You have two guys.. One feels like ripping some shit up so he sees a tree and rips it out of the ground. Meaning? It makes him feel strong and powerful. Now it's hot and the air is stale and he has a vitamin c deficiency and he's pissy so he continues his favorite pastime goes and rips up another tree. Other dude is drinking lemonade from the lemons that grew on the tree, enjoys fresh air, and later enjoys swinging on a tire swing. Both of them can tell you their life is meaningful. One of them is just unaware that life could be a whole lot better.

Meaningful is in the mind of the individual.

I regard meaning and purpose as subjective feelings one gets when one has enough value in their life.

The reason that this doesn't work very well for "bad" people is that the value they seek is not sustainable. You can't build an enduring society based on fear and power. You can't always outsmart others who seek to get the better of you, who are playing the same zero-sum game against you that you're playing against them. You can't forever elude justice, as the rest of society will try to remove you as the cancer that you are.

If however one seeks value in virtuous cycles that improve the lives of others, it has a funny way of improving the quality of your own life.

Can a sadistic person be happy making others happy?

What is that supposed to mean?

I can’t see why human life is sacred. Sounds like declaring a privileged position in the manifest schema.

Is canine life ‘sacred’, feline, equine?

If not, why not? If so, why single out human life for special dispensation?

Meaningful? Of course. That would be subjective. One msn’s meaningful is another’s pointless.

The challenge here is to define ‘bad’. One man’s Outlaw is another’s Redeemer.

All down to deviance and normativity. Culture or sub-culture

I don’t see how anyone could think that an individual human life is sacred or precious. Individuals are frail and temporary by design. Life as a process though obviously has value or it wouldn’t exist.

Looking at nature as a whole I don’t see where the concept of morality has a place. Morality is nothing but a superficial human concept—a person who is behaving the way I want him to behave is a moral person.

Sometimes a pack of wolves will go on a killing spree, lay waste to a herd of caribou and leave the meat to rot. Is that immoral behavior? No, they are acting out inherited impulses derived through millions of years of evolution. That is the behavior that works for nature—who are we to sit in judgment?

It would indeed feel stressful to be in constant disagreement with natural processes. Better IMO to view our bodily selves as illusions and identify with the whole—with universal consciousness beyond space and time.

“It is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life”

Damn! I’ve never been a Catholic. Why in hell am I quoting the prayer of St. Francis, and on an atheist web site no less! Please disregard the above quote.

I don't think anyone could really know. Whatever deficits they have in connecting and having empathy with other humans they have adapted to, as maladaptive as it is for an adult, seems would diminish the possibility of a happy life. But maybe they can. What makes a meaningful life, is subjective and their capacity they have to see themselves as bad or destructive is probably elusive.

When you say "bad people" do you mean Jeffrey Dahmer or someone who committed a crime of passion on a bad day? Or someone who embezzled millions because of greed, or a gambling addiction? Or a drunk driver who took out a family of 5, and who is now sober? Who died and left you Judge? (And did I just not point out the problem with religion with that sentence?).

I don't see any reason why there should be a conection between how meaningful your life is and how much the rest of us hate that person.

Firstly, nobody things themselves evil or bad. We are all Saints in our own minds, if we are commit horible atrocities, to us it's the greater good. Therefore being evil is a label placed on a person externally.

Some people need social interaction in order to derive satisfaction from life, others don't. The reason people like to be good and agreeable to begin with is because they don't want to alienate themselves, but someone who was antisocial might not care, so it will have little or no influence on how meaningful they find life.