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Existential Atheists

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A place for existential discussion and exploration...

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"The meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment."

Viktor E. Frankl

"A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence. Whether the meaning of existence is only what we put into life by our own individual fortitude, as Sartre would hold, or whether there is a meaning we need to discover, as Kierkegaard would state, the result is the same: myths are our way of finding this meaning and significance."

~ Rollo May, 1991, The Cry for Myth, p. 15

"I call a lie: wanting not to see something one does see, wanting not to see something as one sees it... The most common lie is the lie one tells to oneself; lying to other is relatively the exception."

~ Friedrich Nietzsche, 1894/1990, The Anti-Christ (R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.), p. 185

Forever I shall be a stronger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth."
~ Albert Camus, 1955, The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays, p. 19w667q

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Comment by Gary S on October 7, 2017 at 10:25pm: I also like that Maciej.

Comment by Ruth Anthony-Gardner on October 7, 2017 at 12:42pm: Interesting Sartre anecdote, thanks Maciej.

Comment by D R Hosie on August 31, 2013 at 9:44pm: Why so many still claim to be agnostic.

Re-examining our God of the gaps

Comment by D R Hosie on August 24, 2013 at 1:35pm: For anyone still in the dark about Bradley Manning.

Bradley Manning's still a Good ol' Girl.

Comment by D R Hosie on August 20, 2013 at 6:01pm: Childhood religious indoctrination is Child Abuse.

Suffer not the little children

Comment by Jedi Wanderer on February 14, 2011 at 7:14pm: Also, there is probably one thing which probably most existentialists would say, but not necessarily all (there were, after all, religious existentialists who disagreed, but one wonders about their idea of existentialism). And that is that if there is no objective meaning or purpose to our existence, and no objective set of values to which we can aspire, value either becomes meaningless or else it is something which resides ultimately in the experience of our existence. I think this is essentially what drives most people to existentialism.

Comment by Jedi Wanderer on February 14, 2011 at 6:52pm: @ Pansy: You will likely get everyone in here putting their two cents into this question, but perhaps that's because of the nature of existentialism. To me, it is the study of how humans experience existence, but with particular attention to the most confounding experiences there are, i.e. emotions, sense of self, values, meaning, purpose, etc.

Everyone has their own way of classifying the different fields of philosophy in relation to one another. I personally classify existentialism as an umbrella discipline containing all the elements of ethics, values, and psychology, but distinct from metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy, and so on. This is because I think existentialism is the proper perspective for understanding the whole range of subjective human experience, whereas other fields try to maintain as much objectivity as possible.

Comment by Pansy on February 14, 2011 at 6:41pm: i've only recently began investigating existentailism, so i don't have a clear understanding of it. i'm reading "myth of sisyphus", and are struggling through it. can anyone help me accurately ( without complication) understand what exactly this area of philosophy is?

Comment by coyote on February 8, 2010 at 10:05pm: The religion that Herodotus mentions that the Persians followed during the time of Xerxes, Darius, etc, involved putting the dead up on towers for the birds to feed on, then destroying the bones by various methods, because they didn't want the dead to "taint" the earth. I am interested in the burial they are currently developing that involves freeze-drying of the corpse then pulverization, a powder to be spread upon a ground to promote it's fertility. However, I still think the methods in Brave New World were good. utilizing the dead, produced by such a massive population, for fertilization of crops would be beneficial to the population. Definitely not like Soylent Green or anything, but for crops, it wouldn't bother me.