This post is a response to an anonymous ‘comment’ by, I think, our camp friend, Don. I have asked him several times to ensure his name is attached to his comments but he persists in submitting anonymously. This is the reason I haven’t published the comment he so generously blessed us with in response to It’s A Small World After All. It has all the hallmarks of a Don sermon: it’s overlong, condescending and redefines words to suit his agenda. Here it is with my comments in blue.
Neal, you’d be right at home with Kafka and Nietzsche. Who is this ‘Neal’ of which you speak?
As you come to the end of the essay – good one by the way – I think you do something that many do; you confuse purpose and meaning. It is easy to do. Even the theologians do it. But you, the great Don Camp, do not because you know better than everyone else. We should all fall on our knees before such a wonderful and wise prophet.
Purpose is what I do or am to do. And I do need that. It is work. I think it is built into us. I feel like I have fulfilled my purpose when (I) serve others.
Meaning is what I receive. So we’re playing semantics again. Despite the fact that meaning and purpose are two sides of the same coin, you want to split them and make them substantively different.
I asked AI to define meaning and it came up with this:
There is no single objective meaning to life; instead, it is a blank canvas. Philosophically, the prevailing view is that you are responsible for defining your own purpose (my emphasis). People generally find meaning through personal connections, pursuing passions, contributing to the world, and embracing the experience of being alive.
Oh dear, even silly old AI ‘confuses’ meaning and purpose. Evidently it needs you, Don, to advise it.
Meaning is what I receive. It is joy. It is what I receive when I sit on a high cliff and watch sea waves crashing upon the rocks below. Or the joy I receive when I stand and survey rolling hills of sage and juniper trees and bunch grass bowing in the warm wind. Or the joy that sweeps over me when I sense God close and am embraced by his goodness. And in all these and many more I feel like this is what I was made for. In all these I feel a oneness and completeness. I could be at peace with these forever. These are subjective feelings, as you inadvertently acknowledge with your use of the word ‘feel’. For some reason you mistakenly interpret your own emotions as externally supplied. You say you ‘receive’ meaning in this way as if it’s transmitted from somewhere outside yourself. It isn’t; what you’re experiencing is ‘emotional reasoning’, mistaking emotions for something that exists beyond yourself.
Your emotions are not meaning in themselves. Listening to the grass grow or watching the ocean waves for all eternity isn’t going to provide you with anything like meaning. Not that you’ll get the chance, of course, when you’re not going to live forever. How careless of you to confuse feelings with meaning, Don.
But I am brought back too soon to a world that is too much with us. That’s the fleeting nature of emotions, Don. Feeling the world is too much ‘with us’ (incorrect preposition?) is also an emotion, not an eternal truth. What it comes down to is, as Exub1a puts it, preferring your own constructed reality over the beautiful chaos of real life.
I think the two together, purpose and meaning, are what life is about. But they are only satisfying to me when they include forever. Oops! Offer is time limited and excludes forever. Sorry Don. You’re living in a delusion. Without that there is an incompleteness, like the loss when one who was part of that completeness dies. Says who? It’s a non-sequitur to claim that life without delusion is meaningless. Of course, it’s an assertion beloved of religionists who like to tell non-believers their lives are meaningless without their imaginary God. It’s a lie, Don.
Without that I at 81 would be an old man like Ernest Hemingway when the fishing and hunting and women were gone. The only thing left is to end it. Nonsense. You’re very fortunate to be 81. I know 81+ year olds, who enjoy life as I, a mere stripling of 71, do. Even when it is restricted by the infirmities of older age there is still much to live for. If your fantasy is all that makes your life worth living, you are indeed to be pitied (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:19).
That’s it, Don. If you want to comment in future your comment must include your name somewhere. Otherwise, straight in the trash it goes. And what would be the purpose of that?
rejectingjesus, 
Neil (‘Neal’) sed: These are subjective feelings, as you inadvertently acknowledge with your use of the word ‘feel’. For some reason you mistakenly interpret your own emotions as externally supplied.
