What is the meaning of life?

reply to post by Republican08

I believe that the blunt purpose of life, is to mate. Simple mate and enhance the human race, by pro-creating more and more humans.

You can define this more strictly: the purpose of life is to have grandchildren. Having children alone isn't enough; you have to raise them until they are able to mate and have children in their turn. Apart from this little technicality, you are quite right. This is, rather obviously, the purpose of life - as far, that is, as life is concerned.

But we humans may adopt purposes of our own.

I like this:

Originally posted by Sendran
Legacy...

Just my tuppence.

Worth a lot more than tuppence, that insight.

I also like this:

Originally posted by orderedchaos
A domino theory. That one life touches some way on another, and another, through birth, friends, inspiration, to make up a larger whole than imaginable.

I think these two posts and your OP, corrected as suggested, sum it all up.

My sympathies to those who think they were put on Earth to learn. How you doing with that, fellers? Ready for the final exam yet?

[edit on 17/7/09 by Astyanax]

reply to post by XXXN3O


I mostly agree but I don't think that even experiencing everything is the point. We take as much as we feel we need and from there I am not sure. *IMHO*

Whatever it is, I think it's both insignificant on the one hand, or empty and meaningless, and on the other, of infinite significance and filled with meaning. It is both.

There exist countless answers to this question. A biological answer, an ethical answer, a spiritual answer....but there is no complete answer. You would be wise not to pose this question unto others, for it is yourself alone who must answer it...

reply to post by OmegaPoint


Of course, "One man's treasure is another man's trash."

reply to post by Republican08


I think you are partly right: to create more humans. But, I say partly because I beleive that we're here to be the keepers of the Earth, we're here to appreciate it and use it without abusing it and to keep our natural environment intact. I beleive we were meant to protect it, nurture it and continue making more protectors. We are the only keepers of time, history and geography of this world, so we are the universe's or God's historians and as such we are to observe and participate in it's existence. If you can make sense of that.

Accepting the skin your in, and living with the decisions you make, doing harm to none along the way!
There is pain in life...accept it, and move on. No one is exempt.
Being able to laugh at yourself, and never taking yourself too seriously.
Knowing that you will never know all the answers to everything, and there are mysteries in life, that will remain unsolved.
Accepting death when it comes, and knowing that whatever it was that you did or didn't accomplish in life, makes no difference on your death bed.
Fame and fortune buy nothing that really matters.
What counts is being loved for who are as a person, and that the love you gave made a real difference in someone's life.
Being fondly missed when your gone, rather than having them say; "I glad that he's dead...I never liked him... Good riddance!"
Having flowers placed at your grave, rather than having some one piss on it!

Laughing and smiling throughout life as much as possible. Knowing tears of joy.
Having a smile on your face when you expire.

reply to post by Watcher-In-The-Shadows


Except you couldn't really trash it, without trashing your own self as an intrinsic part of life.

But I realize you were talking toungue 'n cheek.

I prefer to think of it as like being included in an inheritance I did not work for, which is an immense treasure of incalculable value.

What I have a hard time understanding, in the face of it all, is how people can just take it for granted, that doesn't seem to many any sense. They treat it like an entitlement, like a rich kid brat who doesn't know how good he has it, and what's worse, some of them even like to trash the creator and the source from which they themselves sprang and within whom they have their very being!

Oh well, to each his own I guess..

Me I'm eternally grateful and can't fathom any other possible response to the supreme gift of life.


[edit on 17-7-2009 by OmegaPoint]

reply to post by OmegaPoint


I Agree with you 100%! I can't STAND it either friend! It bugs me to no END to see people trash Evolution and Abiogenesis. But I try and have patience and wait till they open up their minds. I guess we just have to be patient huh?

reply to post by TurkeyBurgers

Hey, ya ever consider the evolutionary implications of Bell's Theorem, and David Bohm's Holographic Universe?
www.upscale.utoronto.ca...
Call it Evolutionary Non-locality..
Sure casts intelligent design and Ruppert Sheldrake's morphic field resonance, in a whole new light.

For that matter, have you considered sacred geometry, the seed if life and the Phi Ratio or the Golden Mean in terms of a self referencial universal creative principal?

goldennumber.net...

Could it be, that the highest commandment summed up by Jesus in his response to the know-it-all lawyers and Pharisees in the form of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, as "love God above all and neighbor as self" is nothing less than a rational expression of the highest universal principal of creation itself..?

It's amazing the things that people assume, without opening their mind to new possibilities, including the possibility that they may be completely wrong in their fundamental presupposition ie: the no first-last cause/creator-God presumption, for example.

[edit on 17-7-2009 by OmegaPoint]

reply to post by OmegaPoint


For you have made the worst assumption in your search for answers.

You ruined your search for truth with the BIAS that for you there exists a Creator FIRST and FOREMOST and everything you research is in the defense of that stance.

