A Christian spends time on apologetics because he knows that people are immortal.
Really knows, or believes and trusts? It's not exactly the same thing.
And if the former I would love to see the epistemological chain for that.
My assertion is that your time is wasted here.
Well if your argument holds then my time is wasted *anywhere* doing "anything".
So here is as good as anywhere, an' it please me.
But if pre-designed or commanded purpose is not present in the universe, and anyone ought to give that possibility some thought (even Shakespeare could at least do that, as you have quoted, fromone of my favourite passages), it may well shake up traditional or assumed values.
It is largely behind Sartre describing humanity as *condemned* to be free. So free that we can ad have to make our own decisions and purposes, and take responsibility for them.
(Unless we less authentically just buy in to whatever the local society is running with.)
But, a life that is a cosmic accident headed full-speed for a permanent grave is hopeless, not happy, as... This worldview certainly isn't going to put a smile on my face or a spring in my step!
And what has "putting a smile on your face" got to do with which of a range of world views is more a match for reality?
**If** that is the universe we have, we can either face that or retreat to some happier fantasy, as a temporary but inadequate refuge. The universe not being as we would like it to be is no grounds to say that it is otherwise.
"Only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair can the soul's habitation be safely built."
Bertrand Russell on exactly that bleak looking to the future you sketch in, as he comments on the human predicament.
it seems to me that an atheist must invent purpose in order not to think out the implications of his worldview. He has to essentially lie to himself just to get out of bed in the morning and face the meaninglessness of his existence, and the irredeemable pain and suffering all around him.?
Yes, invent purpose, but out of facing the situation not out of denying it. You miss the non-theist mindset, I suggest, though there have been times and places where "partying against the dark" was very visible.
Some of the accounts of life in Berlin just before its fall, for example.
As an atheist, are you intellectually honest enough - are you brave enough to admit that your existence (holding to your worldview) is meaningless?
I dispute the assumed starting position. Yes, individual lives and an entire universe with no pre-set meaning or purpose. (as though it were a mere rat-maze, set up to see if we experimental rats could find the "right" path through it.)
Staying with the Shakespeare, I'll take the line before yours: life as "a poor player. That struts and frets his hour upon the stage. And then is heard no more."
What to do with that hour, that lifetime? Well, curled up in bed whimpering doesn't have a lot to recommend it. And the time will slide on, anyway.
"What is love? ’tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure."
or "But at my back I always hear.
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;.
And yonder all before us lie.
Deserts of vast eternity."
Or go to "Ozymandias": It is well known, this dread timescale which almost makes a mockery of a human life, of human existence.
But what is left? To live life, of course. To work with and play with one's hour on stage, or in the sun.
The golden rule in its varieties doesn't only make sense with eternal life in a god-composed universe.
(and there problems with that... follow it through and free-will is very hard, perhaps impossible, to find room for.)
So apart from myself I think it right to assist the next generation to deal with their "brief candle" of existence, if that's all they, as I , get.
How about the thought from "In Flanders Fields"? I can use that.
"Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high."
Eternal hope? I've looked carefully and can't find enough to put hope or faith in.
Private Frazer's "Doomed, doomed, we're all doomed" is perfectly correct in the long run, (though always wrong in the particular incident.)
"In the long run we're all dead" (John Maynard Keynes) was not a call to apathetic inaction but a call to understand and act on the now, not to trust that "it'll all come out all right in the end."
Samuel Beckett's "Endgame"
HAMM: Clov!
CLOV (impatiently): What is it?
HAMM: We're not beginning to... to... mean something?
CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something!
(Brief laugh.) Ah that's a good one!
I could reach for Tolkien, or Anglo-Saxon tales, or Douglas Adams...
All of them have the seeing of transitory existence, the facing of it, but the finding of meaning, enough meaning, anyway.
Chris
(Well into the second half of his time on stage.)
