Hacker News Reader

Comment by regularization | Hacker News Reader

> But if you're single, isolated, on dating apps -- or maybe caught in an unfulfilling marriage commuting from the suburbs to a job you resent -- there often doesn't seem much point to your own existence. Everything has been stripped of its meaning.

The scenario you paint is one where everything has been stripped of meaning. One option is to seek more meaningful work and social relationships, on an individual level, and/or on a societal movement level. Or one can seek some supernatural mental delusions, an opiate for the people, to anethisize oneself to being a miserable wage slave with a miserable life.

View on HN

> Or one can seek some supernatural mental delusions, an opiate for the people

I'm very much an atheist and a positivist too. I rejected religion growing up.

But we don't have to cede the concept of spirituality to organized religion. Spirituality is so much more than that. It's about purpose, connection, and what it means to be a human. You can practice spirituality by meditating at home, just sitting with your thoughts and feelings. No delusion or supernatural beliefs required!

When you talk about the future of mankind, our role in it, and what's the most meaningful way to live our lives -- that's what I mean by spirituality.

Using a long phrase like "Purpose, connection, and what it means to be a human" seems preferable to enabling supernatural belief to slink in through the gap in the now-ambiguous word "spirituality". I say leave it to Madame Blavatsky. Oh wait that's spiritualism. Same difference.

Ooh, how about zeitgeist? I like that word. Then you'd still have spirits, but rational German ones.

I intentionally use the word because fellow atheists and positivists are too uncomfortable with it, and I believe the world needs more of it.

Yes, I'm pro-science and rational thought, but I'm increasingly thinking people like me have spent too long in left brain land and need to explore some of the deeper, subtle, and more intuitive parts of what it means to be a human, if that makes any sense.

Hey, I'm cool with Chesterton and CS Lewis and "the numinous". (There's another word option for you, BTW.) I just think "spirituality" is already crammed full of very fruity religious meaning. If when somebody says "spirituality" they might be talking about meaning and purpose or crystal healing and Jesus, that's bad for me trying to pin down their argument, and worse for their memetic victims who can be suckered into thinking the two are related, which deliberate confusion is already a big vector for the spread of religion.

What’s your proposed alternative for flourishing, content, joyful human lives?

There's humanism, but it didn't take off. I don't know if this analysis even gets to the root of ... the alleged problem. I mean, OK, lets say (other) people are miserably lonely and need to join some kind of club: they won't do that anyway, even if it's a church-like club that promises to tell them what life's all about. Possibly people already form communities as much as they honestly want to.

But people used to join those kinds of clubs at much higher frequency. Sp it’s not impossible for that behavior to change.

It’s just that historically there haven’t been many successful examples of atheist communities with the kind of shared deep purpose, meaning and connection you describe.

That would be weird

Yes it’s much better to be an atheist miserable wage slave with a miserable life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com