That’s interesting. Can you please elaborate?

I wonder, what exactly is a “seeker” couple?

I’m not sure if anyone is familiar with the “Alpha Course” (that thumbnail is their logo), but has anyone been to it? I know my grandparent’s hosted one and that the canadian version of their website has a bunch of really sexy people dancing at a bar with a ripped out “Is there more to life than this?” title. I’m kind of tempted to check it out to see what their take on this is (especially if all those really hot people are there )

Don’t get your hopes up too much!

Alpha Course is an evangelical outreach put on by many churches. It’s usually held over dinner in a couple’s home and attended by “seeker” couples as well as church couples. The idea is to get nonbelievers who are looking for meaning in life through the door and then try to get them to convert. Pure and simple “friendship evangelism.”

The course has rather controversial beginnings in the U.K., however, and over there it’s aligned with a highly Pentecostal movement and charismatic pastor. That means it has a lot of critics over here in the U.S. – conservative evangelicals who disapprove of Pentecostals, of course.

Google it and read some of the links. It’s pretty fascinating stuff.

Interesting you say this, since you make a normative and qualitative claim that you are “lucky enough” to be Godless. Nietzsche was never able to answer the problem of normativity though, so I don’t expect you to be able to work outside it either.

Ah yes, the nonsense about “meaning.” (Or, it you prefer means-ends, “purpose.”) Don’t let theists beg the question — what meaning?

Once Western religious myths, like xianity, are rejected — moralized pairs of opposites, like purpose/accident, meaningful/meaningless, being/nothingness — no longer apply to the cosmos.

Those of us lucky enough to have become godless see a bit better what is unclear. Removing “God” from legitimate explanations of natural phenomena can cause intense mental distress.

(There’s cognitive dissonance as well, but “meaning” is not a wholly cognitive concept. Distress, depression, even malaise penetrate the affects.)

To what extent a post-modern culture can create incomprehensible shock can be gauged by the fierce resistance to every threat real or imagined by xian fundamentalists. The U.S. suffers greatly from being among the last Western nations to make a successful transition to a truly secular state.

Starting 150 years ago, only the intelligensia were disturbed.

Darwin knew exactly how he would be treated by Society — he was after all a bona fide “gentleman” quite aware of the perks of class and freedom from laboring for any man save himself. T. H. Huxley, who had no fortune to inherit, felt himself socially inferior, certainly he was ill-treated by Owen. It’s no surprise that Huxley coined the word ‘agnostic.’ He must have hated the ignoramuses of both class and cloth.

Someone like Matthew Arnold who seems to have been a sincerely attracted to God’s good moralized natural universe, gives us ‘Dover Beach’ as testimony to a completely irrational, but widely felt depression. Science though true, negates meaning.

Reactionary believers, however, would have none of this. If science negates meaning, then it is either mistaken, false, or lying.

Today’s troglodytes, people like the late (unlamented) Falwell, have continued to abandon rationality while exalting increasingly shrill versions of God’s purpose and the meaning of your life, as defined by these demagogues.

We “godless ones” as Nietzsche calls us realize that “the moral world order” does not exist. It never existed. There is not and never was any “meaning” in this cosmic sense. Our affects are to that extent unperturbed.

1st-Circle
copyright asserted 2007

If the universe has no ultimate purpose, does that render our individual lives meaningless? I must answer with a resounding “NO!” Although meaning is not provided to us, we humans are uniquely qualified to make our own meaning and to find fulfillment through the act of living purposefully.

There are many worthy causes and many ways to find meaning in life. Eventually each one of us must come to recognize those causes that are closest to our own hearts and those issues that arouse our strongest passions. These may change many times over the course of a lifetime. Some people find meaning in raising a family, others in pursuing a career, and still others in charity work, volunteering, creating art, public service, and many other spheres. Every day we must search our hearts to find out what it is that gives us meaning and to find a way to fulfill our purpose while we attend to the needs of our families, work to make a living, struggle to keep up with our daily responsibilities, and are bombarded with negative news.

The path may not be easy, and the goal may sometimes seem impossible to reach, but regardless of what we call it, mystery and meaning are available to all who seek to live a spiritual life–and belief in the supernatural is not required.

(This is excerpted from an article I wrote for Skepchick a year or so ago.)

… but then how do we handle the examples from our history where great damage has been done by men who link the survival of their society to the extinction of another…. These examples we would necessarily label as “evil,” but why is that? Is it because we would say it “goes against our evolutionary propensity to continue life?”

Perhaps. Why is it that the majority of the human population finds such acts so revolting? What then do we say about the sociopaths – are they genetic abnormalities or has circumstance shifted their mindset to be able to separate our singular human species into many? Or even on a small scale, is their something to be said about those who are so detached from their own kind that makes them able to kill another human? Isn’t that how soldiers – otherwise normal, decent humans – are trained? This century has been full of horrific events, which is accentuated mainly because we have become so efficient in our killing – could you imagine what some of the Chinese warlords or the feudal kings of Europe would have done if they had access to our technology!?

This all leads me to wonder – do animals have their own sociopaths, or is it something innate in human consciousness?

All good questions, none that I will touch in my more uplifting post tomorrow

http://www.alphacanada.org/