November 09, 2018 Friday
Bedtime Story
If Life is Pointless Then What
Returning to the point of humans trying to
find meaning in lives historically we saw that they have ended up in two
conclusions.
The first one is that life is in fact
meaningless.
The second is to set up a higher power (and
not necessarily one of the mythological Gods) and to set up some elaborate
abstract concept if not religion and assign meaning through it.
Regarding the second option Kierkegaard
questions the purpose of belief in God for to him there is no human-comprehensible
purpose of God.
This according to him makes the idea of God
absurd.
Like I said earlier I never could decipher
the language and thought processes of Kierkegaard and so I can neither defend
him nor support his ideas.
It is left up to you to make up your mind
on Kierkegaard’s philosophy.
So is there anything else that can salvage
people like me who has no “clutch” so to speak from the paradox of absurd that
stares at me every moment of my life.
Well, there are few ideas that might be
helpful in the face of such bleakness.
One is that of freedom.
How is that so?
When an individual realizes how absurd the
life is it can be most liberating as one has no reason to get overwrought of
being judged by some supreme deity in the life hereafter or bothersome fellow
apes on this very planet.
The thing is that even those who believe in
life hereafter also do not seem to be too much concerned about reprimands from
the divine god no matter what claim they may make.
The second way how confronting the absurd
possible helps is one is left with no hope or rather one seeks little hope from
elsewhere.
Though many would argue that hope is a good
thing one can counter argue that the only way to live life to the fullest would
be to do so without hope or expectation.
Camus would consider hope as yet another
method of evading the paradox of absurd; and philosophers of his kind would
call men with hope as fraudulent in the sense that they seek to evade the
reality.
The Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis who was
nominated for Nobel Prize nine times was an open critique of fundamental values
of the Greek Orthodox Church.
One of the years that he was nominated for
the Nobel Prize in Literature was 1957 where he lost to Albert Camus by the
slimmest margin of one vote.
He never proclaimed himself an atheist for
he showed inclination towards spirituality (who doesn’t) and such spiritual
type of brains can never be categorically disbelievers.
Human apes are hard to decode.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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