>One can find much more objective meaning to existence without outsorcing it to some imaginable friend.
Care to elaborate on this? I'm an atheist myself and I've been struggling with this a lot.
Care to elaborate on this? I'm an atheist myself and I've been struggling with this a lot.
Keep going in that direction and a life well lived is it's own reward. And by well lived I mean occasional cliff diving not devoting oneself to charitable giving.
There is a lot of pressure for 'success' but I suspect many people are happier with a career in dog grooming than they would be as CEO of IBM. High status can be fun, or endless drudgery.
Some men want to watch the world burn. Tell me why that is wrong? You will say that human life has value. I will ask, honestly, why? From a purely reductionist perspective it doesn't. It's all just atoms. I kill cockroaches without a negative thought. There is no reason to not have the same view of people in a purely materialistic worldview.
Again, if one's aesthetics is gruesome, but enjoyable to that person, you cannot tell them they are wrong. You cannot interfere with them from an ethics perspective. They want to kill, steal and rape, you have to let them. Otherwise you're forcing an external model that you deem good onto them. We've already established that there is no actual good model.
The result is that we must accept hypocrisy. We must all realize that might makes right. The most powerful, flawed group of people are correct. They are the law.
Following the rules of society results in lower friction, and is generally a net positive trade off. That does not mean it's always the correct path. After-all George Washington could easily have been shot as a traitor.
It may seem the strange for a hangman to respect the hanged, but morality and rules need not be 1:1.
PS: This also set's up an interesting freedom duality where someone is free to impose rules and others are free to break them. With the right set of rules you end up with a Darwinian system with huge pressures to enjoy conforming. And a safety valve of people rebelling if the rules are unacceptable. Oddly enough this actually maps fairly well to the real world.
My point was you don't need to say what someone did was "bad" to stop them. As long as more people prefer an ordered world then the dissidents can be dealt with.
If majority rule says giving to the homeless is a capital offense then so be it. Physics and thus biology are going to impose a few rules. Further, completion kicks in at the social level. But, that does not mean Anarchy is "bad" just out competed.
Thus, while morality does not impose any rules collective groups of people do. Not because might makes right, but might exists and there is no right.
PS: At the extreme at one point I realized I was being paid in part to help maintain nuclear weapons. Not because I believed in them instead I liked money and other people want them.
I can't tell you where you could/should start, because I feel like I would already influence you too much by taking some sort of choice away from you.
I will link a few essays I could find that are available for free and are not too long. I'm already influencing you a little bit by making this selection, but I urge you to do your own research: If you like one of the stories, try to find out who was influenced by whom (e.g. Kafka doesn't directly address meaning but influenced Camus; Nietzsche was influenced by Schopenhauer), and consider reading things challenging the author.
[1] The Last Question - Isaac Asimov (http://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf)
[2] Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5200)
[3] A Clean, Well-Lighted Place - Ernest Hemingway (http://www.url-der.org/a_clean_well_lighted_place.pdf)
[4] On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense - Friedrich Nietzsche (http://www.jpcatholic.com/NCUpdf/Nietzsche.pdf)
I've often see people link the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, so I'm gonna do it as well: http://plato.stanford.edu/index.html
While I'm writing this gutenberg.org seems to have some problems, but just search for "Metamorphosis Kafka", and you should find plenty of other sources.
Trying hard to have people make up their own mind can be hard for dating, though.