Paraphrasing Churchill, if you aren't left of centre when you're young, you have no heart. If you're not right of centre when you get older, you have no head. The thing is, the right keeps dragging the centre over towards them so I'm still pretty much where I started.
Why is it you're unable to see that you're assuming an inherent value to stimulus? An inherent value that is unable to be substantiated and within your worldview is actively opposed by our nature within it. We literally are just matter smacking up against matter within Atheism. What is joy but merely chemical reactions within your schema? There is no inherent meaning to these chemicals either. I don't know how much more forceful/exacerbated I could have been.
That's abject nonsense. You are saying that love and friendship are nothing but chemical reactions and are therefore worthless. You are saying that these things are real to you but not to me. You are saying that they are meaningful to you but meaningless to me. How dare you. How dare you belittle the love I feel for my wife and my kids and my grandchildren. How dare you insinuate that my life has no meaning.
The mere allowing oneself to imagine that all the things in the universe are there BECAUSE they’re there, and not because “Someone” is “around” to make sure that things stay things and it could all just blow apart every 15 (or so) billion years, is liberating and [edit] [in my general opinion, not advocating believers to “stop believing”, but] every believer should try it at least once.
Yes, that’s why our friends on the Right think that (compared to the rest of the earth’s countries) a center-left policy like single-payer healthcare is “communism!” That’s pretty far RIGHT, and most will stick with “socialism” because they aren’t quite “ready to rumble” and it’s all just fun political-spreche and they’re not trying to “bring things to a head” but the effect will be much the same.
