What do you keep living for? Is there a specific person, goal, or idea that you work for? Is there no meaning to life in your opinion?

Context: I’ve been reading Camus and Sartre, and thinking about how their ideas interact with hard determinism.

  • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Not to bully your belief here but how would you justify this with the fact that God allows many really bad people to live? Just curious of understanding this mindset and I hope this doesn’t offend you.

    • Flax@feddit.uk
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      17 hours ago

      Quite a few reasons I can give:

      Through bad people, good can still happen. For example, the passion narrative. Bad people caused the execution of Jesus, but through that, we believe we can get salvation

      Some people got a positive opportunity out of wars, COVID, etc (The lockdown may have saved me, it pulled me out of a dark place)

      God is patient. Bad people can still repent and come to God.

      Bad things on earth are actually eternally insignificant if you believe that eventually all of it will be wiped out, which plays into the patience aspect. Just say you’re in heaven for two thousand years, you’re not really going to worry anymore about 100 years you spent on earth that were absolutely horrible.

      These are just my thoughts on the matter. A lot of people do have varied responses to the “problem of evil”

    • Twanquility
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      22 hours ago

      I tried to justify this (if one insists on the existence of a god), through the argument that dangerous and bad things exist in nature as well, such as storms, lightning, floodings, earthquakes, and chimps that go to war with each other etc. and likewise, violent and bad things exist among humans.

      However, I cant really convince myself that it’s comparable. Actual evil did not really exist before be came along and started torturing each other. (The church and christians have been through many iterations of hard questions and tough answers to their own riddles, and overall, I think it has been a sum positive for humanity, in trying to explain, and to figure out the question of evil in general.)

      So no, I don’t have a, from the hip, justification from god, why evil people would still exist. Perhaps the world just is a better place, with snakes in it, than without. It gives us something good to do?

      I can however confidently state that really bad people have been here among humanity many times before, and they have all, in one way or another, left again, and somehow we manage to sustain a world, that is continuously improving and trying to become a better and better place. Getting rid of bad people, snakes, and natural dangers.

      I know that there are serious crises and problems we still have to solve, but we tend to forget all the past evils that we have defeated. We are not being actively overrun by mongols from the east, and not every family loses several small children before they reach the age of 5. Most people have enough, and we still keep working to make sure that fewer and fewer people will suffer in the future.

      • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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        16 hours ago

        Ngl that’s a really unsatisfying position imo. There are and have been people who had nothing but suffered in their entire existence with zero meaning like slave babies born with extreme deformities. This thought exercise completely dispels any idea of a present god in my point of view.

        • Twanquility
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          15 hours ago

          Yeah I agree. There are some absolutely ridiculous explanations and excuses, to answer plotholes like that. “The Lord works in mysterious ways”. We have more than 1500 years of made up explanations, to solve made up statements.