Meaning what exactly
December 29, 2007

After much investigation I've discovered that one of the driving forces that causes faith heads to latch onto their delusions is the belief that their life has infinitely more meaning if there is an invisible sky daddy fortifying their eternal meaning vessel. The standard issue argument against the naturalists is that our lives must be very shallow if all we can claim to be is the mortal human animal. The religious see us holding a glass that's empty and pity the loss of the contents. We reply, "What glass? I have a body"

It's as if those that walk in the kingdom of the holies, look at us humans and wonder how we can live from day to day, year to year, with the knowledge that at the end we'll "complexly" not be. It's assumed that since the secularists can't extract meaning from another dimension we are forced to place a valued rating system on the meaning of a persons life depending on how much their actions influenced, or their work influenced, future groups of humans. Logically the idea of god and the good Shepard is very comforting in this view of reality. In my opinion this is the cause that secular/religious people create idols of historically documented figures. The god child view also contains the belief that it doesn't really matter at all what one did or made, for as long as they loved the god and try to obtain the impossible perfection of his prophets, they have achieved the ultimate meaning in the eye of the god. Because apparently gods purpose was to create souls that could chose not to love him, thus creating a dualist system of mean and mean-nots. God must fear a world of atheists because then he would loss meaning, his purpose would be a failure and all would flash in a skillet of hell.

I'm not convinced that there is a value spectrum of meaning. Ether a person places meaning in something or they don't. If something had meaning placed in it, that meaning will always be a fact, even if the thing and the meaning giver fuzz out into the chaos of the universe. There is no such objective thing as "real" meaning by consensuses. There is success by consensus which is objective and measurable but just because 99.9% of the human population place meaning in a pattern of stars in the nights sky doesn't mean that a loner on a deserted island and his meaning of a split second falling star is any less meaningful. Nor does the mean of a collection of subjectively valued meanings have any relevance to individual or majority valued meaning; Meaning is not up for debate.

An interesting observation is that one can place meaning in something, then grow out of holding any meaning to the thing thus transforming it to a current state of non meaning according to the original meaning giver. But a fact of history can not be erased, and even though the meaning instiller fluctuates, once something gets a dose of meaning that dose can't be undone (sci-fi time travelers exempt - be careful what you mean to). Meaning is such a strange word because it's definition is reciprocal. Meaning is only comprehensible on a highly metaphysical level and thus understandably is used frequently in the dialog of god. Meaning is not godspeak's sole domain however. Most healthy people place ultimate meaning in society, mother nature and in their own existence: rightfully so. Naturalists know that this is the only life we'll ever have, and as such, nothing can have more meaning than every second we work to keep: waiting in the grocery store line or lining up for president. If we had an opportunity for eternal life, "our time" would be meaningless and that belief is a danger. Life on earth means everything.