what is the meaning of life?

Question

i've been thinking about this quiestion on and off for most of my life and still i can't put my finger on it...

any insight would be greatly appreciated...

if at all possible, please be both thorough and concise with your responses...

Answer 1

80% of humanity, the religious folks, don't need to ask the meaning of life, the church tells them....the supernatural explanation. But the rest of us can't swallow religious dogma, because there's no evidence. Nobody can prove that there life after death, that people are tortured or rewarded after life or that there's invisible spirits running around.

I've come to two conclusions recently:

1. Life has no meaning
2. Life has a million meanings.

First, there's a certainty that death and annihilation awaits not only you, but the Earth in general. It's an astonomical certainty that our sun will supernova and leave the earth a burnt crisp, not to mention all the other extinction level events around the corner.

Second, the million things that give us meaning are the pleasurable experiences we can conjure up during the short period we are here on the earth, in the form of the relationships we have with our kids and other people, and the 'housekeeping' types of purposes. What i mean by that are the curing disease, ending hunger, improving literacy, reducing crime, preventing war, helping other kinds of things.

So the bottom line is, we only have a temporary meaning to life, to reduce pain and increase pleasure, other than that everything is lost to oblivion.


To be or not to be? "To be" is temporary and "not to be" is inevitable.....

Answer 2

If we will view life from the perspective of people, we will find its very drastic and unorganized. If we will look or we will put our eyes on the God's view we can comprehend what is His purpose on making and giving life to all who inhabits the universe whether it is human or not. We are here for a purpose and He made us for a destiny. This earth is just the testing ground for an eternal life, whether we will be with the real Maker and Giver of Life or with the great liar of all time who deceives millions and make them blind of the reality of life. Whether we read the bible or the quran or any Godly books, we can see that there is God who is looking down to our lives and generally, all of the predictions and the moral contents of these books shows that there is a pattern in the life here on earth and someday it will end and we will be facing our eternal place where God has more beautiful things prepared for the eternity. Life is not accidental, we are here not by random, just look at the design of our body. Our eyes are placed on top (in the head so we can view more better) it didn't appear in our palms lest it will be difficult if we are to grasp a thing, it didn't appear in the belly, can you imagine what it will be if it is placed in other parts of our body rather than in the head? It is also placed near the nose, mouth and ear - the other vital organs which is crucially needed to be in the open areas and not to be covered by the other parts of the body. I am a Christian so I will quote the bible now, the bible says in Ecclesiastes 12:1 "Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, 'I find no pleasure in them'"

Answer 3

* happiness and sorrowness
* a precious Gift from God

Dfnt. Life: although there is no universal agreement as to a definition of life, its biological manifestations are generally considered to be organization, metabolism, growth, irritability, adaptation, and reproduction. Protozoa perform, in a single cell, the same life functions as those carried on by the complex tissues and organs of humans and other highly developed organisms. The attributes of life are inherent in such minute structures as viruses, bacteria, and genes, just as they are in the whale and the giant sequoia. In seeking an understanding of life, scientists have broken down many barriers that once separated the physical sciences from the biological sciences; a result of the growth of biochemistry, biophysics, and other interrelated fields of study has been a better understanding of the composition and functioning of living tissues of all kinds.

Answer 4

MY CONCISE RESPONSE WILL ANSWER YOUR EXACT QUESTION. Your question is meaningless. That's why the perrenial humph over it. Here's why, precisely.


Your question "what is the meaning of life" inquires into the semantic reference of something, due to "meaning." "Semantic reference" means "meaning." Semantic reference is meaning. another word for it is denotation. The terms are synonymous, and refer to words and phrases. "Book" means "a bound volume" or something like that. When we say "book," its semantic reference is some book. What makes a word or phrase meaningless? A word or phrase is meaningless if it does not have semantic reference; that is, if it does not refer to something real, whether concrete or abstract.

So anyway, you asked about the meaning of something, and now we know that you can meaningfully only ask about the meaning of some word or phrase.

Now, we make reference to words or phrases, in sentences, by enclosing them in quote marks, as I have been doing. But you asked about the meaning of life, such that "life" appears in your question with no quotes around it. The only time we reference a word or phrase, in a sentence, but do not enlcose it in quotes, is when we identify it as a reference to a word or phrase by calling it that, such as in "now we are all going to talk about the word big." No quotes needed that time around "big." But you neither identified "life" that way, nor by using quotes.

Yet you asked about meaning. You are asking the meaning of what, then? The word life? Or the thing life? With no quote marks, and nothing that says you are asking about the word, other than the word meaning earlier in the question, your question does not refer to anything. It really has no semantic reference. For, life, the thing, has no meaning. Why? Simply, because life just is not the kind of thing that can have what we call meaning, or semantic reference. Words and phrases have meaning (when they refer). The semantic reference of "life," is life. To ask the semantic reference of life, is meaningless.

You can find the meaning of "life" in a really good dictionary!

I hope this clears up the whole thing for you.

Note that none of this implies that life has no function, importance, direction, or any other such thing. With respect to life, it pretty much just implies that life is not a word or a phrase. Understanding this can save many years of frustraton trying to figure out something important by asking the wrong question.

Answer 5

You will never know. You are not omnipotent. You cannot know what higher power there is, you cannot know the difference between good and bad, you cannot know if you have a destiny, and you cannot understand the meaning of life. The days you spend on Earth may or may not have significance. Accept this and find your own meaning. My 'meaning of life' is to understand as much as I can even if that means as little as understanding myself. I never stop searching for my limits. I figure I can't know my place in the world but I'll be damned if I don't do my best to know myself. You will never know what the meaning of life is but that is no reason to stop searching. [e-mail]

Answer 6

you are in good company. Many great minds have pondered this thought and have yet to agree or explain the answer. If you narrow down the vastness of responses it comes down to what you determine life to be that you have sat your values of this life on. If you believe in God your definition will be different from one who does not believe in God. In the end that will be the two bottom lines that all lines will come back to.

Answer 7

What's the meaning of a blank paper? To be written on. So is the meaning of life: to be lived. If the question is how, the answer is: you live your life just as you would write your own story.

Answer 8

Many people say that the meaning of life is the love. Yes, to be with your beloved one, to be happy with them and to be save and sound in your own home sounds...the paradise of the life! But still...I am not sure... I think, I feel that there is something more than that!

Answer 9

"What is the meaning of life?" is probably the most-asked philosophical question by humanity. Common answers include: happiness or flourishing; love; reproduction; power; knowledge, or wisdom; and being blessed, or simply that there is no meaning to life.

Answer 10

Well if you assume that life has a "meaning" then that meaning must be God.

Otherwise your question would have been, what is the ultimate pleasure of life.

If you are searching outside of yourself then you are looking for a higher being, God.