Look I am not denying the existence of the possibility of Intelligence that is greater than what is here on Earth.
All I have to do is turn on "Real World Road Rules Challenge" to understand we are probably NOT the most intelligent thing in the Universe.

reply to post by TurkeyBurgers


Not the most "intelligent" no, but as the most recent sentient, at the apex of the 7 kingdoms of life on earth, given the idea of an evolutionary non-locality, almost certainty the highest expression of the creative principal and dynamic in the entire history of the universe. We COULD very well be created beings made by universal intelligent design, to contain nothing less than the whole or what I call the spirit of the universe, or universal intelligence, arising beyond the domain of "self" or our stupid part.

"And the first shall be last, and the last, first."


Oh and I did not do my research to support the preconceived bias of a creator, but to prove it wrong. My search was the search initated and driven by a bias which would NOT require an intelligent creator, that inevitably and in the final analysis, could no longer deny the pointing finger of reality

P.S. Edited my last post to add a little more, just for consideration..

[edit on 17-7-2009 by OmegaPoint]

reply to post by OmegaPoint


I have a severe problem with the reasoning behind a "God" or Force or Intelligence that either has always been or has arisen to the point of "Omnipotence".

I believe that there COULD exist very powerful Intelligence well beyond our understanding but it is the "Omnipotence" that just drives the spike through my reasoning.

Watcher-In-The-Shadows enlightened me one time that there is a difference between the ability to know everything possible and the ability to do anything possible.

But to remove confusion I will refer to "Omnipotence" as the ability to know everything and do everything (because I am cool like that).

I do kind of like the idea that maybe Life was seeded here from an Intelligence Species or just got flown here on a rock from another Planet where Abiogenesis occurred. Would be kind of cool like a asteroid dandelion seed on the solar wind that spreads life. Regardless we have to look at the origin of life occurring SOMEWHERE at SOMETIME.

The problem that exists for me is not of a Demi-God (lol) but of an ACTUAL God. Omnipotence in the way I describe it is a complete IMPOSSIBILITY!

I've had a few things happen to me, from time to time, which would indicate that indeed there is an all knowing all powerful God, who is in fact so powerful that he rarely takes any direct action to intervene. Call it virtuous where virtue is defined as power restrained. But God CAN do anything at any time.

reply to post by OmegaPoint


And here is where I will explain that the Possibility for a Omnipotent God to exist cannot be possible.

"Total Omniscience - actually knowing everything that can be known. (I will add to this the ability to know everything that could ever be known past present and future at the same time and have no need to process the different information since you have already processed every single piece of information against every other piece of information)".

"Omnipresence - is the property of being present everywhere (I will add to that the ability to be everywhere in time at the same instant and since you are everywhere in time there is no actual need to travel between time since you exist everywhere in every time).

Omnipotent - Being able to do not just anything but everything.

(I used Wikipedia as my source for definitions.)

IF a being knows everything that ever has happened, ever will happen and everything that is currently happening and has not only the ability to change anything that they want about any of these things but has ALREADY changed ALL of these things to the point where there is nothing left to change than there exists no purpose in even existing.

You have already done everything that could ever be done so there is nothing to do.

You have already calculated the outcome of everything that could happen and know the results of everything that will or has happened and have done all of these things so there is nothing left to calculate.

You have been there, done that, bought every t-shirt in existence.


Edited the word Ability to Possibility at the beginning.


[edit on 17-7-2009 by TurkeyBurgers]

I just disproved God! What, no stars?
Second line

reply to post by TurkeyBurgers


But maybe it's a rigged game, so that it's still possible for God to see what happens, by not intervening, a type of objective awareness which remains open, but yet which does gather and store all information on the fly, from every angle and perspective.

In fact, without that consciousness or awareness, there would be nothing to maintain and uphold the universal wave of all possibility.. !

what no star? I just proved God as the prerequisit for existence, as an observing universal consciousness, from which everything that is arises and has its being, and without which nothing would be possible.

It's called the Tao in Eastern traditions, or the Implicate order in modern science.

reply to post by OmegaPoint


No you need to rename your "God" to a "Demi-God".

Maybe the Conspiracy is that all of the worlds publishers who print religious books would have to Edit and Re-Print every single religious text ever made?

I think that everything that is happening everywhere may be thought of as God's doing and non-doing. I also think of life as an inheritance in the sense that God is always passing away and handing off, including and involving, like the love of a parent for a growing child. Which would mean that we are like God in training.. as an included part of the whole thing, the entire universal doing/non-doing, and where there's nothing left to do, and nowhere to get to, at the same time there's always something more to do and somewhere new to go. It's more Buddhist really than Christian, this view, and in many ways, it's in perfect alignment with modern science, so at least there's case to be made for this view, which is an open and not a closed viewpoint.