The point of this one is that typical do-good principle is not always good choice since it can lead to disaster. Skip the frist chapter, the chpaters about food production and crysis at far east are what matters here.
(Un)sustainable development
Spirituality is not a 'do-good principle' first of all, so I believe your latter point is moot to me.
Spirituality does not directly make me wish to be morally righteous—it is not a cause, nor is it the reason.
For me, it is simply a feeling, separate from these other desires. It is a very strong feeling. It is not a belief in the afterlife, or paradise. It is not a whole set of emotions, neither do I believe that everyone has a sense of spirituality. I am pretty sure that not everyone does. But it is part of
my reality.
Neither would I say that spirituality gives me a purpose of life. But it gives me a sense that there should be a purpose in life.
I will focus now on what you said near the beginning
The thing is that you and many other people in general are searching for a purpose. But on the other hand I have deteached myself enough that something crystallized in my head.
Sinceever people are searching for answer(s) on this question but what if the quetion itself is wrong? What if we are searching simply because our brains alows us to do so? But what if we are just playing games with our brains and we don't even grasp the basic things about reality since we have a need for purppose.
What I am saying is that things can get so impersonal and abstract that nihilism is not the right word for it.
Hopefully I have read this right... I'll try to reword it as I interpreted it so you may point out if I made a mistake. So you suggest that people's search for a purpose in their life is simply like an automatic brain mechanism that we allow ourselves to 'follow' and that in fact it actually distracts us from what is real (reality) in the world.
But let me argue against what I think I have understood you to say. Let's say I agree that searching for a purpose in life, or asking this question
Why? is indeed a brain mechanism.
What if I suggest that it makes no difference, and that this is not something that we can change?
Let me compare it to another ‘mechanism’ that we use commonly in life. Rationality.
I argue that rationality itself is also an automatic brain mechanism. Why should we believe in it…? Why should we be rational? Why should we be scientific?
In short, the basis of rationality is our belief that the future will always follow from the past. But why should I believe that the future will be like the past? What if instead, I believed that the future will NOT follow from the past. This is possible for me to believe, just like it is possible for you to believe that we do not need to have meaning in our lives.
Just as we would say that if we were not ‘rational’ and if we believed instead that the future would NOT follow from the past, we would undermine the whole of rational thought, as well as science. We can think the most unseemly things, such as, even though every time someone jumps off a really tall building, they die, THE NEXT time someone does it, he or she won’t. Just as we would say that if we believed the purpose of living was not to have a meaning in life, then we would not have any incentive to live, we would not have a necessity for life itself—thus, there is very reason for us to simply die (without a fight), or to kill ourselves.
Can you prove that we should believe in rationality? Can I prove to you that we should find a meaning in life?
Just like it is natural for us to be rational beings, it is natural for us to be creatures that search for a purpose in life.
However, one does NOT have to be spiritual in order to find a purpose in life. That is only one aspect in life that not everyone may share.
In my opinion, people have a huge misconception about what spirituality can be. This is because the religious have taken this word and messed it up by associating it with the woes of organized religion.
Spirituality does not have to be dogmatic. Spirituality does not have to be defiant of reality. Spirituality, however, does have several definitions. This is the problem with the word, just like there is a problem with the word ‘God’. It is too personal for us to share the same meaning of the word. However I still believe myself to be a spiritual person.
Let me take a quote from a lecture on some of Nietzsche’s ideas I was watching on Youtube. (link here -
YouTube - Nietzsche: Nihilism, Death of God 3/4) I think it explains something I agree with quite well:
[Nietzsche believed that] the more perspectives we adopt and the more evidence that we gain from different perspectives the closer we are to having a good perception of whatever it is we're studying. He will still not say 'the true thing' because he thinks there is no 'true' thing. It's always the thing as perceived from different perspectives. But nevertheless the more perspectives the better.
But this means not just scientific perspectives. There are also ethical or moral perspectives, there are religious perspectives, and of course, there are aesthetic perspectives.
...
One can contrast for example, the aesthetic perspective and the scientific perspective. There is an image that I sometimes use -- a friend of mine, who is a poet. We were sitting in a cafe once and there was a flower on the table, essentially, as he would put it, "stretching its petals towards the sunlight." And I thought, 'Wonderful.' But, I was a biologist. I knew about turgor and all these other things that would explain why the flower was doing what it did. And I thought, here's my scientific explanation, and here's his poetic explanation. Which one is better? And obviously it depends what we need them for, but in the context of having a cup of coffee, I was perfectly happy to say, the aesthetic was preferable.
You have not detached yourself from searching for a purpose in life. You are trying to view it in a strictly scientific perspective. But is any perspective of it the sole truth?
Perhaps you may understand why I reject your notion that the future will lack any spirituality.