A question just came to me from a post on another thread.

For atheists who are hard core and non-spriitual:

If you believe that when you are dead, you are dead forever, never to live again... then why care about the survival of your species?

Why care about having any decedents?

Why worry about the future of the human race or the future of the world when you die and you are gone... none of that matters to you.

And why would an animal work so hard to pass on his genes? What does he care? Does he even think about dieing or the survival of his species. (I doubt it.)

If he doesn't, then how did he obtain that kind of programing? Genetic memory? If genetic memory is involved, then what does that say in regards to the idea of reincarnation? Will his memory live in his decedents? Does he remember the lives of his ancestors?

I see it as an inevitability that this species will become extinct eventually, regardless of anything I do or don't do. For me, it has less to do with "caring" and more to do with accepting the reality as I see it.



I'm assuming you mean "descendants" -- decedents would already be dead, by definition -- I don't want to leave any descendants, in fact I absolutely refuse to do so.



Exactly. Whatever it's going to be, that's what it will be. It will have no impact on me after I'm dead.



Biological imperative. I'd like to believe that I've been able to overcome the raw-instinctive-mindless reproduction compulsion and live a life without any need for such things.

Those are questions no one knows Jeannie. Those who claim to know only have so many followers. In the end one has to come to their own conclusion in what works best for them.

This is the way I feel too. In fact, in a very real sense this seems to fly in the very face of the arguments that are often given by an atheistic belief in evolution and a gene-driven reality.

If I really was being driven by my genes why would I be so vehement about not reproducing?

That makes no sense at all.

Me too. I could feel very strongly the 'nesting' instinct when I was young and restless but I consciously made a point to 'override' that programming. I did not want to pop out a bunch of kids and spend my life raising them and worrying about supporting a family etc.

you are a sentient being(I am assuming this)....therefore you can overcome you "animal instincts"...Your genetic coding to reproduce has been supplanted by your "reasons"....

Plants have no such "reasons"

Sort of the same with me JB. I never wanted the responsiblity I'm like my own kid

Bingo!

JB and Skyhook seem to be like me,in that we all 3 realize that we need to believe in SOMETHING

Well, for whatever it's worth, atheists in another thread are attempting to argue that genetic coding is indeed what drives are "reasoning".

So something's gotta give.

The need to believe in something would not imply this thing exists .
We need lots of things that might or might not exist .
My biggest challenge and dilemma about a God or a creator is and always was : if he created me then how did he come to exist ?.
There is no reasonable answer to this scientifically or philosophically or religiously .

Because one does not believe in a god/deity does not preclude one from caring for other people and what happens to
the species nor planet. Indeed, that caring is most frequently heightened,
because we do not believe "it is in god's hands". Alternatively,
we feel more innately responsible for our actions. However, other agnostics & atheists may feel differently. All Christians/Muslims/Buddhists (etc..) do not feel the same way on all topics either.

May I suggest putting questions about a thread ON that thread, where the question might be more likely discovered and answers might be more accurately addressed.

I realize that there is an "x-factor" that I do not fully percieve

I can't speak for Skyhook or anyone else but I don't have a need to believe in anything, I simply like to keep a very open mind and process all information and come up with conclusions and ideas about this reality, --which by the way I don't think anyone has figured out yet.

I am not certain I am right about anything I believe and so I evaluate all information. When the puzzle pieces begin to fit together, I form a loose belief or theory of everything. It gets me through the day.

I was agnostic for a while -- which means I did not care one way or another what truth was or if there was any afterlife or soul. It was a very liberating belief system and I began to focus on my life for what it was.

It was when I realized that death may NOT be the end of me that I was faced with responsibility. You can't escape your karma. Even if you die.... there you are.

I'm in completely agreement with you here. If a "need" to believe was the only driving factor behind the question of spirituality I too, would chuck it off as a totally unnecessary option.

Like JB, I have no need for anything.



Well, first off, I would suggest that you are seriously limiting yourself by thinking of God as a "person" by asking, "If he created me then how did he come to exist?"

When considering spirit the very first thing you need to realize is that if you are a spiritual being then guess what?

That means that you are the spiritual being!

So why are you thinking about some him creating you?

Where did you get that idea? From the Mediterranean religions?

Secondly, you're stuck with the same question either way. The question of "Where did spirit come from" is no difference from the question, "Where did the universe come from".

Yet you accept that the unvierse exists.

So whether it's a spiritual unviverse or a 'dead' universe is totally irrelevant to the question of "from whence it came".

You're stuck with that question irregardless of whether you consider spirituality or no spirituality.

