Do you really think there are no more answers to Discover?
If you are talking about the mysteries of existence, then yes, I don't expect to ever know any more about such matters than I do now, and I am fine with that. But at a more mundane level, yes, I continue to learn, but little of it has much value. I've gained several new insights posting on RF for a few years, but none of them changed my life at all. This activity has confirmed my choice of atheism for myself, but I didn't really need that, it makes me no more of an atheist, and the only impact it has on me is in what I post.
I'm almost seventy years old and have led a contemplative life. I've read and traveled extensively. Earlier in life, good new ideas came along frequently, as when transitioning from Christianity to atheistic humanism. Such good new ideas came along increasingly less frequency as time progressed, and today, they are rare indeed.
Doesn't all knowledge enhance one's life?
We might not mean the same thing by knowledge. I mean the set of demonstrably correct ideas. Believers tend to call their fervently held beliefs truth or knowledge, but I don't.
Here's an example of knowledge that if I possessed it, would be irrelevant to my life. This is from a recent discussion on another thread, and a statement of apatheism:
She: "I do not think that God will punish me because I do not please Him, but I believe that God will punish evil-doers."
Me: "Why should a decent person concern himself at all with the possibility that such a god exists?"
She: "A decent person would want to know if God exists."
Me: "Why? It doesn't matter to me, and most people consider me decent. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't be interested in a correct answer if one were available, but it's not, and even if it were, nothing at all would change in my life because of that knowledge except that I would stop calling myself an atheist if the answer were yes, there is or was a god out there somewhere. I wouldn't start talking to it if it weren't present. I still wouldn't believe any human being telling me that they know how this god wants me to live. I wouldn't start congregating with others who knew the same. It would similar to learning that there is life on a moon or planet that isn't earth. "Cool. Exo-life exists. What's for lunch?"
Life is about interacting with others.
Agreed, but not just that. It also involves interacting with nature and with oneself (knowing oneself, contemplation, managing conscious experience), but gods play no role in any of that in my life, and as I just expressed above, I don't see where injecting such an idea into my thinking improves it or the outcomes it leads to.
I point where one can Discover what I have said for themselves.
Thanks, but I don't need help there. Your beliefs seem to serve you, but I've arrived where I wanted to be without them. I suppose that I could instruct and advise you as you have tried to do with me, but I won't. Why? You seem happy and centered without my ideas, just as I am without yours.
This activity that others call searching is just living life mindfully, which I have done for over half of my life. It means experiencing much of the best life has to offer and critically evaluating that experience, developing rules to live by in the process and tweaking them through trial-and-error to achieve desired outcomes. Initially, there is a lot of learning and tweaking, but this slows down over time as successful ideas are accumulated and unsuccessful ones tweaked or expunged, and one can end up with a worldview that works and needs no improving. That doesn't mean that this analytical approach ("searching") ever ceases. It just means that it eventually, new good ideas are infrequent.
Speaking of searching, another poster - a mainstream Protestant Christian - was admonishing me to investigate the supernatural (whatever that means), as if I hadn't already come to a stable position on that matter, as if there was anything I could experience that would change that position, as if there was any more to know on the subject. Like you, I'm sure he meant well, but he had nothing to offer or teach me beyond his faith-based and unfalsifiable beliefs, which have no value to me. And, of course, to him, investigate means to think about supernaturalism until the idea becomes palatable or appealing, which will never happen unless my mind and with it, my critical thinking skills begin to fail.
It seems to be a common value that we should be searching all of our lives for answers including those unavailable to us. I consider it a virtue to recognize when one has reached a stable position that cannot be improved upon and be content with that. Searching for gods and the supernatural is pointless, and at this point, is no different than living life without actively searching for these things. If gods or the supernatural manifest in my life, fine. If they don't, that's fine, too. If they exist, fine. If they don't, that's OK, too. If I ever get an answer, cool! What's for lunch? If I never get an answer, that's perfectly OK, and what I expect will be the case.
