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Secular Symposium: Meaning Without God

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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Peter M.

I said once that I found meaning in seeing as much beauty in the world as I can before I die. I think that’s still probably the best way to sum it up.

When I was growing up homeschooled in a conservative Christian family, the most meaningful thing I could do was was live for Christ. What could be more meaningful than saving people from the fires of hell? I told everyone I was going to be a preacher; the purpose of my life was clear.

But I also had a strong desire to explore the meaning in the lives of people that were outside my straight-laced Christian upbringing. So I read, every spare moment I got in my homeschooled upbringing — which sometimes meant sneaking out my room at 3am — I read. My parents didn’t allow me to watch much TV, movies were strongly policed, and limited friends, but reading was less restricted.

When I read, my world changed. I felt like I was there, in the stories, going through what characters were going through. I began to feel meanings in the characters’ lives that were very different from the one I had been told to embrace, which led me to doubt that the meaning I had been assigned was the only one out there.

I was eighteen when I decided I wasn’t going to be a preacher any more. Instead, I was going to be a Christian professor of the humanities in a secular university, showing people how all their stories were ultimately solved by the main “big story” the Bible offered them. I worked very hard on this project — through a BA in English, to an MA in Literature, through a good portion of a Ph.D. in Literature.

When I started writing my dissertation a few years ago, I thought that it was where I was going to prove that all the stories I’d read all my life, all the people I’d empathized with, all the emotions I had felt — all of it could be combined and harmonized into one big story.

But I couldn’t do it. I had grown to respect individual stories so much that I couldn’t force them into one Grand Story that went so clearly against many of their individual desires — especially when the story was increasingly being exposed to me as having no evidence behind it.

So I left Christianity, and gave up on the Grand Story (as an angry dissertation chapter shows). For a while, I didn’t know what meaning was, and while that was bewildering, it was also exhilarating, like a giant weight had disappeared. I could live without worrying about it.

But it’s been a few years now (yes, I’m still working on the dissertation), and I’m discovering, increasingly, that where I find meaning is in those stories — not just the ones in books, but also the ones in individual human lives. My sense of meaning seems to develop and expand with every new story I hear. This leads me, oftentimes, to be protective of some stories I think are underrespresented or being erased.

I said once that I found meaning in seeing as much beauty in the world as I can before I die. I think that’s still probably the best way to sum it up.

Image via NASA Goddard Space Flight Center under CCL 2.0

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