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>Realising that you are a product of accident or chance is not depressing or a dark and empty way of life. It's quite incredible. You are born out of stardust, your life in its beginning is indeed free of any deeper meaning and true purpose. You are a brain fighting for survival, against the monstrous odds.

I see this argument used, but it always feels forced to me, trying to make lemonade from the lemons given. Or stardust, in this case.

I don't think it's necessarily "depressing", but neither it's "incredible". It is what it is.

>You may have certain privileges over others to help you on your way - richer family, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc. can all make certain doors open or shut for you - but your meaningless life, born with no purpose, is yours to shape as you see fit.

Well, in this version, you still age, decline, and die forever anyway, so one can argue there's no much meaning into this "shaping". Temporary struggle (and often hard struggle) for no great reward, just ultimate old age and death.

A touch that I think would help this argument: It was evolutionarily beneficial for our brains to demand a sense of purpose or higher meaning, which explains why we consider these questions important, which explains why we have generated fantastical narratives to fulfill these desires for purpose/meaning, and continue to use these narratives even after we have created new narratives that have better predictive power — because we haven’t explained the feeling in a way that resonates.

I mean, maybe it was just important for the brain to have a model of threats. Once we created models of obvious threats, the human capacity for abstract thinking generated abstract super-threats and then began to model such potential threats in the manner to which it was accustomed — via personification in the beginning, and then mathematically.

Really, physics replaces God as the dominant belief system because physics is scarier than God.

Not trying to derail from the quality of posts, but I think this panel[0] makes a valid point in this context.

[0] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/438/013/8ad...

> You don't need God to find purpose.

Yes you do, or at the very least some higher axiomatic meaning that people refer to by "god" and you demonstrate it with your own post: it's just that instead of using the word "god", you use the words "stardust" or "good habits".

Implying that stardust is somehow a good thing (which is your own interpretation, which you assume for some reason is obvious to everyone else? Why exactly is stardust a cool thing, and not a dead meaningless dreadful thing?), and that "good habits" is a meaningful thing to pursue. Those become your deities. There is no difference except for which words are used.

The stardust itself doesn't give you any meaning. It is you that fill those words with meaning. People do exactly the same thing with the word "god".

That's quite the reach. I didn't read their comment to mean stardust is a good thing. It's neither good nor bad. In any case, remove the sentence about stardust from their reply and their point still stands.

If you remove all the words that give meaning from their post, it will just become something like: "I do this thing, it's very important, and this thing, it is awesome, and this thing, and you should all do the same - but I have no idea why I do them, they are just good". - Which doesn't make a better post. It makes it a statement of someone who is not aware of their deeper inner workings. It doesn't remove "god/meaning/stardust" from the equation, it just makes it look like the person is not aware of where their meaning comes from.

And if you define "god" to mean "whatever gives your life meaning" then of course God gives your life meaning. But it's a completely meaningless statement.

You are quite right about stardust and good habits. It seems to me, though, that many people use "god" (and especially "God") to refer to something quite different from "some higher axiomatic meaning".

If that's all we're talking about then there are barely any true atheists.

A lot of people utter things like "I love my partner", without actually having a clue about what that means, and living miserable lives destroying each other... But why talk about that? ;) I want to focus on the best meaning of the words, the useful meanings, the ones that matter. Not about how there are a lot of people that use the words in weird ways and who don't mean what they say.

As gods obviously don't actually exist[0], this is just a reframing of the idea that humans give meaning to their own existance.

[0] Don't want to start a flamewar here, but there are so many contradicting ideas of god out there that at least most of them must be wrong. So regardless of some conception of god being true, the purpose is still felt by all the faithful.

> As gods obviously don't actually exist

It's funny that you would write something like that as if it was a useful statement. Reducing that much complexity in such a nonchalant way... But nevertheless...

> that humans give meaning to their own existance.

If you have time can you share what you think is the reason for why humans have a capability, the will to give their life meaning? Where does it come from? Why is their ability to give life meaning able to produce actual tangible results in their lives and lives of other people? If that ability even implemented through some genetic mechanism, why does the world work that way that it produces this type of genetics, that can create meaning? Genetics could have worked in any number of ways, why this one?

Would you say that love "exists"? Would you say that an integral "exists"? What about if there are no mathematicians that know about it or use it? Does it still exist?

I had no intention to offend, sorry if I came across like that. But this is actually illustrative to the point at hand: Neither in my family nor in my whole social environment do I know a single religious person, yet most of those people feel some kind of purpose or meaning in their live.

Why humans actually do this is of course a hot topic in both philosophy and psychology, for at least a few thousand years now. I think the cognitive root lies in us being social animals. Being social means needing to keep the group together, which makes communication necessary, to align individual actions to a cohesive whole. Communication is hard, though, misunderstandings lurk everywhere. We therefore have to interpret the signals we got from the others, fill the gaps of the unsaid. We necessarily have to infer intentions, meaning, relations to us and so on. If we couldn't to that, we couldn't form cohesive groups, and therefore cease to exist as a species. We could become some other species, but not the current one, having discourse over the internet, sitting in different parts of the world.

All higher order concepts like "love", "purpose" etc. are more elaborate functions to sucessfully and peacefully live together. They actually exist, even physically, as processes in our brains and bodies. But they aren't necessarily ojective. If we as a species would have originated in a physically different world, say as spherical creatures living in the oceans of Titan, we would also have different sets of feelings and emotions. The idea of "love" of such a species could be a completely different one than our human concept.

Thank you, interesting perspective.

> do I know a single religious person, yet most of those people feel some kind of purpose or meaning in their live.

Ah well yes, :). Being religious - vs - having an inner meaning/{what some people call god}/aka being spiritual - is like having gone through a CS program in an expensive university - vs - actually knowing how to code.