Are you incapable of logical thought? Or do you simply fall back on feel-good platitudes when you have nothing else to say. Do you have any idea of the meaning of "enlightened self-interest?" That you airily dismiss whole fields of ethics and philosophy as the "movement of meaningless molecules in a meaningless universe" does not speak well of your intellectual abilities.
If you really believed that, you would not be answering me, would you? In fact I'm just following the chain of the internal logic of your belief system and apparently I've touched a nerve because you're now resorting to insults.
Or do you simply fall back on feel-good platitudes when you have nothing else to say.
Do you call the arguments of others "feel-good" platitudes when you cannot refute them?
Do you have any idea of the meaning of "enlightened self-interest?"
I know what it means -- it is an idea based on the assumption that people who believe it is in their self-interest to see to the welfare of others will always be a large enough percentage of the population to ensure the existence of civilization. Human nature and human history say "fuhget about it" because it is based on the ever shifting sands of mob rule.
Any truly good civilization has to be based on something that either is, or is at least perceived, to be eternal and transcendent. "Enlightened self-interest" is neither eternal nor transcendent.
Besides, it is irrelevant to my point, which is that any philosophy that presupposes no God and no afterlife saws off the very branch it is sitting on, like the lefty war protesters who say that there is no objective morality and in the same breath call the war immoral.
You cannot have a philosophy without stipulating that life has inherent meaning and purpose (unless nihilism is your philosophy).
Yet you cannot say there is no God and no afterlife where justice and mercy are finally made perfect and still profess that life has inherent meaning and purpose. At that point, everything becomes purely subjective and life has no transcendent meaning that is independent of what anyone thinks of it. Your moods and emotions of the moment are the law that is rewritten minute by minute. There are no facts, no truth; only opinions, desires, impulses and appetites.
That you airily dismiss whole fields of ethics and philosophy as the "movement of meaningless molecules in a meaningless universe" does not speak well of your intellectual abilities.
In other words, that I disagree with you means I'm stupid.
Follow what I said: If we just live and die by chance in a universe that came into existence by chance, all the "enlightened self-interest", all the fields of ethics and philosophy -- all fields of learning PERIOD, that have ever been or will ever be -- are meaningless. Your life and every life is just a bunch stuff that happens for no reason at all. Everything is futile.
You can pretend that life has meaning and purpose, but at the end of the day, like a child playing make believe cops and robbers with his friends, darkness comes and you have to stop playing and go to sleep, never to wake up again.