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There is no point in doing any of the things that nobody will have memory of after they cease to exist.
Unsurprisingly, I noticed that not one person has yet to seriously answer the OP. Notice that the OP has nothing to do with God at all nor did the question ever require God to be mentioned. It is simply a scenario involving a suicidal atheist who doesnt believe there is an afterlife. What message of hope would you provide this individual to turn him away from his nihilistic conclusion? It is a simple question so why are the atheists so quiet? As an aspiring chaplain, this is a very serious and practical question because I very well may have a suicidal atheist come into my office.
There is no point in doing any of the things that nobody will have memory of after they cease to exist.
That... sounds like clinical depression, to be honest. There is no transcending subjectivity for the individual. The reward system either does its job or it doesn't. When it doesn't, we tend to get very nihilistic indeed.
I'm not fine with them telling me I need to believe the same lies they tell themselves and I will rip their arguments apart with alacrity every time.
No one can prove that there is there is a heaven, nor can anyone prove that heaven does not exist. Either way each view is simply a belief in itself, as absolute knowledge is not available to us.Let's say I was an atheist and for some reason I wanted to kill myself. I told you that I hated my life and wanted to end it. Being an atheist, I know that there is no afterlife and I will simply cease to exist. I also know that the second law of thermodynamics proves that the universe is dying and when that time happens, all humanity will die too. So because all humanity will one day die and cease to exist, the universe will ultimately be no different than if humanity never existed at all. So who cares if my death hurts other people, they will eventually die and all memory of hurt will cease to exist. So atheist, talk me out of suicide. Why should I not kill myself? Explain why life and existence isn't futile? Good luck.
Then, to answer the OP: I would suggest that he practice the Buddhist Path in order to gain relief from his suffering, and to personally gain the three knowledges of rebirth, kamma, and the Four Noble Truths.Although I don't think anyone can honestly claim to be a Gnostic atheist, in this scenario it would be Someone who has concluded for himself that God does not exist.
I would explain the preciousness of human birth, and advise him to test out the theory by practicing the Buddhist Path.Why should I not kill myself? Explain why life and existence isn't futile?
Or it's just a brute fact of nature, and we don't need to ascribe bizarre, clandestine motives to people, a propos of nothing.
Unsurprisingly, I noticed that not one person has yet to seriously answer the OP
Notice that the OP has nothing to do with God at all nor did the question ever require God to be mentioned. It is simply a scenario involving a suicidal atheist who doesnt believe there is an afterlife.
What message of hope would you provide this individual to turn him away from his nihilistic conclusion?
It is a simple question so why are the atheists so quiet?
As an aspiring chaplain, this is a very serious and practical question because I very well may have a suicidal atheist come into my office.
Except that is not the scenario that we are talking about. If all memory of said movie experience all of a sudden ceased to exist after you got home, what is left from the experience to enjoy other that $30 less in your bank account?
That is the point I am making. In this scenario, it would be better to never have gone to the theater at all and saved yourself the $30 bucks.
If naturalism is true, it’s a great cosmic tragedy that we’re intellectually equipped to uncover more than we’re emotionally equipped to handle, but it’s not surprising. We’ve evolved to get things done, not necessarily to feel good about our place in the cosmos. In the past, our ignorance in many aspects of cosmology, psychology, and biology left enough room for us to fit all kinds of reasonable, comforting answers to the Big Questions (what are we, what is the meaning of life, etc), but now is a different story. It’s harder to sneak anything too grandiose past scrutiny because we have access to more information than ever before. Pair that with modern social stigmas against help-seeking behaviors and prohibition of certain psychedelics demonstrated to help cure depression, and it’s no wonder we see it so much these days. We’re left without anything to save us from or cope with existential horror.I would not be uncomfortable calling it clinical depression, but there are questions out there concerning to what extent depression is a disease of modernity, and if so, why precisely. Naturalism as the underlying academically accepted philosophy is dehumanizing, and I can't help but think that plays a role when it comes to modern psychological problems.
I can say that shifting over to a theistic outlook has made a huge difference for me when it comes to anxiety issues. It's not a magical drug, of course, but it is a worldview change that affects the way you look at everything. Which is why the best thing an atheist can do for someone with nihilistic tendencies is to refrain from bullying them out of taking theism seriously as an alternative. You just want to make sure they're exploring the best that the religious traditions have to offer instead of getting taken advantage of by fundamentalist predators.
Yep. That's what it's for ... but by that same token of thought, I've always held the old proverb, "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander" to be highly applicable in these cases. I'm an equal opportunity deconstructor, and I can challenge and deconstruct my own faith, and my own beliefs, as well as those of others who don't share my beliefs.I can agree with this, and I think I’ve probably been guilty of overlooking it more than once, perhaps even with you, so I feel I should apologize. There’s no good reason to resist “whatever floats your boat” as long as it doesn’t harm you or others. That said, if one is submitting an argument in an apologetics forum that’s not explicitly for believers only, they’re fair game to be desconstructed in terms of soundness and accuracy. That’s what an open apologetics forum is for.
You do realize that if your worldview is full of brute facts, that's a bad thing, right?
Why do rainbows appear after storms? Because they just do. Brute fact.
Anyway, emergent properties as a concept is millennia older than emergentism.
You're thinking of naked assertions. Worldviews that are full of naked assertions are bad.
That would be a naked assertion. The factual answer is, because of light refraction.
Sure is. It's interesting to study from a historical perspective, but it doesn't mean we look at the ancient progenitors of particle physics, chemistry, neuroscience and other fields pertinent to emergence for advice on the subject. No one reads Hippocrates to learn how to do brain surgery.
Unsurprisingly, I noticed that not one person has yet to seriously answer the OP. Notice that the OP has nothing to do with God at all nor did the question ever require God to be mentioned. It is simply a scenario involving a suicidal atheist who doesnt believe there is an afterlife. What message of hope would you provide this individual to turn him away from his nihilistic conclusion? It is a simple question so why are the atheists so quiet? As an aspiring chaplain, this is a very serious and practical question because I very well may have a suicidal atheist come into my office.
If naturalism is true, it’s a great cosmic tragedy that we’re intellectually equipped to uncover more than we’re emotionally equipped to handle, but it’s not surprising. We’ve evolved to get things done, not necessarily to feel good about our place in the cosmos.
I can agree with this, and I think I’ve probably been guilty of overlooking it more than once, perhaps even with you, so I feel I should apologize.
That said, if one is submitting an argument in an apologetics forum that’s not explicitly for believers only, they’re fair game to be desconstructed in terms of soundness and accuracy. That’s what an open apologetics forum is for.
No, I'm thinking of brute facts. Perhaps you do not know what "brute fact" means? It refers to an aspect of reality that is inexplicable. And seriously, if you think you've hit a whole bunch of dead ends in your understanding of the world, maybe you should consider rethinking how you look at it to see if more possibilities for how to proceed next don't appear.
Yes, which is why accepting it as a brute fact would have been bad. There is an explanation for why rainbows appear, so we don't have just accept it as an inexplicable fact about reality. If people had decided it was inexplicable, we would not know about light refraction.
This is extremely prejudiced and shortsighted. We're often trapped in our own very modern way of viewing reality, and the only way we escape from that is by trying to look at what we see from a different historical perspective to see how much it works.
Neuroscience in specific actually would benefit from some exposure to Buddhist and Hindu ways of conceptualizing reality to break it out of the post-Cartesian dualism vs. materialism paradigm it's stuck in.
It is perhaps possible, though I make no claim, that birth and death are two sides of the same door.
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