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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Sarah P.

My existence simply is. I make of my life what I want to make of it. And that’s kind of beautiful.

I grew up in a small southern town with deaf parents in the 1950s, when it wasn’t cool. Because they thought it was best for me, my parents put me in a conservative fundamentalist church. I think their rationale was that I might be happier without them—to be with “normal people.” I wasn’t. But I was too young to understand and accepted that this was my lot in life. This stoic acquiescence is important.

What ended up happening is that I was taught three things: that I was born in a freak family because of some unknown horrible sin committed in my family’s history; that even after being baptized at the age of 8, God could at any time send me to Hell because I hadn’t actually received the Holy Spirit; that God judges us on how we dress, where we come from, how much money we have, and how connected we are in the community. I was a dirt poor girl from a freak family. Doomed.

Of course I rebelled and went on a very long quest to seek God and true meaning. I tried TM, camped at ashrams, appropriated eastern religious iconography, wore crystals, a true flower child of the 60s. Never found God, though. So then I became a super vegan crunchy mom. Perhaps meaning was found in motherhood. I would be the perfect mother and wife. That didn’t end so well.

Then several years ago, I was diagnosed with a benign mass on my right frontal lobe. It was during that scary time that I turned to philosophy. I studied teleology for fun. Finally, I came across Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. I know most freethinkers found enlightenment in The God Delusion, but for me, Dennett opened up new ways of seeing the universe and my part in it. I have now read every book Dennett has written. And yes, I have since read Dawkins, Sagan, Hitchens, and a whole host of wonderful thinkers in the Freethought blogs.

The end result is that instead of a stoic acquiescence of my lot in life, I now feel a serene acceptance that my life is what it is. In fact, I think I have stumbled upon the real secret to life: that there is no secret. My existence simply is. I make of my life what I want to make of it. And that’s kind of beautiful.

Image via Mysianne under CCL 2.0

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