny? Our suffering would be meaningless. Our failures would be nothing; insignificant blips, invisible to the vastness of eternity. No comfort for our sins.

And yet, even within that meaninglessness, we still hurt. We still regret. We still hang on to things despite every instinct to let go. We choose to suffer in a universe that ignores it. Why?

Because that is where the meaning comes from. We hurt because the things that mean something to us hurt us. We lose them; it is inevitable, and without that hurt, without that loss, there is no meaning. The Truths of Buddhism state that life is suffering, and we must relinquish our attachments in order to relieve ourselves of that suffering. I disagree. Our lives are comprised of attachments and sometimes that suffering is all we’ve got.

What I was getting at with this depressing little blurb was that despite everything, despite any meaninglessness or valuelessness of our actions and experiences, we still feel. If there is nothing, why do I still feel? We absolutely cannot help it. So you know those silly, girly little things you get at the end of Hugh Grant movies? That’s what this is all about.

This made sense to me almost immediately, because whenever I talk to people about how meaningless this life is, how our actions have no value, and that we live in a universe devoid of hope and compassion, for some strange reason they always seem to find it supremely disheartening. They tell me I’m wrong, and naturally I get defensive and irritable, and demand to know why they would dare disagree with me. They tell me that it just doesn’t feel right. It feels like there should be something more to this life of ours. They can’t quite put their finger on it, but there’s definitely something. And it was those feelings all along that hit the nail on the head.

Camus has a theory that since no individual experience has any relative value, that in order to measure a life, you have to measure the quantity of experiences rather than the quality. And that’s all fine and good, but my problem with it is, you can have all the experiences in the world, but if none of them affect you emotionally, then it’s as if you haven’t experienced them at all. Camus’ character Meursault from L’Étranger experiences a wide variety of things, from a wedding engagement to a murder, but as he feels nothing during any of it, it’s all considered to be equally without meaning.

You might think that this is a fairly hippy-ish way of looking at it, that The Feels are what give our lives meaning, but I’m saying that the negative emotions offer just as much meaning to our lives as the positive ones. When you feel sad, it’s typically because you had something and lost it. Something that meant something to you. And that meaning is perpetuated through your sadness. I mean, you do traditionally let go, just as all joys leave us as well, but it’s better to let things run their proper course, rather than trying to force yourself to be in a state that you’re not.

So those children of yours I was discussing earlier, the ones that give meaning to your life. They give meaning through the love, the anxiety, the frustration, the hope, the disappointment, the excitement, the entire roller coaster of emotions that they put you through. Not just having kids, but the places you go, the people you meet, the drugs you take, all those things that affect your life in different ways. That’s what this is all about.

Don’t be stoic. Don’t rid yourselves of your attachments. You might as well be dead already if you shut yourself off from your emotions, because otherwise what’s the point? Love, lose, suffer, get angry, get happy. Be alive, and make it mean something.

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Categories Philosophy

The God-Shaped Hole

Sep 2, 2013 //
0

As dirty as the title sounds, the God-shaped hole is actually a fairly common philosophical concept. What it boils down to is that ever since God died, humanity as a whole is missing a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. Not even necessarily the moral compass that God typically is considered responsible for, but just the essence of having something above us, greater than us, something that is inherently right in the universe.

Even if you don’t agree that God is dead, you might be able to appreciate that God is certainly less prevalent than He used to be. The “civilized” world has all but abandoned God, by keeping it out of the majority of its establishments. Flip side are those who place their faith less-so on God, and more-so on the war for God. In every day life it seems that the intimate relationship with God has lessened from what it was even a hundred years ago. Some see this as a bad thing, others see it as a good thing. But for something like God (Higher Power, whatever) that has been around for pretty much the entirety of human existence, you’d think that having God disappear might leave something missing in our shared consciousness?

Within the last few months, I have spoken to two people (I have spoken to others as well, but they obviously weren’t memorable enough to make it into this blog post) who were in Alcoholics Anonymous, and Narcotics Anonymous. I realize that two people isn’t exactly an ideal statistical sample size, but shut up because this is hardly an academic paper. ANYwho, the person in AA is partially religious, to the extent that they believe that Christ is our saviour, but still does not adhere to traditional religious practices. The NA member is anti-religious. A burning-down-the-churches-and-laughing type of person. Not as totally polar opposite as I would like, and if anyone happens to know a super-Catholic, bible-thumping lush I’d be happy to talk to them, but we’ll have to make do with what we’ve got. But these two almost-opposite people agree on one thing: they need their Higher Power to help them with their addiction. For the semi-religious person, the Higher Power is the obvious one. The anti-religious person relies on Love as their Higher Power, and focuses on NA’s stipulation of personal interpretation to exclude themselves from the otherwise religious tenets of the NA program. Keep in mind, this isn’t a romantic love that every day humans are capable of experiencing, as “romantic love is a bunch of bullshit and shouldn’t exist.” This is a Love with sentience, that produces a form of serenity and a sense that everything will be okay. This might sound almost identical to a definition of God, but from our conversation this Love seemed like more of an inner sense rather than an outer being. It is what this person needs, and they found it.

It might be argued that this is the Anonymous program brainwashing its members into its informal religious doctrine, but at the same time, it’s hard to say what it really takes when you’ve hit rock bottom, and you feel like nothing, and maybe humans as a species really do need something greater than ourselves to pull us out of the dark. I know I certainly haven’t come anywhere close to the lows that addiction can ravage us down to, so I choose not to offer an opinion on the matter, and prefer listening to the experiences of others.

