What is the Purpose of Life?

Fundamentalist Christians (ie, the set of people that I grew up amongst, and obtained most of my formative information from) will mostly say that the purpose of life is to do God's will. The problem with this answer is that it is so vague. It qualifies as a "correct answer" according to Christian dogma, but it is not practically useful. Furthermore, there is a deeper sense of the question that Christianity still does not answer at all. I discovered this through the following conundrum: Christians generally assume that A) Abortion is wrong, and B) Aborted babies go to heaven. Non-aborted babies who live a normal life have several decades to exercise free-will, and may do so in such a way that they end up going to hell. Ergo, the aborted babies who never really lived are better off eternally and spiritually (...ecumenically? grammatically?) than the babies who were not aborted. So, what is the purpose of life (and why isn't abortion actually a good thing)? Even King Solomon said it is better to have never been born (Ecclesiastes 4:3). Even if you take a Calvinist tack, and don't assume that all aborted babies go to heaven (because God is omniscient, and knows what those babies would have done had they lived, and so the ones that were predestined for hell will still go there.), it still does not explain the purpose of life. If God knows where we are all going to end up anyway, then why doesn't he just put us there to start with? Why even go through the motions of life? What is the point?

There was a time in my life when I was very depressed and thought about suicide alot. I would not go so far as to say that I was actually suicidal, because I didn't have the guts to actually do anything. But I thought about death alot, and often wished for it. I could not make up my mind if suicide was a sin or not. The God of the New Testament seems to be fairly forgiving, so even if suicide is a sin, perhaps he would forgive it. Then again... on the off-chance that it is a sin, and will not be forgiven - the whole point of suicide is as an escape, and committing suicide only to then be sent straight to hell was not really the escape route that I had in mind :-/ . Anyway, I got through that rough patch of my life and started thinking about suicide less often. Later, I saw the film What Dreams May Come with Robin Williams, and also read the book The Great Divorce by CS Lewis. Bot of these got me to thinking of one's destination in the afterlife as more a function of one's mindset during life, than as a decision that God makes about you. So, if you commit suicide, you may go to hell, and whether or not God forgives you may not have anything to do with it. So, perhaps the purpose of life has something to do with working on your mindset so that you can create a "heavenly mindset" and actually make it to heaven. There may actually be a path to heaven (ie, The Eightfold Path?), and suicide as a (Cartesian?) point simply does not lie on that path.

So then I started thinking of the purpose of life as practice for a higher level. Part of that practice probably even involved trying to figure out what the purpose of life is! Or maybe more the idea that the more you could improve your mindset, the more of a "head start" you would have once you got to the afterlife. Several Steve Pavlina blogs seemed to go along with this idea of "levels" and the afterlife ("Life - The Ultimate Game," "Levels of Consciousness," and "Life After Death,"). Also, somewhat before I began reading Pavlina, I read The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Williard (and wrote a review). I suddenly got the idea from Williard that the next level could start NOW. Why wait for the afterlife? Then when I read Pavlina, I started to think that there may actually be practical things that one can do to advance in "levels." So then maybe the purpose of life is not to "practice" for a higher level, but to actually start climbing the ladder. For REAL!

As I think about that, and try to figure out what kind of a ladder life is, where is is going, what are the rungs, and where am I on it, I began to come up with another hypothesis as to the purpose of life. I have been getting exposed to the idea of The Law of Attraction from many different sources: Steve Pavlina, Napolean Hill (who may have more responsibility for popularizing this concept than anyone - I had his book recommended to me while attending real-estate investment meetings with my Dad), Tony Robbins, and a movie called The Secret (recently recommended to me by someone at work). Now I am thinking that the purpose of life is just this, to get you to answer one very crucial question: "What do you want???". I also thougt of something that may be a big HINT: In any conversation with life, actions speak much louder than words. Interestingly enough, this actually brings me back to a very short humour piece I read as a teenager The Cookie Principle.