No value PART 1
What is the difference between a human a chocolate bunny? This is a serious question. According to many atheists, who adopt a naturalistic worldview,everything that exists, is essentially a rearrangement of matter, or at least based on blind, non-conscious physical processes and causes. If this is true then does it really matter?if I were to pick up a hammer and smash a chocolate bunny and then I did the same to myself, according to naturalism there would be no real difference. The pieces of chocolate and the pieces of my skull would just be rearrangements of the same stuff: cold, lifeless matter. The typical response to this argument includes the following statements: "we have feelings", "we are alive", "we feel pain", "we have an identity" and "we are human". According to naturalism, these responses are still just rearrangements of matter or to be more precise, just neurochemical happenings in one's brain. In reality, everything we feel, say or do can be reduced to the basic constituents of matter or at least some type of physical process. Therefore this sentimentalism is unjustified if one is an atheist, because everything, including feelings, emotions or even the sense of value, is just based on matter and cold physical processes and causes. Returning to our original question: What is the difference between a human being and a chocolate bunny? The answer, according to the atheist perspective, is that there is no real difference.
Sayfa 41Kitabı yarım bıraktı
''Pain and suffering are not the same thing; I'm sure you've heard this before. We love pain. We make the same expression during an orgasm as we do while being tortured. Crying is cathartic, the psychological sensation of pain ultimately keeps us alive. It's suffering that we don't like. Suffering is a resistance to pain, and it's in resistance that we suffer. We don't choose what pains us, and that's a good thing. We do choose what we suffer for, and that's even better. It was always only of our own volition.''
e-kitap olarak okuyorum.
"human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice"
Beloved author, C. S. Lewis addresses a similar concept when he spoke to students at Oxford in October of 1939-less than 2 months after the outbreak of World War II. In his address, he begins by asking how it will be possible for life to continue as usual, "when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance?" He answers: "The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice."
Lewis continues:
"War threatens us with death and pain. No man-and especially no Christian who remembers Gethsemane-need try to attain a stoic indifference about these things: but we can guard against the illusions of the imagination. What does war do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent; 100 percent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased... War makes death real to us: and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right. All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that centered in this world, were always doomed to a final frustration. In ordinary times only a wise man can realize it. Now the stupidest of us know. We see unmistakably the sort of universe in which we have all along been living, and must come to terms with it."
Sayfa 45Kitabı okuyor
And then, one day, she stopped. Slowly, painfully, step by small step, her contempt for suffering began to restore her to life. She would not allow her love for Leo to be a tragedy, and to become a scar on her soul, she told herself angrily. She would not let pain win its one permanent victory: to make her forget her conviction that joy is the meaning of human existence. “Life is ahead,” she told herself ferociously. She stopped questioning his friends about him, she stopped seeking him out—she tried to stop thinking about him. But in 1961, in her middle years, at the height of her powers and strength, when it seemed as if the whole world were spread out before her, offering her everything she had ever dreamed of, she said, with an almost childlike wistfulness, “I am not indifferent to Leo, to this day.” Then she added softly, “But you see, it was fortunate that he didn’t ask me to marry him. I would have said yes, I would have stayed in Russia—and I would have died there.”
Sayfa 49
Dionysos üzerine
For only in the Dionysian mysteries, in the psychology of the Dionysian state, is the basic fact of the Hellenic instinct expressed—its ‘will to life’. What did the Hellene guarantee for himself with these mysteries? Eternal life, the eternal return* of life; the future heralded and consecrated in the past; the triumphant yes