What's your religion?

[BlueWing]

Originally Posted by meshou

More like the cure than the disease.

Existentialism insists that meaning in the universe does not exist, we have to somehow come up with our own. This is a rejection of objective meaning which is indeed nihilism. What this means is that there is no meaning in the universe, but we somehow have to befool ourselves into believing that there is.

[meshou]

I suppose. I don't reject meaning, though. I am very interested in what meaning people have personally created in their lives. I find value in it.

I think there's something beautiful about people who have created meaning to their existence, claimed their own lives as a result of self exploration and reflection, become more aware of themselves and their surroundings.

I don't think that's classically nihilist. nihilists are often a great deal more defeatist.

I also don't reeject all morality, nor do I think something being arbitrary makes it without merit. Everything's arbitrary, it can still be useful or valuable.

[BlueWing]

Originally Posted by meshou

I suppose. I don't reject meaning, though. I am very interested in what meaning people have personally created in their lives. I find value in it.

I think there's something beautiful about people who have created meaning to their existence, claimed their own lives as a result of self exploration and reflection, become more aware of themselves and their surroundings.
.

If the meaning in their life is legitimate, than they did not create it, but find it.

[meshou]

Since I don't believe it's "out there" to find, I'll have to disagree.

[BlueWing]

Originally Posted by meshou

Since I don't believe it's "out there" to find,

You in effect accept nihilism then.

[meshou]

I don't agree with all of its conclusions, some of which I consider pretty essential to the philosophy.

[Jennifer]

Originally Posted by SolitaryWalker

So raised in Christian mythology that preaches that Gods existence is absolute and provable and now you're still in faith, yet epistemically agnostic?

uh... yeah... (?)

To be a little more descriptive:

1. I believed at an early age and was raised in the church. My mom was Christian but unable to contribute intellectually to my faith; my dad did not want to interfere for good or ill.

2. I tried hard to understand everything I could and could easily find what patterns existed in the theology.

3. I was also involved in a variety of churches and had some spiritual experiences along the way, but struggled hard with knowing "what I should do" and "not being able to do it" consistently. And, amid what hypocrites or pedantic sorts I knew, there remained a very small handful of genuine loving / deeply engaging believers who cared about me as a person. If anything is an anchor to me, it's my memory of them.

4. I spent much of my teens and early 20's into apologetics-style material, since belief was very "intellectual" for me. There were things I did not understand, but I fought hard to somehow put together a "consistent picture" that incorporated the doctrine I had learned (which basically incorporates an inerrantist view of Scripture and a view of the Bible more as a cohesive guidebook).

5. Since my mid-20's, I've had to learn a lot of relational truth (as opposed to intellectual truth), and I've also (with more study of various viewpoints and historical things) changed my view on what the Bible is and how it was put together. I've also gone through a lot of crap that challenged my faith and in many ways helped me grow, yet inevitably also eventually left me here, where I am now -- feeling very agnostic in terms of having no real proof that anything I had believed was true, yet seeing value in the faith and also having learned a lot of "life truth" that meshes up with what I learned in rubber-meets-the-road Christianity. So any faith I continue to have will be a choice on my part, not a derivation from "evidence."

--

Hmmm. Not sure why you guys are arguing over whether Meshou is a nihilist. She certainly doesn't seem to fit up with the negative stereotypes of nihilism, and it's clear that her main gist (at least the part you have been discussing) is pretty typical existentialism, where people construct meaning in a world where no meaning inherently exists. So why not leave it at that?

[BlueWing]

Originally Posted by cut the grass

atheist

atheism is not a religion. Religions can be both theistic and atheistic.

Example of a theistic religion: Christianity
Example of an atheistic religion:Marxism.

[cafe]

Moved several posts to new thread in Graveyard

[disregard]

i'm atheist. i never said my religion is atheism

and i'm definitely not part of an antheist religion.