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

[InquiringMind]

 The universe isn't an agent, so it has no perspective.  It's just a category error to expect meaning to come from the universe.  

This is a profound idea.  Only an agent can declare meaning.  The universe isn't an agent and can't bestow meaning or lack of meaning.  

But it's obvious that you care about things.  So much so that it's eating you up at this time.  

Yeah, I probably care too much sometimes.  I care about stuff that I don't need to care about.  

Surely caring is a sign that these things in your life are significant.  Maybe not capital 'S' Significant, but small 's' significant.  You are a social animal.  Certain things matter to you just because of that base fact.  

OK, now I think we're getting somewhere.  In Stage 5 faith, people stop looking for Truth, and instead look for truth.  I've been looking for Significance.  But perhaps there is no Significance, only significance.  Subjective meaning, not objective meaning.  There is not Meaning, only meaning.    

You want love, and you would experience sexual love as significant.  You want the admiration of your peers.  You want status in the scientific world.  You want all the typical things that make life good.  These are significant for you.  All these things are meaningful to you, but you're experiencing their absence at this time.  I think focusing on their absence is making you an existential gloomy Gus.

I suppose that this experience is not particularly unique.  

You've got the telescope trained on the idea that ordinary things can't be meaningful because there's no big 'S'.  I think you've deluded yourself by believing meaning doesn't exist as much as you'd deluded yourself into believing there was a sky daddy.  I don't think we can escape meaning in this life.  It is the water we swim in, so much so that we are distressed by its absence, or seeming absence.  I think perhaps if you concentrated less on the big S and more on the small s'es, you'd be a lot happier.  Epicurean things like good friends, satisfying work, good food, an occasional novelty to spice things up.  In short, I think you're mistaken in believing that life has no meaning; I think you're surrounded by it.  You've just chosen to focus on this idea that life has no meaning.  And I think that's distorting things for you.  We are built by evolution to experience meaningful things in a vast variety of ways.  That you are experiencing a low in your sensus meaningfullitis is no reason to jump to the conclusion that meaning doesn't exist.  I think you're mistaken.  I think it does.

This may be true, but aren't you struggling with finding meaning - with a small "m" - yourself?