Life of Pi

[Bong Lover]

Mr Khan said:

Bong Lover said:

Mr Khan said:

 

If we are all (or in the majority) in the belief that existence is good and preferable to non-existence, we can then enforce that norm, thus stopping the homicidal as part of a mutual pact to protect the lives that we generally agree that we love

Human life can be held sacred from a purely humanist and indeed nontheistic perspective, and imbued with meaning in our quest to make our own life and the lives of others better.

In a mechanical world, all our believes amount to nothing. They are just random collisions of atoms in a lump of fat. Also, the distinction between exsistence and non exsistence becomes meaningless since the matter exsists regardless of what happens to a human body. Remember, your soul or feelings doesn't really exsist in this world view, they are merely results of particles in motion. These particles will still move after death and destruction of the body.

point 2, I readily agree and also pointed that out in the post you are quoting. However, for us to hold up life as 'better' than non-life there has to be some sort of fixed point of morality or ethics if you will. My point is that this fixed point can not be found if exsistence is reduced to nothing but a deterministic mechanical view.

The fixed ethical point is life itself, that we live and agree we enjoy life and that we all have a right to live and a right to enjoy life to a degree that it does not harm other's enjoyment, and we might also take upon ourselves a duty to somewhat enrich the lives of others in the course of our life, but there need not be a higher power or point beyond the miracle of life itself

What i'm propounding here is not a nihilistic view, just one of finding meaning in the world that does not necessitate crafting powers that exist beyond the world. I believe religion can do good things for the world if it encourages us to enrich our lives and the lives of others and that these views might serve as a nice tool by making these concepts more palatable and less dry and/or dense, but that to speak of outside things is ultimately unnecessary. Goodness can be its own thing, unhinged, unexplained, yet built into our makeup

Yes, you are right. 'Goodness' can be its own thing, and does not require religion. As I have stated several times, this question is not about religion. But 'goodness' is not a physical entity, it is a feeling. In that sense it is 'supernatural'. It is a property of exsistence that is outside the pure physical mechanics of matter. From this I claim that if you want to subscribe to a purely rational world where everything can be explained using the laws of physics, then 'goodness' reduces down to a particular configuration of electrons in a human brain and that is it. It is no longer better than 'badness' just a different configuration of electrons. And so it follows that normative statements become meaningless.

For the record, I don't believe in this world view myself. I believe that there is something more to the world than a cold and deterministic collection of atoms. This 'something' is hard to frame in words, and that is why we have so many different ways of explaining it, from the multitude of religions to the concept of human rights, to your explanation of goodness being part of the basic essence of being human.

To anyone who thinks I have derailed the thread: I have brought up these points not to prove someone wrong or right, but to try to encourage critical thinking around the concepts of spirituality and reality. To make people ask these questions is the ultimate purpose of The Life of Pi as well, and hopefully reading through these deep arguments will shed light on the deeper meaning of Life of Pi.