If Life is Meaningless Anyway, then What's Wrong with Religion?

[Angrboda]

For my own personal belief, meaning is real, and we never escape it's grasp.  We are built to experience meaning as something real.  That makes it real to us.

You seem to want it both ways. If intentionality is a convenient fiction then it isn’t real. If it isn’t real then proceeding as if it were means living a lie.

We are bathed in a soup of neurochemicals which makes for good, bad, and neutral. The effect of these neurochemicals upon us is real. If we weren't biological creatures, then your abstract philosophical reasoning might have some bite. But we are biological beings. We have desirable experiences because we are biological creatures. It is our response to this brute fact which frames the question of what is real to us: pleasure and pain are real to us, even if from a naturalistic perspective, these are just meaningless nerve signals. To us, they are more. It is real because our brains make it real. It is the difference between being inside the system, and being outside of it. You, too, are looking for a 'universe' perspective, but you overlook that we have a very real 'human' perspective. Thus it isn't living a lie, which is a claim that our internal sensations have no meaning for us. They have meaning because we are built in such a way that they have meaning for us. If I stub my toe, I am not living a lie by hopping around in pain. I really am in pain! This idea that because our pain and pleasure can be deconstructed into mere material interactions that it is devoid of meaning is just rubbish. We don't live in that deconstructed world. Our 'world' is highly structured by things like feelings, intuitions, thoughts, and so forth. That from an outside perspective they are not universal facts means nothing. Meaning is positional; it comes from the fact that emotionally we can gain or lose. That the inside perspective isn't 'real' because it doesn't correspond to some objective fact existing 'out there' is just nonsense. We live inside the bubble. Showing that the things that exist inside the bubble don't exist outside the bubble is not in any sense defusing how they appear inside the bubble. This puddle of flesh in our skull creates a world, filled with things like feelings and thoughts and a 3D world. That this world has no objective meaning does not defuse the fact that it very much has subjective meaning. You are engaged in a sort of category error. Comparing how things are outside the bubble, in one world, with how things are inside the bubble. They aren't the same world, and you're comparing them as if they were. The world inside the bubble doesn't exist 'out here'. That doesn't make that world any less 'real'.