Baldeagle8 said:
Cliche answer, to love God and other people. |
It may or may not be worth getting into, but I've always found this to be a strange sort of answer. God made people in order to have those people love him? In my honest opinion, that starts to look like a strange sort of deity. A questionable mentality at least. And then there are other related questions, such as what does this "love" consist of? Do we really mean "worship"? For after all, I know what love is primarily due to the relationships I've had with my parents, my friends, my wife, my daughter, and so forth; yet the relationship people are meant to have with God does not resemble these, imo. And then there is the further question of whether or not this God is deserving of my love.
As far as loving other people goes, as an atheist, I do love other people. Some of them. Not all of them. And if we mean that my purpose is that I should love all other people, again, I find it a funny sort of answer. Since we're dealing in cliches, I'll affirm that I don't love Hitler, nor do I think that to do so would be a worthy purpose, let alone "moral."
| Baldeagle8 said: Other than that, I guess we will or won't see... |
In a sense that's true, but as an atheist, my primary interest is not in seeing whether or not one of us is correct upon our deaths (or for that matter the ancient Greeks, or the Zoroastrians, or the Shoshone, or etc., etc., etc.; even if one adopts a religious mentality, seeking purpose or for any other reason, there are literally thousands of possibilities -- but the vast majority of people simply ride with whatever their parents told them to believe, it seems to me).
Rather, my primary interest is in living this life to the best of my ability. Thus the purpose I hold for my life matters greatly to how I choose to live it. If the suggestion is that a good way to spend my too-limited time on earth is worshiping and obeying an invisible sky daddy (or his terrestrial agents) based on ancient literature, well... beyond questions of proof/evidence, I have to say that this does not sound like the best use of anybody's time or energy, God's included.
If a God actually existed, and if he were anything approaching sane or moral, anything that was worthy of a person's love, then I would expect that he wouldn't need people to worship him, or even seek out such a thing. It's all too petty, too vain, too low. And if such a God wished to be genuinely loved, there are far better things he could do to deserve it than the kind of activities described in the Bible and promoted by various churches.
