“I want to decide my own purpose”: Meme from The Way of the Heathen

"I don't want my entire reason for existing decided by a manufacturer, like I'm a memory chip in some cosmic video game. I want to decide my own purpose."

“I don’t want my entire reason for existing decided by a manufacturer, like I’m a memory chip in some cosmic video game. I want to decide my own purpose.”
-Greta Christina, The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life
(from Chapter 6: “Why Are We Here?)

(Image description: above text, juxtaposed next to image of inside parts of a computer.)

I’m making a series of memes/ inspirational poster thingies with my favorite quotes from my new book, The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life. Please feel free to share this on social media, or print it and hang it on your wall if you like. (The image above is pretty big: you can click on it to get a bigger size if you like.)

Way of the Heathen cover
The Way of the Heathen is available in ebook on Amazon/Kindle and on Smashwords for $7.99. The audiobook is at Audible. The print edition is at Amazon and Powell’s Books, and can be ordered or carried by pretty much any bookstore: it’s being wholesaled by Ingram, Baker & Taylor, IPG, and bookstores can buy it directly from the publisher, Pitchstone Publishing. Check it out, and tell your friends!

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“I want to decide my own purpose”: Meme from The Way of the Heathen
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One thought on ““I want to decide my own purpose”: Meme from The Way of the Heathen

  1. 1

    One of the many reasons that I freaking loved Way of the Heathen was the many times I thought: “That’s exactly how I feel!”
    Case in point: I used almost exactly this analogy in a letter to a Christian friend that I’ve been debating philosophy with:

    “I do think that we are better off choosing and making our own purposes. It strikes me as similar to the difference between an inventor’s relationship with her creation and a parent’s relationship to her children. An inventor creates something, and that creation exists for the purposes of that inventor. It has no telos of its own. It exists to further the aims and desires of the inventor. But a parent does not dictate the purpose of her child. The parent can help shape the child to some extent, and give advice and aid when necessary. But ultimately, the purpose of the child is their own to decide. A parent should not raise a child merely to further her own aims. To do so is to inflict a hideously circumscribed life upon them, and to imprison them in a cage of expectations, where they cannot become an autonomous adult. Every child deserves to be able to make their own way, and to discover and define their own purpose for themselves.

    “Even if God exists, I would rather he left our purposes up to us. God’s purposes would necessarily have to override our own. And even God’s purposes for us would be subjective. They would be God’s subjective purposes for us, replacing our own subjective purposes. This relationship is necessarily zero-sum: if God’s purposes trump ours, then we cannot have our own. The only substantive difference between so-called “objective” purposes and our own subjective ones is that one of them is given authority by the creator of the universe, and the other is created by us, for us. I know which of those two options I’d choose.”

    (Most of the other reasons that I freaking loved Way of the Heathen were the new insights that I wouldn’t have thought of on my own, but I immediately recognized as brilliant.)

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