Secular Symposium: Meaning Without God

Last updated on: February 4, 2016 at 3:38 pm by Martin Hughes

Secular Symposium: Meaning Without God 2016-02-04T15:38:35-06:00 Martin Hughes

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Curtis H.

The awe of being and thinking about this supremely beautiful, absurd joke we call a universe is all the “meaning” I need to live the long and joyful ticks of time.

Until my senior year in high school I think I would have been baffled at the thought of someone asking me what my “meaning” of life is. I got up pretty much every day without a thought, going through the days as they piled up on each other (although I knew I wanted to stay out of my father’s way his anger).

But somewhere in that time period I started reading Voltaire and Rousseau, and a sense of what the world of ideas was about and how to make sense of them started to blossom. Soon I was a Thomas Huxley agnostic.

Ah, but the neighborhood teen peers led me to the Church of Christ and soon after that I was “taking Jesus into my heart” with full immersion baptism.

To cut to the chase, “meaning” to me is a mindset.

What is the thought process that percolates in my seemingly infinite possible connections and pathways of that molecular biological mass sitting in the dark space of my skull? A mindset. Everything I have seen, read, heard, felt with my tongue or skin, imaged abstractly, make up this mindset. That mindset gives me the ability now to no longer cry to God or Jesus about the suffering that comes my way, as I used to as a Christian who pled for help to rid the pain of the consequences of very bad decisions I or my love ones had made.

My found “meaning” of what it is to be an atheist is the sweet taste of total acceptance in a paradoxical universe that, for me, needs no creator. The awe of being and thinking about this supremely beautiful, absurd joke we call a universe is all the “meaning” I need to live the long and joyful ticks of time. The time that my organized set of molecules stay organized. Yes, I may miss out on heaven, but so be it. I don’t worry about Christians telling me that they won’t miss out on heaven and that I will.

Image from Cyril Rana via CCL 2.0

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