Meaning in the Hunt for God

My Last Foray into the Jungle of Meaning

The big arguement this summer has apparently been centered around intelligent design (yet no one I met brought this up with me) and whether the world was created by said intelligent design. I personally don't think it even matters if this is true or not; the fact is we are apparently on our own now, and have been for at least two thousand years, if not since the begining of human history.

What does this Mean? It means we're really not going to please any higher being by being pious, donating money, or by praying. We're doing these things for ourselves, and that's fine. Really, it is. Tons of people claim to find Meaning in spirtuality, be it in a religous paradigm or not, and if that works for them, cool, at least until they get all up in my face about it and start using it like a sword and not the soul-balm it is intended to be. I have never felt the touch of God, or whatever, but I somehow think even if I did feel it I still wouldn't attempt to find my meaning in such a way. Getting your meaning from latching on to another being, real or imaginary, is what I call HARMFUL CO-DEPENDANCY.

I truly think there is no way we were put here on this earth just to worship some higher being. The idea is ludicrous, though it seems to be doing just fine in the Midwest and beyond. There is no Meaning in worship; think of Wayne and Garth power-bowing to Heather Locklear and saying "We're not worthy". It's funny, but it's also nonsense. There is nothing about her they need to be worthy of. They do not need to define themselves, and what their lives Mean, by some blond supermodel. If there is a God we don't need to define ourselves and our lives according to this God; God sure as shit doesn't seem to care what we think about God. Good and bad things happen all the time and if you try to get Meaning out of these things by tracing them to some unseen hand you'll just go crazy, like Joan of Arc or Tom Cruise.

Whatever you find your Meaning in, it should come from deep within yourself. Like a soul fingerprint !

Thus Ends the Inquiry

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think your post has two seperate seperate but interesting ideas going.

Usually, one doesn't hear the ID argument given in that it negates a meaningful life; although maybe it does. To some people, the idea that self awareness is merely an artifact of millions of years of evolution is incredibly frightening. To others, the idea of having apes as distant relatives is just to repulsive. And some believe that the universe is far too complex to have been the product of a gazillion random interactions.

But, can the meaning of life be found for those who don't believe in a higher power? Humanists would assert they can; that a meaningful life is found through the belief in sucessive generations.

Anonymous said...

P. 2

In his book, "Man's Search for Meaning", Viktor Frankl believed that the meaning of life wasn't necessarily an answer waiting to be found out and about, but rather was located somewhere deep inside each of us:

"Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible."

Of course, he wrote the book on scraps of paper he hid on his person while in the Auschwitz concentration camp, so he has some interesting ideas.

Imagine how much writing like that would suck...

David Oppegaard said...

Thanks for that, Mike. I recommend Maus and Maus II to everyone. They're graphic novels about the holocaust with the Jews as mice and the Germans as cats. Very powerful stuff.

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