Without...?

Some of our youth today are said to be hanging around the place with no purpose and with life in disarray. Apparently without much thought that I can see, it is often said that they are in need of something or someone to follow. Instead of supplying them all with some sort of supernatural belief system (which helps some a lot), what if it was acceptable for some of us to say,

"Hey, you're right. I too believe life has no purpose. There are no gods. No reason for our existence. But what we do have is love, each other, and this incredibly amazing planet. Now there are conventions and rules and regulations, cultural and legal, set up so that we can live side-by-side and hopefully not hurt each other, but isn't the real task to go beyond that? To gain the depth and the understanding of our world more and more and more so we can love, respect and enjoy that with all our hearts and supple minds not totally pinned down with steadfast blinding rhetoric? ... And then to look after it. Can't our world itself become our purpose and our reason?"

It seems part of the human condition to seek explanation in terms of function, if not outright purpose. I had once forgotten, but it had been interesting when I was younger to consider how anthropomorphic it can be to assume that the phenomena we perceive must have a function, a design, and thus an existence that we can all end up appreciating. Moreover, often it becomes easily assumed that such appreciation should be in set, standardised and pre-existing terms, and in ways parallel to what is found in conscious human endeavour. I still become intrigued at how people who insist that what seems created must have a creator, find it insolent to be then asked who created the creator.

If I seem obnoxious and simplistic at this point, I think it's because I want to offer a glimpse of what I really feel, leaving myself open with an honesty I'm entrusting with others. I myself can half-jokingly take a presupposed framework for my own question about creators here to absurdities in an answer that would entail reductionism in the explanatory mode, but going in an unfamiliar direction of invoking the sense of there being increasingly more encompassing agencies of control. There would be a god who was created by a god who was created by a god... I don't doubt that I can't hide my wonder as to how one extra level of explanation can be deemed necessary, and yet, we'd all find such further reductionism ridiculous.

With those who call it denial when I don't invoke a creator of the things in this world that I dearly love, I respect the dedication, faith and love brought about by their belief system as incredibly strong and real in itself. Accredited to different things, the potentially overwhelming intensities of our emotions, still do exist. These feelings for who we really know and what we love on this earth can still exist no matter how we change some of our thoughts. Empathy can also be for the people who want us to have different beliefs in light of that very want, as we all know that feeling too.

For a while I sounded even more nuts, as it was only through rare surges that I could faintly remember there were a few more varied facets to me that were worthy of retention. I revisited my early undergrad years in my mind late one night, and shit - the following still made sense to me:

( - it was made manifest in a loose dialogue on who created certain so-called creators ... )

Also see http://oocities.com/kayneich/notes