What is the point in life?

Reproduction is the Biological imperative so I guess that is the purpose of your corporeal existence. However once you have achieved that (or choose not to) then it's up to you to find whatever meaning you think you need.

Personally I subscribe to the "you are a long time dead" school of thought and my purpose is to be happy. This means that I try hard to avoid doing things or hanging with people if they subtract from my happiness and visa versa. I am a lifelong aetheist who doesn't believe in anything woo at all so I try hard to enjoy the here and now with an eye to my own future happiness. At 48 I suspect I have 25 - 30 active years ahead of me and I intend to enjoy them!

The basic, physical point of life is to reproduce, to carry on that long line of evolution.

In terms of our own lives - to follow the path you feel you should take. If money wasn’t a consideration I’d have worked on writing novels and learning herbalism to heal others. This was always the path I most wanted to take for myself. Also learning and travel and just taking wonder in life. How beautiful the world is despite how harsh nature can be.

I often think how amazing it is to be a being that can look at the universe and appreciate its vastness and beauty even if I don’t understand it.

The purpose is to find YOUR purpose. We are all different, and it changes over time anyway.

I'm annoyed by annoying people, who, having posted their opinion, won't give it a rest!
We've all heard you!!
I'm off to bed now, play nicely.

You shouldn't be annoyed by truth. You should be annoyed by delusion.

@AliceMaforethought
Something wrong with you. You're determined to get your point across, newsflash, you have, now go & annoy someone else.

I make no apology for 'bellittling' harmful nonsense. All this delusional dross written by someone millenia ago and still trotted out by sheep needs to be a figure the DSM for various cluster b personality disorders.

Well said @calliopespa and @cornflakecrunchie and shame on you @AliceMaforethought for belittling other people's beliefs.

Anything other than procreation is navel gazing? Great art, music, literature, kindness, charity, trying to make the world a better, more just place; navel gazing?

Yes, I have!

@AliceMaforethought Well, you've responded.

The only person forcing their belief was the one who was literally giving chapter and verse of a fictional story.

@AliceMaforethought
We all have our own beliefs.
Some of us aren't rude enough to try & force them on others. You've made your point. Leave it.

I know. But I felt that on this thread people had mostly.

Try saying that on one of the trans threads. How many religious people genuinely stay in their own lane? Some do, but most don't.

I am not supportive of anything that oppresses anyone, but nonetheless many people do not feel oppressed by it - like the poster you responded to - and many use it as their way of making sense of the world.

I have disagreed with many of the attitudes on here, but I think when it is something as personal as how we as individuals contemplate and navigate the meaning of life , people should be free to express their beliefs without having them denounced as wrong. No-one is forcing anyone to accept anything.

I think it’s whatever you make it. There’s no clear direction so for me it’s to love and protect those around me, make a small difference somewhere and enjoy my time here as much as possible with the people I care about.

It is a delusion at best, a tool of absolute oppression at worst.

Well, people certainly seem to take it pretty literally, like the person on this thread who gave chapter and verse.

@Calliopespa

Religion isn't a mental illness

I agree. However, speaking as someone who works with people who have formal diagnoses of delusional illnesses, they frequently manifest in no different a way to how religious people describe and practice "faith", so I can understand precisely why the term "delusional" is also sometimes applied to the religious.

I think if you delved into religion a little more, you might find it often isn't as literal as you seem to think.

I'm not young, I'm in my forties. Religion is a tool to oppress people, especially women. I have no more respect for it than I do for any other specious philosophy. If people are so entrenched in their delusion, my objections are hardly going to register. People on this site (rightly) say that men cannot become women and vice versa, yet you say we have to 'respect' the belief that a man rose from the dead and that there is some omnipotent being in charge of everything. No, no, and once again no.

Religion isn't a mental illness.

It's the way many people conceptualise or make sense of the unknowable and some of the mysteries or bigger questions of life, such as human souls - a quest which mankind has been absorbed with across most cultures and in most eras.

It's just rude to belittle other people's beliefs.

As for one thing that doesn't exist, it's Emperor of the World.

You sound very young.

Oh please. You really believe all that nonsense? If I was the emperor of the world, the first thing I'd ban is religion. It's a mental illness IMO. If someone told you that you'd seen a man dead and buried who arose three days later, you'd think they were a lunatic.

@AliceMaforethought Do tell how you know it's misinformation?