"The Internet Is My Religion"
jakelevine.me
jakelevine.me
It all sounds lovely until the universe turns into a cold, dead cinder.
Seriously, making stuff is beautiful, and helping people is beautiful, but those don't add up to transcendent beings. If everything about us, right down to our deepest desires, is fundamentally just the motion of atoms, when the universe ends, it might has well have never happened.
I am a Christian, so I'm biased here#, but it seems to me that non-religious people keep trying to simultaneously claim that the universe is merely a semi-random collection of atoms and energy, AND that we can find transcendent meaning in it. You can't have it both ways.
#Then again, I think it's impossible NOT to be biased about a question like the meaning of life. We all want some particular thing to be true.
And your description of an afterlife is not at all how I think of it; it sounds quite mercenary. It's more like "spend your time painting as if someone will see it, not as if you will burn it immediately upon finishing."
I have no problem if you want to believe that there is a super-being in the sky or that we are all made of stars or that there is some inherent order to the universe and life that we do not yet understand. But don't pretend that you are right and others are wrong. Your version of a God with his omnipotent powers and everlasting love has just as much cause to communicate with me personally as he does with you or the Pope or your preacher. No one can tell me that they know better than I do what lies beyond this life.
Why do we have to keep our eyes closed to the beauty of life here on earth for it to have "meaning"? Life is awesome, devastating, amazing, heartbreaking, and wonder-filled. Every moment is a gift. Knowing that one day it will all come to an end makes it all the more beautiful for me.
I'm just asking for consistency.
I can't speak for the parent post, but personally I'm fine with that. All meaning, and indeed morality, exists in minds. Which is why it's so incredibly important to me that we not squander it while it does exist in the name of something that doesn't.
There's a Straaaaaw Maaaaan [1]
waiting in the sky;
He'd like to come and meet us,
but he thinks he'll blow our minds
Jesus was probably the first to emphasize how much the humans are social beings, that they need one another, and that there's actually a lot to enjoy and to win by being nice towards each others.
Some biblical teachings are remarkably insightful, but you don't need the full package to make sense out of it.
BTW, assuming that god (whatever it is) is transcendent, by definition, it is impossible to conceive it. As a consequence any attempt at conceptualizing it is doomed to fail. You're only ever relating to your flawed mental representation of it. It can provide wonderful experiences, but you can get similar ones in totally different settings [2].
[1] David Bowie, Starman http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5iOiLX5ppA#t=00m52
That first bit is a rather bold claim in the face of Confucius.
I'll refine it as "Jesus was probably, in western philosophy history, the first to emphasize...". But I may still be wrong...
I know nothing about Confucius. I guess it's Wikipedia time :-)
I'm also not sure why you think we can't have it both ways. Take chess for example. There's a board, there's rules, and it plays. However ask any serious player about the game, and you'll discover very quickly that there is far more to the game then just the board and how the pieces move.
Why can't the same principle be applied to our universe, where the board is what we perceive and the rules physics?
If by "far more", you mean "following these rules can result in any one of a large combination of outcomes, and at any given point it's nearly impossible to keep them all in your head", I agree.
If you're talking about the thrill of it, that's external to the game: it's human feelings and human interactions. Which is exactly what a materialistic view of the universe would dismiss as illusory.
Huh? Apply your same logic, "following these rules can result in any one of a large combination of outcomes." Bingo, you have thinking, feeling creatures. Nothing has been dismissed.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Mind for the details.
See http://clm.utexas.edu/~compjc/papers/Tononi2008a.pdf and the next two links for what I bet my money on regarding scientific theories of consciousness.
http://www.coma.ulg.ac.be/papers/vs/boly_PBR_coma_science_20...
http://www.coma.ulg.ac.be/papers/vs/massimini_PBR_coma_scien...
For those of us who don't believe there is some transcendent being out there waiting to either embrace us or condemn us to eternal suffering in the afterlife, this is all we've got. We don't have faith that our good deeds and beliefs will rewarded or punished. We don't have faith that there is some larger purpose to life than what actually happens on this planet.
Instead, we try to build societies so that we can place faith in people, and ideas. Is that goal any less noble because the universe will at one point, billions of years in the future, turn into a cold, dead cinder?
Nobody, except those who commit great harm, will be remembered even 100 years from now. Some people might know the name Bill Gates in 2111, but most people will have forgotten what he actually accomplished, just as most of our generation has forgotten what Rockefeller, or Carnegie, or Vanderbilt did. Does that make their contributions to society any less important or righteous?
For us nonbelievers, transcendence isn't about becoming one with "god". It's about becoming one with the ideas and values we hold.
Yes, yes I can. As a human I can find meaning in literally anything. By no means is this any more or less silly then walking on water, turning water into wine, etc.
Are you implying transcendent meaning is an objective thing?
...it seems to me that non-religious people keep trying to simultaneously claim that the universe is merely a semi-random collection of atoms and energy, AND that we can find transcendent meaning in it.
So I interpreted that as the original non-atheist person meaning transcendental as metaphysical or supernatural in his statement.
I personally take "transcendental" to be describing a purely emotional experience. But I agree, for most other people it means super natural.
Unless you were there. Then it rocks.
You are assuming heat death is inevitable, however this may not be the case, in fact if it is possible to harness Zero Point energy as energy and matter are just two sides of the same coin it will be possible for us to avoid heat death, that would certainly be a Revelation and humanity would be the Saviour.
It's an inspiring talk about a guy who has dealt with multiple extreme health issues, like cancer and a lung transplant, and how people--connected by the internet--made it possible for him to get the help he needed to live. He's not saying that he worships the internet, rather that communication and understanding other people is what is best in all of us. In this sense, the internet is his religion because it allows him to have faith in the goodness of the world.
Right now the Internet is at the primordial ooze stage of evolution.
That said, it is a great source of "godly" works.
A quick Google search brings up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vJoaWa-kWQ
2. Quoting Rand signals, if not acceptance, approval for her general thesis. It is a good thesis in so far as it romanticizes (in her technical sense of the word, see _The Romantic Manifesto_) the ability of humans to produce great things. It is a bad thesis in so far as it blames those who cannot produce great things -- for any reason -- for "enslaving" those of the previous class.
I would love for that sentence to be explained. The speaker took the stage and spoke with confidence. I saw no signs of nervousness. As for geeky, I guess you mean he was skinny, wearing a rumpled shirt and glasses? Sensibility? You mean he looked sensitive, or reasonable?
I dunno, it just seems like a whole lot of snap judgment of a guy and some words that seem to have just been assembled at random because it sounded cool.