Week 6 subject - ?

Why Am I Here? - A Fundamental Question
Why am I here on earth? Where did I come from? What am I worth? Do I have any intrinsic value? Do I serve a purpose? These are all fundamental questions. They are life's "big questions." How you answer these questions determines how you see the world and how you treat the world. Because you are a part of the world, how you see the world also determines how you see and treat yourself. So, it's important that we resolve these fundamental questions. And it's important that we discover the honest truth. Wrong answers to important questions aren't helpful.

Where do we begin in our search for the truth? We begin at the beginning. Perhaps the most fundamental question is: does God exist? It's fundamental because our answers to the other "big questions" actually hinge on how we answer this significant question. For example…

Why Am I Here? - The Atheistic Worldview
Why I am here? Well, if God doesn't exist, that means that life must have come about through some natural impersonal, unintelligent, and ultimately purposeless process. That means we're ultimately as purposeless as the very process which brought us into existence. Life's just an accident and so are you. You can find short term reasons for living like you're here because your parents wanted to have children, etc., but ultimately you're just an accident and so are your parents. Life is one big accident. You serve no purpose, you'll cause no lasting effect, and in the grand scheme of things your life is utterly meaningless. Without a Creator in the beginning, there was nobody around to put you here on purpose which means you aren't here for a reason. It's that simple.

As far as asking "what am I worth," without God we don't actually have an intrinsic value, at least not an objective one. Our worth is ultimately subjective. You might think you're worth something but someone else might think you're worthless, and as long as there's no transcendent Assessor to have the final say, no one's ultimately right or wrong. In fact, without God there's really no such thing as right or wrong. John Dewey (1859-1952), the famous 20th century atheist explained, "There is no God and there is no soul. Hence, there are no needs for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural law or moral absolutes."1

Philosophers generally agree: without an absolute God to make the rules, there is no such thing as a moral absolute; there are only preferences. You don't actually have a right to live; you just prefer not to die. Someone else on the other hand might want to kill you regardless of how you feel about it, and who is to say that they're wrong? In the absence of absolute morality, power reigns supreme; the strong survive and the weak get exploited.

Thankfully most governments see it as their duty to uphold what they see as your God-given right to live, and governments also happen to be the strongest institution among men (which means they can enforce morality upon those who don't necessarily agree with your right to live). The founders of the United States of America put it well when they declared, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…" Unfortunately, some governments don't share this worldview and their people suffer terribly for it.

Why Am I Here? - The Theistic Worldview
Why am I here? Well, if God does exist, that means He is ultimate reality. If He created you for a reason, that's ultimately why your here. If you're valuable to Him, that's ultimately what you're worth. What He says is right is absolutely right and what He says is wrong is absolutely wrong. We may be free moral agents with the freedom to make moral decisions, but that doesn't mean we can choose what actually is right or wrong; that just means we're capable of choosing to be right or wrong. God makes the rules. The question is: will He enforce them? Will God ever hold us accountable for our moral decisions? The prevailing instinct among the majority seems to be that, yes, God will hold us accountable. It's as if most people instinctually know that one day they're going to have to explain all the bad things they've done (which of course means that they also instinctually know that there is such a thing as moral absolutes).

thanks

I’m often asked what is the Existential-Humanistic perspective. Simply put, it comes from the root words of ‘exist’ and ‘human’. ‘Existential’ is an exploration of our existence and ‘Humanistic’ is an exploration of what it means for each of us to be human.

The bottom line is that we exist – we are alive. The challenge of our lives is how do we choose to live our existence and how do we make meaning of our unique, individual journeys.

Here are some essential concepts that describe the perspective:

We stay open to the flow of life, its process and its content. Yet, within this openness, we take stands. We are an active participant in our life’s events. We live in the paradox that nothing is for certain. Yet, we do not let this deter us from consciously deciding our life.

We aspire to live a life of integrity and wholeness. If we feel split and fragmented, we listen and stay open to all of what is going on. We will then start shifting into clarity and a more unified understanding of our concerns and responses.

We believe in possibility and potential. Simultaneously, we acknowledge there are limitations to being human.

We are always both ‘being’ and ‘becoming’.

We are connected to the world, and everyone and everything in it. When we heal some of our pain, we heal some of the world’s pain. When we focus on healing some of the world’s pain, we are healing some of our own pain. We know that we are not separate from anyone or anything.

We believe there is something greater than ourselves. There is something greater than our personality or ego that it is important to stay open to.

We aspire to be open-hearted and clear-minded. We aspire to love every human being for all of who they are — all of their struggles and successes, all of their joys and pains. We aspire to love ourselves in the same way.

We intend to live in the present moment, for it is what we have. In this present moment, the past and future are embodied. We want to be conscious of how we feel, what we think, and how we act in the present moment. This makes life vital.

We intend to act from our authentic core. We believe that as human beings, if supported to be our authentic selves, we will ultimately act in the best interests of self, each other, our community, and the planet as a whole.

We intend to have relationships of honesty, openness, and mutuality. With this attitude, we believe fresh discoveries will be made, deepening will occur, and intimacy will happen.

We endeavor to embrace and honor our shadow-self as a valid part of ourselves. We explore and understand our shadow-self in an accepting, integrated, holistic way. We acknowledge that our shadow-self is an integral part of our human condition and take responsibility for it.

We believe that human beings are innately good. However, they need to explore and heal their wounds in order to actualize their goodness.

We believe life is an ongoing learning process. There are always further discoveries we can make about ourselves and the world. We are always evolving.

We believe we are constantly choosing our existence, whether we recognize that or not. We are the authors of our own life.

I hope these concepts will provide a better understanding of the Existential-Humanistic perspective. I also hope you can use some of these concepts to enhance your life.

thanks

We can talk about the killer, are they human ? We don’t know but there are doing some things that human shloudn’t do and we can’t explain that. I am here because my mother and my father did some sex without condom.

Simon and Mathis, thanks for the copy and paste from philosophy.org

I just see that my answer for this topic didn't appear so i repost this one. I talked about a famous woman serial killer: Beverly Allit. This one is in my point of vue the worst woman serial killer that had ever exist. In fact, she killed 4 young babies and attacked 9 others. She was totally mentally deficient and the craziest is that she worked in an hospital with children and babies. That’s the reason why she killed and hurt as she wanted. The reason of those kills is cause she wanted to be famous, obstinate by the necessity to be recognize in the street. Actually, she is again behind bars and that’s a good thing for our descendants.

Ted Bundy is an American serial killer. He assaulted and murdered many young women and girls during the 1970s, and perhaps before. In addition to abducting and raping his victims, he performed necrophilic acts on their remains.