Tolstoy's ''A confession''

Have any of you read this book? It's about his quest for the answer for what is the meaning of life.

Basically, he concludes that rational thought makes it clear that life is meaningless, because everything you do in life is meaningless. It destroys life.

However, he says that faith has answers that rational thought doesn't. Why does this happen? - because of God's laws. What is the point of life? - eternal happiness or eternal suffering. It enables us to connect the finite and the infinite and we do it through our concept of God and morals.

If you have no faith and base your life around rational thought, you're living in an absurd. You know life is meaningless and everything you do is meaningless, but you're too weak to end it. Or you're simply ignoring it and indulge in hedonism. Neither experimental science nor philosophy can give the answers that faith can.

I will definitely read it sometimes.


yes I realized you have to make yourself believe something to be happy, you have to delude self, the only problem is to forget you are deluding your self. I always had a gut feeling(read delusion) there is something more to all this and that's what makes me happy. Also it is natural to believe that something is good, but seeing the misery of the world, I think it would be wise to abandon that idea. If there is something, it is superior to us and have a "superior morality" rendering our sufferings insignificant, like killing animals for food. All we can do is to hope and try to live a decent life if possible, if not than suicide, but only if all other options fail, and believe me there are plenty of them. sure some children are born in a hell with no food or shelter, their existence is mere survival and I think we should help(only if we helped ourselves first) those who are suffering, but not too much, just enough for them make it on their own.

...

The book is like 90 pages long.

The point is that you're deluding yourself even further if you ignore faith and stick to rational thinking alone. Because if life is meaningless, why just not end it? Plato, Solomon, Buddha and Schopenhauer came to this conclusion, that life must be destroyed because it's meaningless and that the dead are happier. This conclusion is the end result of pure rationality and that conclusion cannot be avoided, all rational thought about the meaning of life comes to this.

There's no point in doing anything if you don't have faith. You die and all your knowledge and wealth and all you've done dies with you and has no meaning.


Hey, I'm an old fashioned guy.

I agree user.

thanks for the feels user

This always seemed so obvious to me. I don't get how people can just be nonchalant about being atheists. If you're an atheist, you should be panicking! You should be depressed! You're hurtling towards the abyss at breakneck speed. Before you blink you'll be dead and everything you've ever done will be as nothing. Like that atheist group put up a sign saying "There probably is no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." Bitch, if life is a meaningless accident and only the void awaits us then enjoying your life is pointless, whatever fruits or fleeting pleasures you get out of it will ultimately be extinguished, you will have no consciousness of them or anything else any more.

Tolstoy retells an old Eastern story:

A traveller in a desert was being chased by a wild beast. And he spots and empty well. But, as he was jumping in, he sees that at the bottom of the well is a dragon with his mouth open, just waiting for him to fall down into his mouth. So he's dead if he doesn't go into the well and he's dead if he falls down into it.

But in the middle of a well there is a branch so the traveller grabs the branch and holds on to it. At the point where branch meets the wall, he spots two mice who started gnawing at the branch and the branch is starting to crack.

But what occupies him? He sees a drop of honey on a leaf on the branch and starts licking it.

So the atheists, and most modern men, is a man who is focused on licking the honey, completely ignoring the fact that death and nothingness awaits him.

Do you look at every animal whose end is being killed by something else, and say, "This creature fights off predators and survives. It consumes life to continue its existence. What a pathetic weakling!"

The mind is capable of complex thought. Unfortunately, it is also easy to fool. If a book contains enough information, then by virtue of its existence, people will believe at least part of it is true, even if all of it false. If your book contains information that cannot be proved false, then there will always be fools who will believe it.


Survival is not hedonism, and it does not require rationalization. Though, both of these can convince a person to give up on it.

I pity people who are smart and persistent enough to disprove meaning through logic, but not smart enough to disprove logic itself. People go around acting like logic is the be-all end-all solution for everything, ignoring the mountain of cases where logic breaks down and just doesn't work. It's still a very useful and effective tool, but just like a hammer there's a time and a place to use it.

It may be cliché user, but I believe that meaning is defined by man.

An animal can't question its own essence, or rather, what is the point of that essence. So it has no other choice but to follow it. And what's the point of survival, if it is meaningless?

Just because you have made peace in your mind by saying oh just follow your instinct to survive, there's no need to rationalize it, the question of what's the point of surviving still persists and remains unanswered by rational thought.


If there's nothing after death, there's nothing to define, all you've ever done was done in vain.

Man can remake reality, and the fools who believe what cannot be disproved will accept it as truth.

Either you are twisting my words or you lack the ability to comprehend the meaning behind them. You should accept that your brain is dysfunctional.

From your perspective, your questions are meaningless, and so are their answers. If that is the case, then you are just mentally masturbating yourself. I guess you are just indulging in hedonism, eh?

Oh I understood you perfectly. And 'you're twisting my words' is not an argument.

Yes, along the lines of rational thought, my questions are meaningless, because rational thought can't provide the correct answers. The answers which it does give are just as meaningless. I am asking them to try to bring you to this conclusion. But, in the context of faith, my question is not meaningless, because nothing in life is meaningless, because life is not meaningless.

