...The Meaning of Life There is a certain point in our lives, regardless of the time, when we begin to ask ourselves a set of questions that challenge our existence on this earth. Was the human race created to wonder this world aimlessly? Or do we have a true purpose that we are destined to harness and attain? Why am I here? Like the rest of us, Thomas Nagel, Robert Taylor, and Raymond Martin have each made their own attempts to answer the question of the meaning of life and while doing so, each of the philosophers rendered their own solution to these universal doubts. Thomas Nagel explains that “to convey the absurdity of our lives often has to do with space or time: we are tiny specks in the infinite vastness of the universe; our lives are mere instants even on a geological time scale, let alone a cosmic one; we will all be dead any minute” (Nagel, 768-769). Nagel then defines absurd as “a situation that includes a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality (Nagel, 769). Translated, Nagel says that absurd is a situation in which life seems irrational and meaningless. Throughout his entire argument, Nagel hardly leaves room for a rebuttal to yield the answer to the true meaning of our lives. He suggests that we as humans have a special capacity to take a step backwards and observe the lives that we are “committed” to and call them into question. But, as he pointed out; while taking that backwards step we realize that the life that we are so “committed”...
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...Can life have meaning even if there is no afterlife? Why or why not? Before I can answer this question I must confess that I have no religious beliefs nor do I have any belief in heaven or hell, ghosts or immortality. Now it is purely my opinion that life is as we make it from the time we are born. Can life have a meaning? Life expectancy of a human can last 80+ years depending on where you live in the world. I think that the meaning of life is defined by the individual person. In my heart I believe that my life is meaningful and I know some people that believe there life also has a meaning. However, like I mentioned earlier it is up to the individual to make their life have a meaning. So far in my 36 years of life I have experienced both bad and good situations. My life has taken a path from which I chose to take. Life can be stress free or stressful depending on how you choose to live your life as an individual. For me, I know there is a birth, a life and then a death in store for me. I have no illusions of immortality or reincarnation or remaining in limbo until I find peace. Until the day comes where there is proof of an afterlife then all that I have just mentioned is all I have to work with. Back to the meaning of life, it is all on how we make our lives meaningful. Destiny has nothing to do with it and neither does some “divine intervention”. Once our mind has developed to the stage where we can make conscious decisions for ourselves then that is where I believe...
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...I believe the meaning of life is to give life a meaning. Throughout my entire life, I have wondered what the purpose is. Why am I and every other human being even on this planet in the first place? That brings me to my next question. Is there a God? If there is, why did he put us here? Any Christian asked will say our sole purpose is to serve God. First of all, what does that even mean? And second, I must ask why? Why would a supernatural being place us strategically on this planet strictly to serve him? That sounds pretty selfish to me. There has to be something more. Something concrete. Something greater. How could there not be? All my life I have worked hard to succeed. I have challenged myself and fought to do better than my best. Why? I asked myself. Why stress so much when I’m only going to die in the end? Pessimistic, I know. Finally, I thought, maybe the meaning of life doesn’t have to be so complex. Maybe the meaning of life is whatever we want it to be. Maybe the meaning of life is to give life a meaning. I do what I do because I want to do it. It’s that simple. I do it because it means something to me. Everyone adds their own meaning to life. The meaning of life is never universal. The meaning of life is never complex. The meaning of life is actually quite simple to think about. Many people help the needy. Others play sports. Both activities add meaning to those lives involved. Purposes change, but the overall meaning of life will always stay the same...
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...Jeremy Halladay INFT 101 6 March 2014 Academic Honesty Academic honesty has been an ever growing problem within the education community. It starts from grade school and continues on through the rest of the student’s lives as well as the work place. No more than ever before has there been more pressure to perform at a higher level in school and some students will go to extreme lengths to just get a decent grade. As you well know academic honesty is a big thing when completing assignments and test in college. But honesty comes down to the core of who we are, from are family’s to are work place. It creates an invisible untrustworthy factor between the student and professor. It basically comes down to cheating, which means to use another person’s ideas or answers for your own. It’s also known as intellectual theft. Academic honesty is not a victimless crime, and you may wonder why, but it has many factors. Taking credit for something that isn’t yours or stealing it can actually put you in jail. Students these days have a lot of pressure on them, which causes them to resort to desperate measures. Some other reasons is because they lack the knowledge or skill for the course or they are just plain lazy. One last thing is that they didn’t even know they were cheating at all because they didn’t use proper citation. One thing I have learned from this article is that, I didn’t know it was as widespread as I initially thought, which really surprised me. The conclusions of the article...
