The purpose of life

[no-excuses]

The Purpose of life
Recently I was visiting a friend of mine in his house, and I came across a piece of paper which i found later that it belongs to my friend’s high school student son. The document was an assignment in religion, the kid is attending a catholic school, and the assignment was about what the student holds as beliefs and his understanding of religion, God and life generally.
One of the questions was, do you think there is a purpose to life? And it caught me in a way that I started thinking about it myself. It is not the first time I think about that, but what made me interested in it more this time was the fact that it was asked to a 14 years old kid. I believe, even though I don’t have any statistics, that the majority of human being believes that there is a purpose of life or at least they believed in that at some point in their lives.  So, is there a purpose for life? and if there is what is it?

I personally, don’t believe that there is a purpose for life, that is not a surprise being an atheist, but even in the atheist community there are some people who believe there is a purpose. I strongly believe that we are merely accidents of nature, we got the brain that thinks, conclude, and decide. The brain is the key to all our questions about supernatural phenomenon.
What would be the purpose of life that we can possibly think of?  Be good? Make a change? Or just simply do everything in your power to guarantee a pass ticket to heaven. After life is completely disregarding the purpose of life itself, it makes us look like Lab rats or experiment monkeys. So that is definitely not the purpose.   

Let’s think again, so we grow up and as children we go through all kind of experiences good, bad and neutral which leaves it’s marks on us and simply define who we going to be as adults, adulthood is a series of interactions with people around us and there is no clear indications for any fundamental purpose of our lives. It is completely chaos when you attempt to find a pure spiritual experience or a distinctive goal to give a meaningful purpose of life. So basically you can’t find a purpose to your life even when you really look for it, however, many people will claim that they know and they fulfilled their purpose in life and that they are satisfied with it. It could be any sort of achievements ranging from academic to religious and anything between them. Well that is not necessarily satisfy me because that is ultimately means that life have multi-purposes and everyone is tailoring the purpose to themselves.
What I’m saying is that life is so great to have a purpose it is merely an organic process that has a beginning and an end with a pile of events in between that we, as human being, consider a magnificent era. Let us make it clear that there is no purpose of life whatsoever, let us just make clear that we don’t really need to think about it anymore and let us just get done with it.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

Reproduction and right now I'm under the impression I could be considered an obsolete model.

[Glitch]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkUpDaJp3_s

This song actually opened my eyes to what humans really are. Just like.. the intro speech.

[no-excuses]

Joe Rogan big respect!

[stromboli]

Purpose assumes purposeful behavior. If we behave in a way that safe guards our lives and our future, awe are acting purposefully.The purpose of any species, through reproduction and evolution, is to survive. If we have the capability to, through our actions, ensure that certain things like global warming do not bring about our demise, we can consider it a purpose.

To extend that further, we can assume that our future as a species may be under threat by the universe around us from asteroids, meteors, Gama Ray bursts and so on. Knowing that, we can work to safeguard ourselves from the possibility of future events or plan to become an extra earth species. Moving outward from our earth into space is as much about survival as it is any other reason. So there is a purpose to our lives, no different than any other species.

[aitm]

One of, if not the greatest (though I believe it to be the idea of a god) arrogances of humanity is to assume because we exist, we "must" have a purpose. I suggest we do not. Some of us live, many of us die, many of us kill each other over the thought that killing someone else enhances our chances to live, for the very reason of happiness, a rather odd and disturbing thought.

[SGOS]

I personally, don’t believe that there is a purpose for life, that is not a surprise being an atheist, but even in the atheist community there are some people who believe there is a purpose. I strongly believe that we are merely accidents of nature

^ This.  Life just is.  It's like asking what is the purpose of a rock?  Both the rock and life are complex molecular combinations with unique properties.  You can note their properties, and understand their chemistry.  But assigning purpose to either one is the domain of philosophical jibber jabber.

[josephpalazzo]

There's one thing you can say about your purpose in life: either you define it for yourself, or someone else will define it for you and it might not be to your taste.

[Sal1981]

I differentiate between meaning and purpose. The purpose of life is to reproduce and further the genes and to continue life. There is no apparent meaning. Although I have this image of spreading life to the far reaches of the Universe and distant descendants stopping the expansion of the Universe to make it a Steady State one.