Wrestling with Religion

Arguably, my earlier posts linking the meaning of life to instinct and passion evade rather than answer the question. Maybe I've conflated know-nothing states with knowing. There are two distinct kinds of knowing represented by different words in German: knowing-how and knowing-about. If knowing how to act with instinctive assurance implies knowing-about, then earthworms are philosophers.            Knowing-about the meaning of life implies being able to make categorical, meaningful statements, or that's the dream of reason. We want to point to something and say, "There is is. That's the meaning. That's real. It exists." Or even, "That really matters." This is different from merely acting decisively. If knowing-about is what we're after, my earlier posts are evasions. They say, "Don't look," rather than telling what to see. They name discomforts rather than destinations. Distractions rather than deities. Suppose that the meaning...

Christmas can be depressing. A slide into the blues may begin in autumn with seasonal affective disorder (SAD). Short days, especially in Christmassy northern climates, can lead to depression, social withdrawal, and thoughts of suicide. Serious, debilitating SAD is rare, but one in five people suffer "winter blues" as sunlight dims. So "holiday blues" depress moods that may already be low. What "should" be a happy time is sad because of excessive eating, drinking, spending, and  social pressure. Then there's the gap between memories and reality. We remember loved ones absent by death, divorce, or distance. We miss old friends,  alone  in crowds of acquaintances. And when the holidays don't automatically bring joy, we're disappointed. HAVE A LESS DEPRESSING CHRISTMAS               (To the tune of "Holly Jolly Christmas") Have a less depressing Christmas than you did last year. Try to shrug off bah-humbug and chug another be...

  I have linked the "meaning of life" to instinct,  my little terrier's life exploding with meaning as he chases the yellow cat from his backyard. Meaning is his moment of doing what he is instinctively called to do. Instinct derives from the Latin instinctus 'impulse,' a compound of the prefix in- 'toward' and a verb meaning 'to goad.' It is the image of a herdsman prodding on a beast along with a sharp stick, a cowboy's spurs. Instinct hurts us into action.  Etymologies don't dictate current meanings, but there is insight here. Instinct, however pleasurable it may be to fulfill, springs from a goading of dis-ease. Buddhists call this  dukkha , loosely translated 'suffering.' My dog hates the yellow cat. It hurts him to see it in his yard as intensely as it gratifies him to chase it away. If he could rid the universe of yellow cats, he would. Instinctual meaning is inseparable from pain and evil, the goads of instinct. If every...

  A search for the Meaning of Life shouldn't limit itself to our species. Humans, however scene-stealing, entered the stage of life only recently and are a fraction of the cast. Any formulation of life-meaning must point beyond language, absent from most life forms, and name something that subsists beyond naming, something shared with all life. My daily companion, Rumi, is a convenient subject to study--more expressive than bacteria and less elusive than the lizard on the porch. As co-evolved mammals, the dog and I speak similar body languages. Lying on the window seat and lazily surveying the backyard, he sees the neighbor's yellow cat and his life is suddenly infused with meaning. An electric absolute explodes in his little body. He knows what must be done. There is no reflection, no ambiguity. If I open the back door, he runs, hurling himself at the cat. He is clearly going about his father's business   (Luke 2:49) , the business of myriad furry mothers and fathers bef...

  Back when I was in my sixties, the twenty-year-old son of a friend was shot to death. The shooting wasn't justified, shooter convicted of aggravated manslaughter, but the young man took risks I wouldn't have, even at his age, rushing into a confrontation over a woman. He was, compared to my milquetoast youth, an impulsive and erratic quester on the edges of conformity. In mythological terms, he was a would-be hero killed by his dragon when the maiden betrayed him. I shouldn't have been surprised that notebooks shared at his memorial service indicated that he had been, in his own words, searching for the "meaning of life." My reaction to this (of course, not shared with anyone at the service) was sardonic laughter tinged with wonder. I'm not sure if a quest for "the meaning of life" would have made sense to me even at age twenty, but I long ago abandoned it as a fool's errand, a snipe hunt. In its naive sense at least, the question What does ...

In his second inaugural address near the end of the deadliest war in America. Abraham Lincoln observed that both sides "read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other." While tempering judgement "with malice toward none," Lincoln wondered (as most of us would today) how anybody could pray to a just God to preserve slavery.  Apologists for race-based slavery pointed to Biblical slavery (a very different institution) and described Africans as perpetual children in the economic family, blaming its cruelties on cruel masters, not a bad institution. But the brutality of American slavery was obvious to any who dared to look. Slaves could be whipped, starved, raped, and worked to death with impunity--protected only by a master's profit motive or benevolence. Although murder was llegal, white killers of slaves were seldom punished. Blacks, on the other hand, were lynched or legally executed merely for insults to whites--certai...