[MD] Thoughts on Nihilism

[skutvik at online.no]

Ahoy Steve!

24 July you wrote or quoted from an article:

.. that started like this  
> Though religious people often say that without their faith life would
> be meaningless, we know that some people's faith itself leads them to
> the same conclusion. What is life compared to Heaven? Life for the
> religious is sometimes viewed as merely a means to an end without
> meaning in itself.  (To such people who see the afterlife as the only
> meaning in life we may ask, what is the meaning of the afterlife?) It
> is not surprising that American voters are not too concerned about the
> environment or social justice when polls indicate that nearly half of
> us expect the second coming of Jesus and the glorious end of the world
> within the next 50 years.

And ended like this:
> It takes a lot of intellectual wheel spinning to even get one's self
> to the point in thinking that the love of family and friends and our
> efforts to make the world better than we found it are not meaningful.
> This whole question of meaning only becomes a question when one
> follows the religious impulse to search for meaning "out there." It
> comes from the idea that meaning must come from outside one's self and
> even outside the world altogether. It is important to emphasize that
> nihilism is not an atheistic phenomenon. Both atheists and theists are
> capable of denying aspects of the meaning of life. As we have seen,
> nihilism--the belief that the world in itself is without value,
> meaning, and purpose--is not the inevitable result of atheism.
> Atheists only become nihilists when their lack of belief in God is
> taken together with a half-measure of religion, while the theistic
> nihilism of the suicide bomber is the result of taking a full measure
> of the wrong sort of religion.

But what does the MOQ say? IMO the social level is the Mythological 
Era and emerged along with the notion of an existence which also 
means NOT being animals, of having achieved "knowledge of good 
and bad, i.e. MORALITY. As mentioned wherever anthropologists 
went they found that all people invariably have a myth - a story of 
emergence, purpose and destiny - and that their morality was 
connected with this. So in this sense animism, multi-god systems as 
well as the Semitic mono-theism religions are all social patterns on a 
scale from simplicity to complexity.

Then the intellectual - Logos - level that took leave from  the  social - 
Mythos - parent level in the known Q fashion and started to debunk its 
parent by way of its rational, scientific means: There is no meaning  or 
morals to existence in itself or imposed from gods or forces or 
anything, all such are man-made and exists only in man's mind. From 
these premises however a lot of "qasi-meanings" is created by intellect 
trying to subvert itself like this (from above)

> It takes a lot of intellectual wheel spinning to even get one's self
> to the point in thinking that the love of family and friends and our
> efforts to make the world better than we found it are not meaningful.

This is clearly rationality that tries to rationalize some (primarily social) 
aspects of existence) and says that even if values are subjective they 
are convenient. But it sounds hollow and is worlds apart from the 
social era when existence as god- or force-centered wasn't questioned 
because the subject/object distinction had not been introduced.

Only with the MOQ's Morals=Reality and its Dynamic/Static morals 
split everything is set right, need I elaborate?     

Bodvar