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No need to worry. Bunny is sharp and will know that I was using "cat fur" as a euphemism for your generic argument. If you had used the hammer first I would probably have called it your "hammer argument". If you had used P and Q first I may have said "QP argument".
This is why you are boring and wearying. I have to explain routine stuff just to try to get you to the point where the debate could get interesting.
Unless Bunny chooses to breathe life into this conversation, I am done with you. You simply do not play the game at an interesting level while also holding the opinion that you are somehow winning. Declare yourself the winner again for all I care. That exists in your mind, just like everything else.
I'm slightly hesitant to get involved, since I disagree with both of you about what RLK meant.
Let me make some semi-related comments, although I suspect it might make things more confused rather than less...
I am struggling to understand the "no such thing as short term mattering" summary you both endorsed, since it seems so obviously refuted (and I would have thought you'd have conceded as much previously - ie you've said things like "If materialism is true then our lives matter to us, of course, but..."). I suspect this is an issue of equivocation.
It seems to me there are two concepts being referred to - you hold the view that under materialism/atheism, since the universe will (effectively) be as if I've never existed many years after I have died, my life is insignificant. Or alternatively, it wont/doesnt matter if I existed since the world with me is indistinguishable from the world without. This is the kind of significance/mattering I termed "long term".
I intended to contrast that concept with short term mattering which is the significance that I and my friends subjectively ascribe to my life. On this basis, using the same metric you applied (I think) my life
can be said to "matter", since the lives of me and those who know me
would be different if I had never existed.
I had phrased your position as thinking that 'short term mattering' was really quite unimportant and valueless, whereas 'long term mattering' was much more desirable (as much as it makes sense to desire an ontological state of affairs). However, I have come to suspect that fundamentally, these concepts are very different.
So that's all by way of background. I think I'm coming at all of this from a different point of view than both of you. As such, I'd be hesitant to read too much into my interpretation, but FWIW, to refer to Old Prunes argument:
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Originally Posted by Old Prunes
For clarity, I take your argument to be in the form of "For every object Q, it's properties P can exist if and only if Q exists for an infinite length of time", where you are inserting "purpose" or "meaning" for P and "a human being" for Q.
A sentence like "the furriness of a cat does not exist unless a cat exists for an infinite length of time" seems self-evidently absurd, so I assume you believe that you can explain why your argument is only true for certain Ps or Qs. Change the example to "purpose" and "a hammer" if you think the cat analogy is too cute/frivolous.
I think his point is that since you seem to ascribe significance to events/lives which will continue to be having an effect aeons in the future but think that events/lives which are short-term are inherently insignificant - infinite duration must be a necessary condition of significance.
Bearing in mind my caveat of confusion above, I would think that the two most likely answers are either:
a) this is all equivocation, as I suggested above, and that we're not
really speaking about significance in the short term vs significance in the long term but rather using the same word for two very different things
b) there is an implicit subjective element to long term mattering/significance. It's not the duration which gives the theist meaning but the eternal nature of the subjective point of view of God.
Take all that with a pinch of salt - the whole 'no short term mattering' thing has left me feeling a bit like I've got my face pressed up to the window looking in. I'd have one query though which would help me:
Would you think our lives would have meaning and significance in an atheistic/materialistic world if we were immortal?