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

[InquiringMind]

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.

 
Is intentionality a convenient fiction the same way that consciousness is a convenient fiction?

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So your life had meaning because you were a 'big shot'? Seems more like self worth than anything else. Why not just join some great cause that means a lot to you where you get to see first hand how your contributions move other people's lives? I volunteered at a food bank and got to physically hand people dry goods and food and got to see their thanks and need. It was life changing.

Possibly.  I always had aspirations to "greatness."  In The Denial of Death, Becker asserts that self-esteem arises from an individual's compliance with the values of the worldview of the culture in which they live.  So in America, we value people who are "successful," or in other words, people who are big shots.  Such people are granted symbolic immortality, as I've talked about in another thread.  So yeah, like many other people, my aspirations to greatness were part of my immortality project.