This is great. Life as journey is 'a dreadful hoax' … Thanks to Blakeley Nixon.
On another blog, FideCogitActio, some theists of a "classical" stripe (that's to say, like Brian Davies, Edward Feser) are criticisng the Evil God Challenge (or I suppose, trying to show how it can be met, or sidestepped). The main post includes this: In book I, chapter 39 , Aquinas argues that “there cannot be evil in God” (in Deo non potest esse malum). Atheists like Law must face the fact that, if the words are to retain any sense, “God” simply cannot be “evil”. As my comments in the thread at Feser’s blog aimed to show, despite how much he mocks “the privation theory of evil,” Law himself cannot escape its logic: his entire argument requires that the world ought to appear less evil if it is to be taken as evidence of a good God. Even though he spurns the idea that evil is a privation of good, his account of an evil world is parasitic on a good ideal; this is no surprise, though, since all evil is parasitic on good ( SCG I, 11 ). Based on the conclusions of se...
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"I am badly oppressed by the gnawing sense of waste."
Watts's remark about heaven at the end of that video is typical of his shallow rhetoric. Not everyone believes that heaven is a reward for living a 'good' life. Christians (at least of the Calvinist persuasion) believe that their place in heaven isn't determined by what they do:
Ephesian 1:4 "For he chose us in him BEFORE THE CREATION OF THE WORLD to be holy and blameless in his sight."
For such a Christian, this life is not a means to an end. It has a very clear purpose:
Ephesians 2:10 "For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to DO GOOD WORKS, which God PREPARED IN ADVANCE for us to do."
Such Christians are not striving to win a place in heaven, they are doing good works because they care about the Good. It wouldn't surprise me if Christopher Hitchens is in heaven right now (though he would be very surprised). In many respects, he led a more exemplary life than many Christians.
Matthew 7:21 "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven."
I don't believe we define our 'self' or our 'life' by the job we do, and I think this is the 'con' that society spins us so that we contribute to that great political machine called the economy, which none of us can live without. And I'm caught up in that as much as anyone else, otherwise I wouldn't even have a roof over my head or be able to feed myself. Yet, there are some brave souls who choose to escape this as demonstrated by Kevin Mcleod's Escape to the Wild programmes.
This is about finding meaning in one's life, which I think is essential, and, I suspect, most people find meaning through having a family and growing children into adults. But I'm only surmising - I don't really know - because I've never done it.
So I find meaning through all the people I meet and the interactions I have whether they be work colleagues or chance meetings, like the one I had just last week with a young woman who had just returned from 20mths in Somalia with her two children, one a teenager and one pre-teen. Over a cup of coffee we discussed her country and its issues and her children, so for a short instance we were part of each other's life and we both feel slightly enhanced by it. That's what we live our lives for and everything else is incidental.
Regards, Paul.
Alan Watts