Are You Searching for Happiness?

by Lloyd Harrison Whitling

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Copyright ©2007 by Lloyd Harrison Whitling. All rights reserved. For permissions and more information visit http://www.AtheistLloyd.com/Permissions.html

Are You Searching for Happiness?

by Lloyd Harrison Whitling

We get too easily misled by improperly posed questions. Your best answer to that one should be, "No. I am not 'searching for happiness'.” That is especially true for those whose description of 'happiness' is to become a mind-numbed slave while avoiding the world’s truths and reality. Why, you wonder, would anyone want to disparage happiness?

That is the aim those who set forth that question have for any who would respond. They view happiness as a goal in itself, not just a derivative. Happiness is something we cannot recognize while we are enjoying it. If we are happy, it is because we are too busily enjoying life to be concerned about it.

Religious happiness is just as spurious and false as any other contrived system advertised as 'happiness'. Men build religions to emulate what nature provides, and the religious effect is as temporary as any other artificial construct, and maybe even more harmful than most. Apathy is not happiness. Apathy is a loss of sensation, an emptiness, an absence of mental presence in the reality around oneself. Apathy equates with the religious description wherein one abandons one’s own interests and becomes an indoctrinated slave.

With no other objective in mind, striving to attain happiness is to aim for a straw. Demanding happiness of life, while offering no material input upon which to build it, and depending upon artificial means to generate it, is a lazy person’s scheme. Happiness arrives in accordance with the material effort from which it gets elicited. Aim for what you love, dedicate yourself to that, learn the ropes so you can strengthen your accomplishments, and happiness will result.

We are either happy or unhappy. We know when we are unhappy. When we are not unhappy, we are either happy or zombies. To have a constructive goal in life, and to plan for it and work for it, plays to the gamut of human emotions, all the while our mind is on our struggle with that, and not upon happiness. When happiness becomes our aim, we lose our focus and cater to our emotions rather than our chosen mission in life, and happiness comes to us the same way as to a drunkard: in our mindless oblivion. Happiness is a carrot, made from a straw, to lure people into traps that dull their minds and subject them to the will of others for false promises, to remake them into zombies ‘for a cause’. Oblivion is not happiness. Acting as animals in the frenzy of a hunting pack is not happiness. Happiness wells up from being and knowing yourself, who and what you are or would be, and accomplishing your goals according to that with whatever your circumstances provide.

Searching for Happiness ?

If you want to know about true happiness, try atheism. Yes! Stop the religious nonsense and knuckling under to what others have constructed to dangle in front of you to lead you astray. Know yourself: Find your own carrot by discovering what your true interests in life are all about, assess your circumstances and capabilities, construct your own dream and chase that.

For most people in today's world, religious indoctrination has wiped away most of the sense of self with which they were born. It will require a grand effort to retrieve it. Maybe, for many people, it is forever gone and has been buried under the religious muck with which their minds have become filled.

For those people, feel sorry; but even for them, any real accomplishment provides more valid joy and satisfaction than can be found in religion, which provides only counterfeit joy ill gotten from bogus promises. Any person would be better off to chase after sex than to join with a religion, and to die of a venereal disease than to give his or her entire self to imperialistic religious organizations.

If you have become interested, you can read more here:

http://www.atheistlloyd.com/Content/Religion

http://www.AtheistLloyd.com/secular_spirituality.html

Practical Hedonism

or, buy a couple of books:

Reality 101 and The Complete Universe of Memes