I think I can deduce you're a materialist, and your answers to question of life comes down to this:

What is the meaning of life?
Well, you see, universe is this big, it consists of this and this. Our psychology functions like this and this and this. We can make a lot of fun stuff by simply reordering and manipulating the particles in our universe, we have Iphones and airplanes, for example, we remake reality in this way, it's so fun.

And I ask you, are you satisfied with this answer? And even if you are, the question objectively remains unanswered.

False dichotomy.

Rise above faith in the unknown and the nihilism of pure rationality.

Make your own purpose. Impose your Will on the world.

Yes I recently read some of this.

It's bitchboy version of Schopenhauer. It's verbose Dostoevsky.

When you die, all you've done is in vain, as I said. So nothing you've done had any purpose. So how do you make your own purpose of something that's unable to have purpose?


Haha do you mean bitchboy in the sense that he should've offed himself or what?

Nothing is in vain if you don' want it to be. Dying doesn't undo your actions, even if all evidence is erased from the universe you still did what you did.

So you're saying that it's all about vanity and pride? And when you die, if you go into nothingness, you can't take pride in your actions, so why do it?

I read it a while back. I was disappointed that his answer was Christianity. His "Death of Ivan Ilyich'' is another short gem of a book.

His book is discussed at some length in Thomas Ligotti's antinatalist work ''The Conspiracy Against the Human Race."

No, it's about will. Follow you will and you can't go wrong. Decide on your course of action and then do it.

His answer was that faith in general was the answer, and I'm inclined to agree with him.

I haven't read Ligotti's book but I presume, correct me if I'm wrong, that he follows the purely rational approach and discards faith?

But user if the doing of that will doesn't translate to something in the infinite i.e. the eternity, there's no objective reason to do it.

I think, therefore I am.
I exist, therefore there is a reality for me to exist in.
Realities can only be linear or non-linear.
A linear reality could not predate itself, and therefore could not be its own origin. Further, infinite regress is impossible for linear reality.
Therefore, if linear reality exists, its origin must be an external, nonlinear reality.
Nonlinear things never stop existing, in the same way that a mobius strip never ends.
Therefore, nonlinear reality exists.

Linear things are transient, and therefore any intrinsic meaning ascribed to them would also be transient, and therefore negligible.
Therefore, there are exactly two possibilities: either meaning is extended to linear reality by nonlinear reality, or the abstract concept of "meaning" defines something that cannot possibly exist.

Therefore, the meaning of linear existence must be extended from meaningful nonlinear existence. This concept is commonly known as "religion".
In short, the meaning of life is religion.

He is some kind of atheist, I think.
He also says that man vastly exaggerates how good life is. And that most men are never really happy moment to moment–they are always looking toward the future to save them (an afterlife; or for technology, social justice, etc., to usher in a secular promised land here on earth).

Yeah, whatever.

So? I'm not an objective, I'm me, and things have meaning to me. Haven't you ever built a sandcastle? Or even eaten food? Those actions don't last forever, but they have meaning and purpose.

Who says we're in a linear universe? It's totally possible we're non-linear and just think time exists. It has merit, we think consciousness and colors exist and we KNOW that they're both just elaborate illusions. Even our ability to make decisions has significant evidence for being just rationalization after the fact. It's not unreasonable to think we're all just dreaming, floating in a sea of illusions and half-formed mental constructs, and if we're dreaming, we can become lucid.

I'd refine your statement and say that the meaning of life isn't religion, it's spirituality.

The poem 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night' comes to mind whenever my mind comes to rest on the subject of my mortal life and it's meaning.

The Idea that it is the Irrational part of men that, despite knowing 'dark is right' strive within their lifetime to act, impose their will upon this world, for the sake of themselves and all things, it gives me comfort I suppose.

I am too young to know the true fear of death, yet too old to pretend anymore, I have to make my piece, rationalize it or find spiritual equilibrium I can't possibly know.

We are non-linear. "Spiritual" and "non-linear" are two names for the same thing.
Linear reality is something like a shared dream. There is a "you" in the dream that is you, but is also just part of the dream.

You fucking serious OP, the purpose of life is to not die and to create more life. And for the last few thousands of years it's also been to go somewhere nice when you die and only now are large amounts of idiots becoming athiests and losing a moral compass and sense of right and wrong.

Deus vult

amen brother.

sage

SAGE ALL MEANINGLESS MEDIA/CULTURE THREADS - THIS IS A NEW TACTIC TO DESTROY 8ch Holla Forums


SAGE ALL MEANINGLESS MEDIA/CULTURE THREADS - THIS IS A NEW TACTIC TO DESTROY 8ch Holla Forums


SAGE ALL MEANINGLESS MEDIA/CULTURE THREADS - THIS IS A NEW TACTIC TO DESTROY 8ch Holla Forums


SAGE ALL MEANINGLESS MEDIA/CULTURE THREADS - THIS IS A NEW TACTIC TO DESTROY 8ch Holla Forums

Just end your life OP

fuck off shill

Sounds like a rehash of the Ecclesiastes