Light Brings Salt
Volume 3, Issue 23 June 5, 2005
Dedicated to the Systematic Exposition of the Word of God
Secularism
and the Meaningless Life!
Dennis
Prager
As
I have noted on occasion, there are three values systems competing for world dominance:
Islam, European style secularism/socialism and Judeo-Christian values. As the
competition in
Perhaps
the most significant difference between them, though one rarely acknowledged by
secularists, is the presence or absence of ultimate meaning in life. Most
irreligious individuals, quite understandably, do not like to acknowledge the
inevitable and logical consequence of their irreligiosity
-- that life is ultimately purposeless.
Secular
and irreligious individuals raise two immediate objections:
1.
Irreligious people, including atheists, are just as likely to have meaningful
lives as any religious person. They need neither God nor Judaism nor Christianity
nor any other religion to have meaning.
2.
Secular and irreligious are not the same as atheistic; many secular individuals
believe in God and therefore whatever meaning accrues from having a belief in
God, they, too, have. They do not need religion or Judeo-Christian values to
give their lives meaning.
The
first objection denies a fact, not a subjective judgment: If there is no God
who designed the universe and who cares about His creations, life is ultimately
purposeless. This does not mean that people who do not believe in such a God
cannot feel, or make up, a purpose and a meaning for their own lives.
They
do and they have to -- because the need for meaning is the greatest of all human
needs. It is even stronger than the need for sex. There are people who lead
chaste lives who achieve happiness, while no one who lacks a sense of purpose
or meaning can achieve happiness.
Nevertheless,
the fact that people feel that their lives are meaningful -- as a parent, a
caregiver, an artist, or any of the myriad ways in which we feel we are doing some-thing
meaningful -- has no bearing on the question of whether life itself is
ultimately meaningful. The two issues are entirely separate. A physician understandably
views his healing of people as meaningful, but if he does not believe in God,
he will have to honestly confront the fact that as meaningful as healing the
day's patients has been, ultimately everything is meaningless because life
itself is. In this sense, it is far better for an individual's peace of mind to
be a poor peasant who believes in God than a successful neurosurgeon who does
not.
If there is no God as Judeo-Christian
religions understand Him, life is a meaningless random event. You and I are no
more significant, our existence has no more meaning, than that of a rock on
Mars. The only difference between us and Martian rocks is that we need to
believe our existence has significance.
Now
to the second objection, that you don't need religion or Judeo-Christian values,
just a belief in God or, as is more popular today, in "spirituality"
to imbue existence with meaning. Theoretically, one can posit the existence of
the God of Judeo-Christian religions without actually believing in any of those
religions or in any of their holy works. There is, however, some absurdity in believing
in the God made known through texts whose authenticity one rejects. "I believe
in the God made known to the world solely through the Old Testament but not in
the Old Testament" is not logically compelling.
Whatever
the logical inconsistencies or theoretical arguments in either direction, the
fact remains that while secular individuals can believe that their own lives
have meaning, secularism by definition denies that
life has meaning. The consequences have been devastating to mental health and
to social order.
Among
these have been increased unhappiness and depression, increased reliance on
drugs and numbing entertainment to get people through life, moral confusion, belief
in nonsense (such as Marxism, fascism, communism, male-female sameness, pacifism,
moral equivalence of good and bad societies, and much more), and perhaps most
ubiquitous, political meaning as a substitute for religious meaning.
Given
that the need for meaning transcends all other human needs, its absence must
create havoc individually and societally. In
government, secularism is a blessing; but most everywhere else it is not.
©2005
Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Honor
Killings Show Culture Clash in
The
latest slaying of a Muslim woman in the German capital has sharpened the debate
over the place of immigrants in
The
accused assailants fled to a place that Surucu knew
well: the home where she was raised. Her killers, police say, were her brothers.
A
23-year-old single mother seeking to escape tradition and religious constraints,
Surucu was the sixth Muslim woman to have died in the
German capital since October in suspected "honor killings," slayings
arranged by families who believe that their reputations have been stained.
Such
crimes are rarely mentioned in
Muslims
confronted with poverty, discrimination and liberal European attitudes. The
case is a portrait of contradictions -- much like Surucu,
whose memorial pictures show her either wearing the hijab,
the head scarf of her Eastern heritage, or with the uncovered hair of her
Western aspirations
(Jeffrey
Fleishman, The