There is also a song by Regina Spektor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqG1Dh36-6s) that discusses many other examples of points in our lives where we might reach out to something greater than ourselves. No one laughs at God in a hospital, when your mother is dying in front of you and all you can possibly do is wish for her to be at peace, happy, somewhere, anywhere. No one laughs at God when the last sight you’ll ever see is a pair of hateful eyes, and you cry out, hoping for any kind of justice to be done. No one laughs at God when it’s gotten really late, and your kid’s not home from the party yet, and all you can wish for is to have something take care of your child.

None of these examples actually prove the existence of God, or even a Higher Power, but as my old buddy Voltaire used to paraphrase, if there was no God, maybe, just maybe, we would need to create Him. The need for something more creates that something more, and to deny that something more is to ignore the necessity for it.

These are all low points in personal human experience. Maybe the God-shaped hole that people allude to is really, in our collective experience as a species, a low point in our humanity, and if we hope to escape it, we’ll need something greater than ourselves to pull us out of it. Maybe we are too obsessed with the distractions of modernity that we can’t unite to actively search for this Higher Power that will save us from ourselves. I’m not saying that it is some objective Higher Power that is doing any actual saving, but the belief in that Higher Power gives us the power to do it ourselves.

I’m going to offer some counter-arguments here, because this isn’t a post meant to convince you of anything, as even I am not fully convinced one way or the other. Feel free to make up your own mind regarding the God-shaped hole.

In regards to addiction, people give up cigarettes all the time without the help of a Higher Power. Cigarettes are equally deadly, but for some reason, there is no Anonymous program to help people escape it, and yet they do. Maybe since alcohol and narcotics destroy more than just your own life, but the lives of the people around you, and even change who you are as a person, do they require something more than just cold turkey and a patch. On the other hand, maybe since there is no secular option for the recovery of alcoholics and drug abusers, we have no other options with which to compare results. It is very difficult to say what it takes to save us when we need it most, and maybe only since we collectively have always reached out for something greater, do we continue to do it today.

There is also the Nietzschean belief that there may be a God-shaped hole, sure, but maybe instead of filling it with something that doesn’t exist, we ought to fill it with ourselves and our Selves. Believe that humanity is the greatest power, and should only aspire to be greater. We as individuals are capable of incredible things, and to ascribe those incredible things onto a non-existent being is an insult to that human capability.  This isn’t to say that what I said initially is invalid, as it is the belief that is necessary to help us escape our lows. It’s just instead of the belief in a Higher Power, it should be the belief in our own power.

Or ultimately maybe it’s not so much what we believe in, so long as we believe.

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Categories Philosophy, Religion

Critique of Pure Religion

Aug 26, 2013 //
0

Normally I like to direct my condemnations toward atheistic and secular modes of thinking. Not because those beliefs are wrong, but because I think there should be more critical thinking in that area outside of the typical “godless, amoral monsters” attack that is too easily repudiated. The God-Shaped Hole argument has some validity, but that’s another blog for another day.

Today I’m going to bat for the other team, and give a couple of examples of things I find wrong with religion specifically, that don’t exist outside of the religious realm.

The first issue I have with religion is the hypocrisy. This centres mostly around morality:  religion is, at its foundations, a strict guide on how to behave. However, as I illustrate in my previous blog post (https://blogforchumps.wordpress.com/2013/08/16/subjective-morality-its-all-weve-got/) we choose our own moral code, and the rules of holy scripture become less of a rigid set of ethics, and more of a timid suggestion.

This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if people admitted that they were using those rules as suggestion rather than as stone cold fact. But this is not often the case, and people will defend adamantly that they are absolutely correct in their way of thinking because their way has fancy words like “Thou” and “Shalt” in it. This is despite these people either glossing over or downright ignoring the Thous and the Shalts that contradict some of their other firmly-held beliefs.

Atrocities may be committed in the name of secularism and atheists may hold atrocious beliefs, but since they don’t have a rule book that says otherwise, it can’t be considered a hypocrisy.

The other issue that I have with religion is the notion that only things that make us miserable can be considered morally acceptable, and if it feels good then it must be wrong. This is of course an exaggeration, but it’s still true to some extent. There is the puritanism, the guilt, the asceticism, and in the extremes we have the self-flagellation, the sexual mutilation, etc. associated with religion, and because of that association, these are seen as morally proper conduct.

This stems from the belief that religion should be a restraint on the natural urges of human desire, and yes, some restraint is a good thing. But humanity seems to like taking things way, way too seriously, and because of this , this way of thinking has far surpassed reasonable levels. It has even gotten to the point where we have secular beliefs that have been created by this “misery leads to morality, and pleasure leads to sin” way of life, such as sex is bad, drugs are bad, and veganism is somehow a good thing.

I’m not advocating hedonism, but religion’s restraint on basic human urges and desires needs to be examined a little more thoroughly. WHY do we slut-shame? WHY is marijuana illegal? It wasn’t secular thinking that led to these beliefs, and yes, an argument can be made that patriarchal cultures lead to slut-shaming, but where did the belief that sex is wrong come from in the first place?

When I think about critiques of religion, and there are many, I always think of John Lennon asking us to imagine a world without religion, and I do, and I believe most of those critiques would still be around. However, I don’t know if these two issues that I have raised would be. There are obviously moral regulations that people can be hypocritical about in secular circles, but no ethical rules are as absolutist as religious ones, which makes the hypocrisy that much more apparent. And you know, maybe humanity would find a way to severely oppress our natural desires outside of religion, or maybe we would simply be content oppressing ourselves in other ways, but who knows.

Who knows?

 

Post-script: I’m not saying that religious ethical beliefs are bad. I’m saying that embracing some and renouncing others is hypocritical if you also suggest that all of those rules are good and proper. Also, vegans, I’m just teasing you. Hugs and kisses!

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Categories Religion
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