Dirty, I'm gonna pick on you in this thread too, just because you open a door to my viewpoint--playing devil's advocate kickstarts my thought process (although there's some irony in that phrasing). I promise it's not personal/I'm not trying to single you out.
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Originally Posted by Dirty
Then you get off the ride and you're either like... Yo I wasted my time on that piece of **** ride. Or you say.. Damn, that ride was awesome.
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How do you judge that, though? What do you put value on and why? You said in an earlier post that you want to do good for the world--how do you define good in such a way?
For me, the answers to that sort of question boils down to acknowledging one is a part of something larger than the self. Doing good becomes a matter of realizing one's actions have consequences and attempting to navigate those consequences (we're not perfect so we can't always see the outcomes of certain actions, but we can try--that's the point). Conversely, evil is not doing that--it's putting one's-self above all others and acting accordingly.
Once one gets that far, it's not that much of an intuitive leap to realize there's an everflowing chain of cause and effect involved in the world. Yes, I control what I do and how I react to the world around me, but that world is shaped by the equally conscious choices of everyone else in the universe. But people's consciousnesses are symbiotic, they inform each other (this is what culture is, by the way), so out of that emerges this idea of a sort of collective consciousness--the idea that the whole is somehow more than the sum of its parts and that each piece exists as an integral part of that whole. To wit, everything that happens to me happens because everything that has gone on in the universe prior to now has led things to this point and everything I do will contribute to that shaping of the universe. Nothing is random and nothing exists in a vacuum; it's all part of a perfect system.
I'm not explaining it as well as I could (I'm tired) but that's sort of how I see god. I don't ascribe to any particular religion because to do so immediately defeats the point for me, but I do believe in a higher power, even if it's not exactly personified. And for those who do believe in a personal higher power, I can usually find my idea of god buried somewhere within theirs.