Utterly Meaningless » Blog Archive » MEANINGLESS! MEANINGLESS! UTTERLY MEANINGLESS!
  • MEANINGLESS! MEANINGLESS! UTTERLY MEANINGLESS!

    Filed at 7:01 pm under by dcobranchi

    An online friend/blogger at my local paper has an interesting post up on the existence (or nonexistence) of a human soul. I really can’t comprehend the belief that without a soul, there’s no reason to love, to hope, to live.

    Pretty sad belief system, IMO.

    4 Responses to “MEANINGLESS! MEANINGLESS! UTTERLY MEANINGLESS!”


    Comment by
    Rob
    December 8th, 2008
    at 5:25 pm

    I just got through the His Dark Materials books. Can anyone tell me if Pullman’s books contain standard athiest thought? Not only did his reality include life after death and the existence of a soul, but he never got around to explaining how it all showed up.


    Comment by
    Daryl Cobranchi
    December 8th, 2008
    at 5:51 pm

    I’m pretty sure there is no such thing as “standard atheist thought.” It’s not like there’s an atheist hierarchy in, say, SLC that tells us what not to believe in. 🙂

    That being said, I doubt that too many atheists believe in an afterlife or an immortal soul.


    Comment by
    speedwell
    December 8th, 2008
    at 5:59 pm

    There is no “standard atheist thought,” as Daryl points out, but I have read the Pullman books. The closest I could find to what a religious person might call “atheism” is a certain slight tendency to a scientific outlook generally, and a great deal of bitterness toward the abuses of religious institutions and those who use religion as a stepping-stool to personal power. If you think all religion must be abusive, and that the powerful people in religion are permitted to abuse their power, and that’s all perfectly OK with you, then you might construe the Pullman books as “atheistic” and also consider this a bad thing.


    Comment by
    Rob
    December 9th, 2008
    at 1:13 pm

    Fair ‘nuf speedwell. So many Christians got worked up into a lather about how Pullman was going to indoctrinate our children into atheism, I just had to read the books to see what the big uproar was about. I never really found it.

    Whoever said ignorance is bliss, has never been around a big pile of mamma bear christians out to protect their children from a book they’ve never read, based on an out of context comment in an article they’ve also never read.