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...(Instructor’s Name) (Unit’s Name) (Date) Meaningful life and its meaning Various number of definitions that have to do with the pursuit of satisfaction in life applies to a meaningful life. According to oxford dictionary meaning is the connection that links two independent entities. Major aspects that arise about this topic are belief that life itself is meaningful and a global way to understand one's life. Some scientists argue that people who possess a sense of meaning are likely to have minimum levels of negative emotions and their risk of contracting mental illness is reduced as well. Life bearers are realizing dominant life goals, valuable goals in that case, and enjoying life by the bearers are argued to be the true meaning of meaningful life by some other world renowned philosophers. This paper aims to discuss meaningful life and its meaning. Meaningful lives are lives that are full of active engagement. It still is an open question if an activity provides robust meaning to our lives if that activity is chosen and satisfying. The writer argues that freely watching episodes of murder and matlock might prove satisfying (Belliotti). Viewing television programs continuously can become one’s life interest, but such a life characterize sufferers, people that cannot leave home without assistance. Muted meaning in life, that does not bring great worth in life are brought about by such activities. The best candidates of meaningful life are Intellectual and moral achievements, self-building...
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...its meaning and unlock perceived views of the meaning of life. This paper is a perspective of philosophy through the affiliation of happiness. The Buddha defines philosophy as "a way of thinking about the world, or a way of leading a more ethical life? Or is it a kind of psychotherapy - a way of helping us come terms with ourselves and with dilemmas that life constantly throws at us? (Kulananda. Principles of Buddhism,2004) ,alias, “The fundamental aspect of philosophy comes clearly to the forefront/ philosophy was (defined) a way of life (Chase, H. Philosophy as a way of life,1995). Conversely, yours and my meanings philosophy differ, evidently...
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...Meaning of life is a deep philosophical question. It may be viewed by different perspectives of individuals. But one is true: there is no life if there is no meaning in it. No matter what we do, there is something we live for—there is a meaning of life because we are born. Life is a period of time through which a person lives, which includes sleeping, eating, working, resting, thinking, and so on. “Doing nothing” does not exist for a human being. The proportion of deeds such as leisure (sleep, rest) versus work (thinking, developing, working, communicating) constitute the meaning of life. Life is worth living I think; but how one lives determines the depth of ones’s life meaning. For everybody meaning of life is different. “Others may have loftier parts to enact; but my mission in this world, Bartleby, is to furnish you with office-room for such period as you may see fit to remain” (H. Melville “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, quote 167), were Melville’s words considering life of Bartleby. For a long period of time life of strange Bartleby coincided with life of scrifeners’ office chief, which generally has changed the meaning of chief`s life. But what was the meaning of Bartleby`s life? After a long story about his everyday deeds I would conclude that there was no meaning of his life. Nothing seemed important for him, nothing was interesting for him. He seemed to have no values and no desires. His life was empty. He lived, but at the same time he had no purpose. He was an...
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...Tasia Barefield PHIL 104 - 003 Professor Steinbock 2-19-13 What is the Meaning of Life? After reading A Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor R. Frankl and short story The Grand Inquisitor on the Nature of Man by Fyodor Dostoevsky, one may begin to question freedom and the meaning of life is. Both books give their readers an abundance of information for them to decide for themselves if these two things go hand in hand. After reading both books I came to realize that a person does not need to be free to have a meaning of life. A person can find happiness in any situation they are placed in when they just have to find a reason to be happy. The Grand Inquisitor on the Nature of Man is a short story from the novel The Brothers Karamazov. The story about human nature and freedom is told by Ivan to his younger brother Alyosha. Alyosha just so happens to be a Monk and Ivan questions if there is a God. Their discussion is very dramatic and causes its readers to assume Ivan’s standpoint on religious faith. It almost seems as if Ivan is trying to get Alyosha to really think about his faith. He never says what he truly believes in; he kept his role as storyteller throughout the whole story. Dostoevsky’s story is about Jesus returning to earth to the city of Seville, during the Spanish Inquisition. He explains that the people automatically recognized him when they first saw him. Ivan explains to Alyosha saying: He comes silently and unannounced;...
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...Life is fine, by Langston Hughes, is a ballad poem with rhyming couplets. In the poem, Hughes uses irony to say that life is fine but in reality it isn't. The message of the poem is that even though sadness can make you question your own existence you have to push through and keep trying. Hughes uses symbolism to show that his life is "fine": "Life is fine, Fine as wine, Life is fine!" We all go through problems in life but some people don't like to show it, so they do simple things to cover the fact that they're sad like smiling and laughing, which often makes other people think that the other person is happy. It seems like Hughes' life is going well but anyone can seem to cover or hide their sadness while with other people or in public just like how you can use symbolism to mean or cover up another thing like sadness. Hughes also uses situational...
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...topic, for instance, what is the meaning of life, why do we all have to wake up in the mornings in order to go to school or office, why do we struggle with ourselves, overcome problems, learn from mistakes we have made and then make new ones, etc. Lots of scientists’ and other outstanding people’s works from different times and generations were contributed to trying to come up with a definition of a life meaning matter. And the only thing that is obvious is that the answer to this eternal question is fully individual. What one might see as the purpose to exist, another might address as absolutely irrelevant and not interesting matter to consider. What individuals search...