It's like apples and oranges. If you have an apple you need to explain how the apple came to be. If you have an orange you need to explain how the orange came to be. It doesn't really matter which you chose, the question of origins are equally mysterious.

You don't gain anything by choosing a spiritless universe.



Truly. Getting back to a "need" to believe.

Actually atheism is a FREE RIDE!

NO RESPONSIBLITY REQUIRED! At all!

You came to be by a purely irresponsible happenstance explosion we call the 'universe'. What responsiblity could you possibly have if you are nothing more than the result of a completely irresponsible happenstance explosion in the first place?

Moreover, if when you die it's just lights out, then why should even care what happens in this utterly irresponsible happenstance explosion?

On the other hand, if you can't die and you're going to be responsible for your behavior in some way after this life is over. HOLY CRAP! All of a sudden what you do in this life matters tremendously!

There's no question that a spiritual view of life places far more importance on what you do in this life than does the idea that you're going to just go kaput when it's over.

Going kaput when it's all over could actually be quite inviting to a lot of people.

I'm not so sure that believing in spirit is necessarily a good thing. That can depend on a lot of factors.

To be perfectly honest about it the idea of just dying when I die almost sounds more inviting than the idea of having to answer for my behavior in this life. Not that I was all that bad, but I wasn't exactly productive either. If being a lazy bum is a sin, I'm in big trouble.

And according to many religions it is a sin. It's called "sloth".

So when I die I could be "called on the carpet" for "wasting" my time when I could have been spending my life getting into trouble instead.

Who knows what evil lurks are the far side of the grave?

In many ways, atheism is the "comforting" religion. To believe in atheism is to believe that you'll never be held responsible for anything. No one to answer to. Just do what you want and when you die it's all over. No fees to pay.

Some people may actually have a 'need' to believe in atheism. Especially if they've done something that they feel is truly unforgivable.

After all, if atheism is true, would it truly be wrong to murder someone? Why should it be? After all, if the whole frigg'in universe is just happenstance meaninglessness in the first place then murdering off a few happenstance humans surely wouldn't be a very big deal. Especially if the murderer saw them as being obnxious pests that the world could do without.

How could any atheist truly say that it's "wrong" to kill off something that happened by happenstance in the first place?

That's makes no sense at all.

My answer to the original question is that the need to feel that our race, species, offspring will survive is a coded need in our mindset. We're hard-wired to feel that.

This is a product of evolution, this feeling or need. Those in the past who did not have a strong need to propagate the species, would not be motivated to, so their own offspring would suffer in their developmental stages when the parent is supposed to take care of them. These offspring would be less likely to survive, thus the gene pool would be made less abundant of the "don't care" attitude as a genetic cause for apathy over the future generations.

If a parent in the past had a strong need to propagate, he or she would make more effort to protect their children and other offspring, or other people in the tribe, or all people against lions and sabre-toothed tigers, so generations that followed this parent would have more chance of getting this behaviour coded in their genetic morality.

Of course man is complex and morally and in other ways self-programmable enough to discard this need. He must first recognise the need, then act against it with his will.

I am such a person. At age 8 I decided that it's futile to have offspring; and guess what, my kind will never have this maladaptive gene propagated, because I was true to my credo, and never reproduced. It's not that I don't like sex; it's that I don't think there is much point in propagating for me.

I even wrote a book (published in 1997) that was a novel, but it described some of my philosophy that I had created and which I would never have been able to, unless I had exited the all-pervasive (perv?) human-centered thinking that our species is wallowing in.

Again, to the original post: Jeannie, were you bothered by this set of questions? You seem emotional and distressed, if only judged by the uncharacteristically large number of typos/mistakes in your text.

Propagating seems to be a goal of all life. Animal, plant, microorgamism, etc...

So to make it more than just a natural instinct doesn't make much sense to me.

I don't think propagation is a goal. It is only a behaviour that is constantly reinforced, and its oppositioning feelings, if successful, then the source of these oppositioning motivations are always eliminated. Are always eliminated from the gene pool, if they are strong enough, because by successfully stopping the individual from propagating himself, these oppositioning feelings also, in the same fell swoop, stop the genes that cause the non-need to propagate also eliminated from the gene pool.

The propagation is not a goal, but a default because the alternative is always weeded out of the gene pool.

The instinct to propagate, in some species manifesting by nothing more than a sexual drive, is a camouflaged motivation that helps the propagation. The opposite instincts, if any, are weeded out by self-selection of not propagating the genes responsible for wantig not to propagate.

I guess I am just curious about people who believe in a finite existence. If this universe is really finite, in the face of infinity we would have died out billions of years ago.

We would not even exist. We are as good as dead where we stand.

Its just not logical.