I read this Guardian article this morning and it resonated with some of my views. Without reading too much into the word "meaning" in this it makes the important point of "we're all we've got"and perhaps we should stop thinking about SciFi, stop placing God as the center and start thinking about humanity as the center ...
I would place religion as a key player in our environmental problems as well as our problems of getting along together. Religions (particularly the Abrahamic stemmed faiths) somehow are key in fostering the idea that somehow "God" and the "Final Conflict" are what we were created for.
So its not for the prudent management of our selves and our world, its somehow about pleasing God. Its almost as if all religions want to celebrate our death as the sacrifice for God.
To me this is complete madness.
The reality as I see it is that we have (in the last few dozen years) become truly world changing agents and are slowly waking up to that fact.
We have to realise that if we fuck up here we fall forever, there is no "new land" to migrate to.
We need to get rid of the toxic mental disease at the heart of most of religion (all or most of them really) and make anthropocentric views the center of what's important.
Now to be clear I am not saying that there is no God, what I am saying is that the human views of God are wrong. If we continue to rely on the ideas of a bunch of illiterate un-educated sheep shaggers and War Lords to inform us of what God is then we're locked into a thinking from 2000 years ago which is entirely out of step with human capacity right now.
Hmm. More than a few typed lines required to respond to these questions. To address just one perhaps...if the purpose of life is reproduction we appear to be a species a little further along the "evolutionary" ladder to others. Anything beyond survival until reproduction is superfluous. We build societies for 2 reasons as I see it, survival and companionship. These groupings aid our biological mandate, as do our hairless faces. Any grouping requires a behavioral code of some sort or the group loses cohesion. In the past various religious beliefs have been a prime source of this societal code, a moral basis for interaction...if nothing else.
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