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...Identity and the Meaning of Life Identity is a very important part of everybody. It defines who you are, what you think and what you believe in. Nobody has the same identity. To some people it is easy to find out who they are, but to others it is a long journey which includes things that most people do not try during their lives, for example to leave the civilization and live alone in the woods without any material advantages. A: “Into the Wild” by Sean Penn is about a boy called Chris. After his graduation he leaves his family to travel around on his own. Chris leaves because he cannot stand the focus on material advantages, and he also wants to run away from the dark secrets his parents have kept from him his whole life. Just like the character in Thoreau’s text “Walden”, Chris goes into the wild to get away from society and to live deliberately. Both of them want to get back to basics and away from materialism. The film is very critical towards society, and especially Chris’s parents try to make it look like everything is good on the outside even though the family is falling apart. The parents are not happy, but they stay together anyway because they are afraid of the opinions of other people. This is also a trace of the Puritain legacy where divorces were not accepted. The focus on the opinion of other people comes across in the first part of the film when Chris still is at home and his parents want to give him a new car because the other one is a wreck. The parents...
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...Cat’s Cradle and the Meaning of Life “The web of life is a beautiful and meaningless dance. The web of life is a process with a moving goal. The web of life is a perfectly finished work of art right where I am sitting now” (Robert Anton Wilson) Life has no meaning. This is a common theme of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Life is much like the game of cat’s cradle: while it may seem complex and intricate, in reality it is simple and leads to nothingness. The religion described in the book, Bokononism, follows the teachings of a man, Lionel Boyd Johnson or Bokonon. In the beginnings of his books he warns readers to “close the book at once! It is nothing but foma” (Vonnegut, 265). Foma, are lies. Despite this, most of the island of San Lorenzo follows this religion. Bokonon realized the meaninglessness of life and created a religion based on lies to provide happiness for people as a result. This is why Bokonon leads people to believe they will find out their karass and reason for life only after they die. He wants to spare them the disappointment of knowing everything they do has no purpose. Throughout Cat’s Cradle, there are a few references to the game the book is named for. The first is when Dr. Hoenikker, Newt’s father, tries to show his son the game on the day his bomb was dropped on Japan. (Vonnegut, 11) Later on Newt goes into detail explaining the game to the narrator, Jonah. Atop a mountain, Newt had just finished painting the game...
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...THE EGO, THE CRUCIFIXION, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE From my reading of New Thought literature , I have learned new and wonderful truths. First, Unity does not tell a person what to think, how to define God, or what creeds to accept. Unity seeks only to teach one how to think—how to pray—so that a person can formulate his/her own understanding of God. Second, is a rational explanation of heaven and hell. In mainstream Christianity, heaven is a glorious kingdom located somewhere in the sky where one goes after death if he/she behaves and accepts Christ. Hell is the firey underworld for sinners. For me, both notions have always sounded improbable (and the latter—not very appealing). Instead, what Unity teaches is that the Kingdom of Heaven—the Kingdom of God—is within, and the extent to which we are attuned to and live from our Divine Center, we are in heaven. Likewise, the extend that we are living accordance with the dictates and fears of the ego—we are in hell. Sin is simply our failure to follow our own inner Christ. That interpretation of heaven and hell made a great deal of sense, but I found myself wondering, “What is the role of the ego in all this? How is the ego related to the Christ Spirit and the self?” What I came to accept is that the self is the sum total of our personality with the ego and the Christ spirit motivating forces behind our personality. Further, in our early years, the ego is the domineering force—the force that fights for survival—that...
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...Individual Assignment Week 2 Mind-Body and the Meaning of Life Paper Quandra Johnson Philosophy\ 443 October 28, 2013 Dr. Shaun Herness The religions of ancient Egypt have their history rooted in creation myths. These myths were derived from deification of mortals who were great rulers. The ruler, who would become the Egyptian Christ like figure, was known as King Horus. King Horus came from the Southern part of Africa with a small army of invaders in his follow; these men that accompanied King Horus were known as the Blacksmiths because of their iron crafting skills. Horus became the chief deity due to his many accomplishments, which in effect through his rule had a temple erected in his name and image. This Temple was known as the Temple of Horus, Egyptians were a polytheistic people, who did not question or defy traditions handed down to them from their ancestors. The morale of the masses was the burden of the Pharaoh, who was considered to be the highest exalted ruler of the land. If the people were doing well, then the Pharaoh was praised if the people and land were doing bad then the blame was placed at the base of the ruler of the land. This form of praise and blame did not stop at a political level, the ruler of the land was more revered as a God, because it all came down to the leader of the land being looked upon as a God. Egypt was host to well over 700 hundred Gods who were said to watch over the land and its people, these Gods were once human...
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