"Phÿltêr" > wrote in message .. .
>>> "Andrew B. Chung, MD/PhD" > wrote in message
>>> oups.com...
>>>> friend George wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> "Genus"?
>>>>
>>>> No.
>>>>
>>>> Demons (satan's sockpuppets) are infinitely less than a subspecies.
>>>>
>>>> May GOD bless you.
>>>>
>>>> Prayerfully in Jesus' ever-lasting love,
>>>>
>>>> Andrew <><
>>>> --
>>>> Andrew B. Chung, MD/PhD
>>>
>>> Don't do me any favors. Just the thought of someone believing in some
>>> sky pixie (other than the God Tinkerbelle) makes me PUKE!
>>>
>>> I wasn't responding to you, anyway.
>>>
>>>
>>> Ordained Minister-Universal Life Church <== by whom!
>>> AFJC Photo Archivist <== smut folder
>>> DOD#144,000 (the LAST one in) <== I doubt you'll ever
>>> get in!
>>>
>>> "AFJC...We Care" <== about me,
>>> mtsel, and Ionly
>>
>> Unbelief and Its Consequences
>
> Many lines of cut & paste drivel snipped...
>
> There won't be any consequences. Your god is as inconsequential as Zeus
> or Odin (to name but two).
>
Phÿltêr - (PHAP) aka "She's So Fat ..." I see U got outta jail for that female
impersonation in the park a week ago, huh. (-:
UR still looking fer meaning urine life?
The Search for Meaning
One might well ask what those pursuits are that bridge the existential and
the rigorously intellectual? At the center of life lie four questions of origin,
meaning, morality, and destiny. How did I come to be? What brings life
meaning? How do I determine right from wrong? What happens to a
person when he or she dies? These are the questions that dig deep into
our thinking, the answers to which we must find if life is to be defined
correctly.
But there is a caution. First and foremost, the answer to each of these
four
questions must be established as true by its correspondence to reality.
Further, all the answers when put together must cohere without
contradiction. For example, the naturalist tries to explain our origin by
saying that life evolved purely by accident and that we are here due to the
cumulative effect of time plus matter plus chance. If that is true, there is no
way to establish any point of reference for either meaning or morality. In
other words, in a naturalistic framework, any constructed meaning is as
equally valid as any other espoused meaning. The words of G. K.
Chesterton ring true: The tragedy of disbelieving in God, he said, is not
that a person ends up believing in nothing. It is much worse. He may end
up believing in anything. There is no way within naturalism to arrive at an
objective moral law or an ontic referent for meaning. Anything goes!
Therefore, it does not suffice to offer just a view on origins. The
entailments must be justified as well.
Another example is pantheism. If all is one and all is God, how can
pantheism explain either origin or morality? And what about Buddha, who
said that every birth is a rebirth and a payment for the previous birth?
Was
there ever a first birth? And if so, what was it paying for? It is not
sufficient
to explain merely origin or destiny. The questions of meaning and morality
must also have equally coherent answers because they stand in
interdependence to each other.
For me personally, the only one whose answers correspond to reality and
cohere in their sum and substance is Jesus Christ. His gospel tells me that
I
am a moral being made for his purpose. My meaning is found in knowing
and loving him. My moral choices are based on his character. My destiny
is to live in eternity with him. In this chapter, I will address only one of
these questions-what meaning means in the Christian context. In that
meaning I find both a rational and an existential defense of Jesus' unique
claims.
The search for meaning is as old as humanity. Even those who have
dabbled lightly in the vast corpus of Greek mythology know the story of
Sisyphus. Poor Sisyphus suffered the wrath of the gods when he revealed
to mere mortals secrets that were known only within the Greek pantheon.
He was sentenced to roll a massive stone to the top of a hill, watch it roll
down again, and then repeat the process endlessly. His was a life
consigned to futility.
Many intriguing suggestions have been made by philosophers in their
attempts to rescue Sisyphus from this futility. "If only Sisyphus could have
changed the way he viewed his task, so that he enjoyed rolling the stone,"
opined one. "Could he not have rolled up a different stone each time, so
that someone else could have built a monument with it?" "Could he not
have found some distraction that would take away the monotony?" It
does
not take a genius to grasp the reason behind the futility that holds
Sisyphus
in its grasp.
As times have changed and possibilities abound, one would think we
should have come a long way from Sisyphus's malady. Instead, we deal
with the same problem, only now it is the busyness of life. No amount of
distraction has cured boredom. No variety changes the question of
ultimate futility.
Not long ago, Life published a book on how individuals cope with this
quest for meaning. The publication is a fascinating cross section of words
and pictures-from philosophers to drug addicts, from painters to
plumbers. José Martinez, a taxi driver in New York, provided this
gripping sound bite of despair:
We're here to die, just live and die. I live driving a cab. I do some fishing,
take my girl out, pay taxes, do a little reading, then get ready to drop
dead. Life is a big fake. . . . You're rich or you're poor. You're here,
you're gone. You're like the wind. After you're gone, other people will
come. It's too late to make it better. Everyone's fed up, can't believe in
nothing no more. People have no pride. People have no fear. . . . People
only care about one thing and that's money. We're gonna destroy
ourselves, nothing we can do about it. The only cure for the world's
illness
is nuclear war-wipe everything out and start over. We've become like a
cornered animal, fighting for survival. Life is nothing.?1?
