I see life's primary characteristic as its being
good.
Life, in my opinion, is good in a huge number of different ways. It is good to enjoy the pleasures that life has to offer, it is good to make goals, to acheive goals, to love, to be loved, to become close with other human beings. It is good to be yourself, to better yourself, to love yourself. It is good to explore life, to ponder why, how, when, where, what and even
if it really is. To wonder what it has come from and what it is going to. It is good to look inward, good to look outward and good to just sit back and enjoy the ride.
Life is somehow
inherently good. It is beautiful.
Knowledge is the fundamental goal of life, of life in general and all individual lives. Free scientific enquiry is one of the searches for knowledge that is part of human life.
But knowledge is also much bigger that positivist knowledge. It is knowledge of art, music, literature, poetry, films and all cultural expression that can be both tangible (e.g. I
know that the _____ tribe expresses its origin myths by singing the _____ song) and incommunicable...there is a sense in which simply hearing, seeing, listening to, experiencing, being and
living a piece of art is a form of knowledge.
It is knowledge of the self, of relationships, culture, humanity, loved ones, the universe and life itself, that can both be specific linguistically commuicable knowledge about history, geography, anthropology, psychology, astrophysics or whatever, and also the knowledge of experience.
To explore all this 'knowledge' involves, in a large part, simply
being all we can and not just technically
knowing of all we can. Life is a journey.
There is undoubtedly something other than the material world. Even if human emotions, for example, are controlled entirely by specific chemical changes in the brain then they still form something above and beyond. The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.
If, however, there is something (or Someone) really
other, really supernatural, then It/We/She/He couldn't care less if we go to a church, gudwara, mosque, temple, synagogue or just go to the park. I doubt that material death is really the end, but there can be no eternal hell, only reincarnation, temporal purgatory, eternal paradise, enlightenment or self-realisation.
I'm not sure how to put that in a nutshell...maybe
undecided agnostic Epicurean pandeist Buddhist Hegelian hedonist...or something along those lines
peace