I want to make what may seem an audacious claim. Every person that is living today, has lived in the past, or will live in the future is living for the same purpose. Whoa…wait a minute! You mean to tell me that Atheists, Buddhists, Christians, Deists, Hindus, Jews, Mormons, Muslims, and who knows what else are ALL living for the same basic reason? Yep. Actually, this is fairly easy to prove if you just think about it for a minute. What is the Atheist living for? Personal fulfillment. Since they believe there is no afterlife, they do all they can to experience and achieve what they think will bring them the most personal fulfillment in this life. They may do things that seem to be selfless or humanitarian at times, but even these actions if taken to the root motivation will seen to be done out of a desire to experience personal fulfillment. Take giving money to someone in need. That is looking for the fulfillment of others and not yourself, right? Wrong! The reason anyone would give to someone is because that fulfills them, either by making them feel good about performing a perceived or manufactured duty, or avoiding the societal guilt that they might feel if they didn’t help someone in need. The same is true for Christians. Why do Christians believe in a higher power, and why do they believe in the resurrection of Yeshua the Christ, and why do they (or at least some) seek to “work out their salvation with fear and trembling”? Is it just because they happen to for no reason love the Almighty? No, it is because they want a personally fulfilling eternity. They too are living for personal fulfillment, though in their case it extends beyond this life.

Really, everything everyone does is at its root done for personal fulfillment. One may have to dig through a pile of secondary and tertiary reasons, but that is always the root. And we would think very strangely of a person that was not living for their own personal fulfillment. We would probably think they were mentally retarded. After all, who is going to do things they feel will never (either in this life or after this life) give them personal fulfillment in any way? I don’t even know if that is possible. So, the next time you are talking to someone with a different worldview or outlook than your own, realize that both of you are actually seeking and living for the same thing; you are just using different routes to get there.