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VIDEO Dave I've lived for 70 years, and the only consistent meaning I've found in life is evolution. Primarily ones personal evolution from childhood to adulthood, and if fortunate, into the wisdom that comes with old age. It also encompasses cultural evolution, from the Stone Age to our modern society.
SHORT 352 While some may seek different sources of meaning, the concept of evolution provides a broad framework for understanding our place in reality. A journey of evolution that requires the effort of lifelong learning and growth, however, this perspective on the meaning of life may not satisfy everyone, for the unsatisfied require faith in an afterlife. Yet, I find the afterlife an excuse for not making the effort to examine life fully.
Nonetheless, even without having a meaning for life, each individual lives and identifies with his community. If religious, he is given and accepts some sort of faith based explanation for creation, powers of good and evil, along with laws or rules of conduct to live by. The individual, completely unaware, will then participate in deterministic behavior based on a belief which is derived from the social norm of the community, and period they belong to.
"The morality of the individual, then, consists in his fulfilling the duties of his social position". General Introduction to the Philosophy of History , G.W.F. Hegel
The process of humanity, the inevitable future evolution of civilization is mostly unaffected by individual belief since each individual is directed not by himself, but by the causal effects of the social construct it lives within. For example if an individual has concepts and beliefs which are outside of the social norm, society will push against this individual to either isolate them, or to eliminate the belief.
Religion is that social construct, even if it is an atheistic political ideology it is the causal environment that gives form to individual actions. In a sense we are in a box, a deterministic construct, where the outcome of behavior is predetermined by religion and community. We change or evolve only when outliers envision new norms from outside of this box. Then, we can change what we teach ourselves, what we believe will change, the community will evolve, and thereby affect the quality of life.
God is how we define the unknown metaphysical, and physical terms like “infinite,” that we can not comprehend. Human evolution creates new technologies, we expand reality, the more we learn and create, the more complexity we generate, and the less we can know of the greater volume of the revealed reality. Our explanation of God may be a bit eroded by science, but the importance of a religion, for a proper belief for what is unknown and causal, has only become more important. If Re-Legion is the way we tie society into a pre-described social construct, it would be wise to reconstruct a new belief that is not dedicated to enslavement, discrimination , or untrue explanations of reality. We require a belief that is truthful , one that can say when something is unknown, and not simply make things up.
When I first came across Friedrich Nietzsche, my takeaway was not religion. It was his concept of eternal recurrence, as explained to me in a book called, The Physics of Immortality by Frank Tipler. This is the idea that in an infinite universe, made of finite matter, any state, entity or events will repeat eternally. A human life within such an eternal universe will recur indefinitely, a virtual proof of eternal life. I would then discover that the eternal recurrence was a flawed concept. For me this came from understanding that the universe is not eternal, instead, it both expands into a distance we can not see and draws into black holes. The universe, as we know it, will go away, thus potentially making any moment unique and unrepeatable. Of course, if there are infinite universes we will re-live our lives an infinite amount of times, and in infinite varieties, but this is immaterial to our particular reality, and would only make our reality even more unique and significant to us.
Religion can be truthful, scientific, and equitable. Let us consider the promise of eternal life. If we had the right technology maybe life could be eternal, at least for our intent and purpose, and there are ways of explaining eternal recurrence within a finite universe. Yet, the current theological promise of eternal life is malicious, as you would go mad if you were forced to live forever. On the other hand each life is mathematically equally significant in the structure of space/time, you can not remove a single beggar, nor is a genius more significant than a fly. Although difficult to comprehend a single life leaves a universal impression that is eternal, your life is in fact eternal.
Furthermore, most religions replace fact with faith, science is dismissed, and we lie to our children to enforce false beliefs. Religion has been an algorithm for power through the subjugation of a peasant class. The Latin phrase "In hoc signo vinces," is conventionally translated into English as "In this sign thou shalt conquer," this phrase is the sign of conviction given to us by the Roman Emperor Constantine, that Christianity would be the religion of conquest and domination for the West. The realization that all current religion was in fact malicious is what shifted my interest from physics, to religion.
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