There is a disturbing candor behind his admission. But we are quick to
rationalize his predicament, fearful of seeing ourselves reflected in his
portrait. "Of course a man struggling to make a living and stressed by an
unrewarding job is bound to seem hopeless. If he were given limitless
freedom and a limitless bank account, his meaninglessness would vanish."
The errant assumption that meaning can be found by merely changing
one's circumstances is endemic to our human condition.
Credited to the pen of King Solomon, no piece of ancient literature is
more forthright and more penetrating in its treatment of this struggle than
the Book of Ecclesiastes. The opening lines claim, "Meaningless,
meaningless! All is meaningless!" Then Solomon takes a regressive
journey, cataloguing his path to that cynicism-wisdom, pleasure, work,
material gain, and much else. He came away empty.
I denied myself nothing my eyes desired;
I refused my heart no pleasure.
My heart took delight in all my work,
and this was the reward for all my labor.
Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done
and what I had toiled to achieve,
everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind;
nothing was gained under the sun.
2:10-11
This was no Sisyphus or taxi driver speaking. At Solomon's command,
others rolled stones up steep hills so that he could build his stables,
palaces, and temples. He was a man who boasted unparalleled intellect
and imagination that made him the envy of many and who presided over
the most pompous court of his time. In the end, he groaned that "under
the
sun" there was a monotony, a circularity, and a fatality to all human
endeavor.
Solomon's assessment presents a startling even fearsome reality: The
worst kind of meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain
or
poverty but from being weary of pleasure amid plenty. Solomon is not the
only one, surrounded by wealth and success, who talked of such
disappointment at the end of the road. The refrain is repeated constantly
yet often seems to fall on deaf ears. A modern-day writer, Jack Higgins,
was asked at the pinnacle of his success what he now knows that he
wished he had known as a younger man: "I wish I had known that when
you get to the top, there is nothing there."?2?
Many scientists have recently entered the fray. Some have castigated
philosophers and theologians for raising the problem in the first place and
creating a need that ought never to have been manufactured. Their
solution
staggers the imagination. Here, for example, is the suggestion of Harvard
paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould.
The human species has inhabited this planet for only 250,000 years or
so-roughly .0015 percent of the history of life, the last inch of the
cosmic
mile. The world fared perfectly well without us for all but the last moment
of earthly time-and this fact makes our appearance look more like an
accidental afterthought than the culmination of a prefigured plan.
Moreover, and more important, the pathways that have led to our
evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.
Human evolution is not random; it makes sense and can be explained
after
the fact. But wind back life's tape to the dawn of time and let it play
again-and you will never get humans a second time. We are here
because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could
transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because comets struck the
earth and wiped out dinosaurs, thereby giving mammals a chance not
otherwise available . . . because the earth never froze entirely during an
ice
age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a
million years ago, has managed so far by hook and by crook. We may
yearn for a higher answer-but none exists. . . . We cannot read the
meaning of life passively in the facts of nature. We must construct these
answers ourselves-from our own wisdom and ethical sense. There is no
other way.?3?
The naturalist's contribution is to assert that the search for higher meaning
is itself a pointless one because it creates the need for objective
metaphysical certainty, when in truth the empirical world does not offer us
such assurances. If nature and matter are all that exist, higher meaning
simply cannot be found and should not be sought.
To his credit, Gould correctly recognizes that the "what" of life and the
"why" of life are inextricably connected. In a philosophy that defines life
apart from God there is a plethora of options, each in one way or another
forfeiting the right to judge anyone else's choice. But as we move from
infancy to maturity, the "whys" of life proliferate, and we seek coherent
answers that rise above mere speculation. By contrast, when God is in
the
picture, life gains an intrinsically sacred nature-based on who he is and
why he has made us in the first place.
Stephen Hawking reinforces this impact at the end of his book, A Brief
History of Time. After discussing the "what" of life, he says, "If we knew
the why, then we will have the mind of God."?4? There it is again: More
consequences follow from the reality of God than we are often willing to
admit. It is the mind of God to which we turn in seeking an answer to
meaning. The gospel of Jesus Christ deals precisely with the question
why.
Jesus says, have come that they may have life, and have it to the full"
(John
10:10). He tells his disciples that he wanted their joy to be full. The
wealthy and the poor, the young and the old came and drew life and joy
from him. How did he give life meaning?
[1]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Quoted in David Friend, The Meaning of Life (Boston: Little, Brown,
1991), 90.
2 Quoted in Alister McGrath, Intellectuals Don't Need God and Other
Modern Myths (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1993), 15.
3 Stephen Jay Gould, quoted in The Meaning of Life, 33.
4 Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (London: Bantam Books,
1988), 175.
[1]Geisler, N. L., & Hoffman, P. K. (2001). Why I am a Christian :
Leading thinkers explain why they believe (268). Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Baker Books.
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