How do you figure that they are "utter, demonstratable horseshit"? How do they harm everything they touch?
The fundamental problem with all religions, all ideologies, that attempt to provide a restricted view of reality or "meaning" to existence is ownership.
Collectively I refer to all of these belief systems as the ideology of Externalism, the belief that what exists outside of you has and should have authority over what exists inside of you, your own thoughts and feelings.
But
who gets to decide what the meaning of existence is and
why is the definition that and
not something el
se... and why should anyone care?
Why
isn't the purpose of reality eating chocolate. Or murdering as many people as possible. Or juggling. Or patting your head and rubbing your stomach the most. Or hate. Or playing piano. Or, or, or...
Attempting to restrict infinity leads to some irreperable mathematical flaws which damns any restrictive belief before it even gets out of the gate. Externalism suffers the same infinite regression problems as top-down causality does.
However most if not all of these problems go away as soon as the focus shifts internally. It's perfectly possible for many different people to have many different points of view. It's just as normal for many people to have their own personal value that they give to various action and events in life. And moreover, this sort of dynamicism is supported by evidence, whereas the objective life purpose ideas of externalists simply aren't. Just look to the double standards for gods that HyperMagda pointed out for some examples.
Further, what you said about why people dismiss the concept of meaningless existence has, I think, been discussed ad nauseum on this forum, and the exact reasons you put forth (namely, emotion and fear) are exceptionally, exceptionally weak.
Keep in mind that when I say "meaning" I mean it in the sense that your are here for an externally defined purpose. Such as fulfilling gods plan, or learning to love and return to the source, etc. As shown above these sorts of beliefs suffer the problem of ownership, unable to justify themselves in an objective way, which means it's not
possible to be clinging to such a belief for a rational reason. The only reasons I've ever seen anyone turn away from meaningless universe ideas is because it doesn't make them feel good.
I am not really sure what you mean by that. Are you referring to the concept that people are reincarnated into a sequence of lives and are supposed to learn from that experience?
Yes. The problem with those concepts is, once again, ownership. Who gets to decide what the person is learning and why.
I second this. I'm also curious how the overwhelming NDE reports of unconditional love and that our existence is "all about love" strike you. From some of your previous posts, that doesn't seem to fit into your worldview.
The problem with all the NDE evidence is that doesn't actually demonstrate that reality is about love. It's just some dude telling some other dude that reality is about love. It'd be like me saying to some guy in Japan that Canada is all about poutine and hockey in a video chat. I could hold some poutine up to the camera or walk them around a stadium but none of that actually proves anything about Canada as a whole. Hell for all he knows Canada could be a communist dictatorship and I'm only showing him the good, tourist friendly parts of the country.
Something else that demonstrates this is that the concept of "love" is either incredibly vaguely defined or is incredibly human centric and thus far from universal. Humans are social animals, our concept of love is likely partly based on that. But what would love be to, say, a sea turtle, who lays eggs on the beach and then leaves forever. If the babies make it to the sea great, if they don't, well sucks be them. Let alone fish and insects that eat their own mates and young or whose young eat each other. Bats that can self abort fetuses if there's not enough food in the environment to raise them. Solitary hunters like many cats, hawks, and sharks who don't care about anything except themselvs and occasionally their family if that. The list goes on.
I'm not saying that all the NDE'ers are lying. I've had a huge amount of my own experiences showing that yes, there appear to be people who really do believe all of this on the other side. Some do it because they genuinely do want to help people just because it makes them feel good for helping, sometimes because they were helped themselves. But others do it to manipulate people for personal gain such as getting people to "pray" to them and do other emotional and mental focusing things for them. Basically using humans as glorified reiki batteries to make themselves more powerful.
And there's whole spectrum in between.
But let's assume for a moment that it's all true, that earth or even this whole universe really is a school and it really is all about love. What about the
rest of infinity?