As for the purpose of life, for me, the purpose of MY life is to be happy, love people close to me, have kids, and help them become independent thinkers who can survive in our very complicated and competitive world. I love to learn new stuff, I am always 'a fucking newbie', aka af_newbie in any new field, I start to explore. That is why I am here in this world. To learn and help others in my life.
Very sad story about the little girl. Any purpose can be twisted if isolated and misunderstood. I don't know the entirety of the circumstances that lead to the tragedy but I would agree that some religious groups focus on heaven with an intensity that places them at risk of neglecting the here and now. This is an area where many Christians can in my opinion learn something from Judaism.
All moral precepts can if isolated and misunderstood be twisted into evil. Take the purposes you shared. They are all good things but each in isolation can also be twisted.
To be happy: If twisted to extremes can lead one to selfish pleasure seeking and hedonism prioritizing ones happiness over all else.
To desire kids who thrive amidst competition: Twisted this towards evil takes one to a tribalistic mindset and in extreme cases a desire for eugenic supremacy by whatever means necessary.
To help others: Is noble but it is also a cornerstone of many flawed ideals such as communism and the argument that the need to help others requires we take via force from those who possess abundance to fund the redistribution.
Even the desire to learn and invent new things: This desire most certainly advances human technology and power but it also requires a simultaneous increase in human wisdom to be healthy. Technological innovation alone bereft of wisdom simply simply opens the door to extreme and new forms of evil.
"Slaughterbots" | Presented by ALTERNew Robot Makes Soldiers Obsolete (Bosstown Dynamics)Your stated purposes are all good ones but they are a floating list without a foundation or at least without a foundation you have shared. A solid foundation requires a rational criteria for choosing between them when they conflict as well as a structure that will keep these desires healthy and limit excess when opportunities for excess arise.
In regards to your argument that you cannot have moral improvement with Christianity because the Bible is fixed and unchanging here is what C.S. Lewis wrote in response to this critique.
"Q: Doesn’t tying ourselves to an immutable (unchanging) moral code cut off all progress and acquiesce in stagnation?""A: Let us strip the question of the illegitimate emotional power it derives from the word 'stagnation' with its suggestion of puddles and mantled pools. If water stands too long it stinks. To infer thence that whatever stands long must be unwholesome is to be the victim of metaphor. Space does not stink because it has preserved its three dimensions from the beginning. The square on the hypotenuse has not gone moldy by continuing to equal the sum of the squares on the other two sides. Love is not dishonored by constancy, and when we wash our hands we are seeking stagnation and "putting the clock back," artificially restoring our hands to the status quo in which they began the day and resisting the natural trend of events which would increase their dirtiness steadily from our birth to our death.
For the emotive term 'stagnant' let us substitute the descriptive term 'permanent.' Does a permanent moral standard preclude progress? On the contrary, except on the supposition of a changeless standard, progress is impossible. If good is a fixed point, it is at least possible that we should get nearer and nearer to it; but if the terminus is as mobile as the train, how can the train progress towards it? Our ideas of the good may change, but they cannot change either for the better or the worse if there is no absolute and immutable good to which they can recede. We can go on getting a sum more and more nearly right only if the one perfectly right is "stagnant".
And yet it will be said, I have just admitted that our ideas of good may improve. How is this to be reconciled with the view that "traditional morality" is a depositum fidei [deposit of revelations] which cannot be deserted? The answer can be understood if we compare a real moral advance with a mere innovation. From the Stoic and Confucian, "Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you"; to the Christian, "Do as you would be done by" is a real advance. The morality of Nietzsche is a mere innovation. The first is an advance because no one who did not admit the validity of the old maxim could see reason for accepting the new one, and anyone who accepted the old would at once recognize the new as an extension of the same principle. If he rejected it, he would have to reject it as a superfluity, something that went too far, not as something simply heterogeneous from his own ideas of value. But the Nietzschean ethic can be accepted only if we are ready to scrap traditional morals as a mere error and then to put ourselves in a position where we can find no ground for any value judgements at all. It is the difference between a man who says to us: "You like your vegetables moderately fresh; why not grow your own and have them perfectly fresh?" and a man who says, "Throw away that loaf and try eating bricks and centipedes instead." Real moral advances, in fine [=in conclusion], are made from within the existing moral tradition and in the spirit of that tradition and can be understood only in the light of that tradition. The outsider who has rejected the tradition cannot judge them. He has, as Aristotle said, no arche, no premises"
The lighthouse of Christianity shines because it is based on the reality of an objective & universal Moral Code that we know & have broken. It is this truth which makes Christianity's offer of forgiveness, & its gift of supernatural help towards keeping that Moral Code, so incredible.
On Ethics by C.S. Lewis