Silly Neil. When Don slaps a Jesus sticker on an ancient myth, it becomes a “real myth.” Likewise, when Don slaps a Jesus sticker on a feeling, it becomes a “real feeling,” origin: God!¡!
Anonymous Don sed: Or the joy that sweeps over me when I sense God close and am embraced by his goodness.
It’s statements like these that make me wonder if you’ve even read the book. God is rarely good. He’s arrogant, selfish, cruel, and malevolent. But seldom, if ever, “good.” You are lying to yourself about the character of this Canaanite god. And you lie to yourself again when you believe you have a relationship with a character in a book.
This is why you’ve been nicknamed ‘Delusional Don’ time and time again as you wonder the internet. You’re off your nut.
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Neatly and hilariously summed up, Kos.
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I admit I didn’t read the entire post, but koseighty’s comment included a reference that I had to comment on … Or the joy that sweeps over me when I sense God close and am embraced by his goodness.
Isn’t it wonderful that the mentioned “joy” that sweeps over this person isn’t limited to any “God” and can be experienced by EVERYONE??? IMO, to limit this (or any) sensation to a particular entity takes away from the human experience.
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But Nan, you can only have “real joy” if you take your joy – from whatever source – and slap a Jesus sticker on it. Don taught me that.
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Wait, what?! Nan didn’t read the whole post? It was that bad!?
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Heh-heh. No, not bad. Just a bit longer than I was in the mood to read.
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Your super friend Don here, Neil. You have been out of teaching for awhile I imagine. Today teachers encounter A I assisted composition daily. Kids, I guess, think they can get away with it. But A I composition is so bland and boring that it is obvious I don’t really think I would trust a machine to give me a nuanced definition of anything.
Sure, feelings are subjective. I did not intend otherwise. Almost everything we experience is subjective. That does not make the experiences unreal. You cannot quantify, measure, and weigh everything. If I have read your own experiences with religion correctly, they sound just as visceral as anything I have proposed. Reasoning almost always follows feeling. Would you say your visceral reactions to religion were unreal and without content?
“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—”
You’ll have to take up the preposition with Wordsworth. Maybe you skipped the Romantics.
One of the most meaningful things in my life has been love. To love and be loved is perhaps the most meaningful thing in life, but I confess to being a romantic. I wonder, however, what it more important and more meaningful for you?
I write for myself as much as for others. It is part of my thinking process. It forces me to organize my thoughts and test my opinions when I go back and review. I think it part of a writer’s discipline.
I like you enjoy the moment, the beauty, the relationships, yes, even the emotion. I enjoy them so much that I would like them to continue. There is so much I have not seen, enjoyed, and experienced in 80 years. There are so many relationships that have been short, for life moves on. Even my experience of God is brief if this is all there is. I deeply look forward to picking up where we left off in this life. Today I drove into the hills and was moved by the beauty of the clouds and new wheat gracing the hills. But there are so many more hills to explore. Only forever can fulfill that appetite for beauty and relationships. I wonder that you do not feel that as well, Neil.
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Isn’t this more or less what Anonymous Don said first time around?
Just two points: using AI as an illustration is not ‘relying’ on it, not like you rely on your feelings anyway.
And second, I didn’t miss the Romantics – I practically live in Wordsworth country – but did miss your misappropriation of one of his phrases. How about citing the poem in which he describes measuring his garden pond next?
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Shall I compare thee to a measured pond?
wait . . .
No. That’s not it. Well, dang!
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Close!
‘You see a little muddy Pond
Of water, never dry;
I’ve measured it from side to side:
‘Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.’
The Thorn (from that difficult second album).
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Your dear friend Don here. RE: The Garden Pond. Wordsworth was just a bit of a dark Romantic, wasn’t he. I would be also. I’d be interest, Neil what era do you relate to? I’d guess, Naturalism or Postmodern.
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Don here. I wrote about this Wordsworth poem six years ago. Listen | Biblical Musing
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Don here. You’ll note I called it a garden pond rather than a muddy pond. I think of it a pond in the garden of the world.
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