Wednesday, October 20, 2010

There are No Answers

We can't agree on anything as a species as to our purpose, morality, metaphysics, etc.
It appears to me that there are no clear answers anywhere, and we can only do what seems the most right.  In any other situation, I would look up the answer on Wikipedia, but for some reason, when you type in "does god exist," or "what is the meaning of life," Wikipedia brings up a summary of various viewpoints.

I don't find it likely that any religion I have encountered is correct, because they claim things that can't be backed up, and in fact their promises of a sure path to truth turn out to be wrong, which further damages their credibility with me.
After all, if any religion had a surefire path to what is obviously truth, wouldn't everyone make their way to it?

 I'm obviously not a very spiritual person, but I can't really bring myself to set much store by the claims of those who are.  If the spiritually in-tune who devote their lives to seeking the truth are adherents to every major religious sect in the world, all of which disagree in major ways, then spirituality did very little for those individuals.

Ultimately, I have never felt anything conclusive from prayer or anything else that is proclaimed as a spiritual opportunity.  I never liked going to the temple, it's just weird to me.  I never liked church, it's repetitive and uninspiring.  I have tried very hard to like both.  I have felt pretty good after prayer sometimes, but honest introspection seems to have that effect.  Likely, meditation would yield the same result.  No discernible answer to a question has ever come to me via prayer.  I have tried and tried and spent so much of my life trying to justify something that never seemed to make any sense.  I doubted in high school and on my mission, but I always just dismissed the doubts because what else could I do?

So.  Nobody has answers.  That doesn't apply to religion alone, I've been reading philosophy and humanist literature for about a year now, and nothing is conclusive on that front, either.  The human desire for purpose and understanding is only the invitation to a doomed quest for a holy grail which cannot be obtained, and which we can't really know exists anyway.
We are born, we struggle against a completely uncaring universe for a few short years, and then we die, leaving behind a "legacy" that probably won't even last a significant portion of the remaining time before humanity meets with extinction, which all species quickly do on a geologic time-scale.

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