Anyway, I sometimes feel devoid of meaning in life when I do not have a connection with this path. When I reengage I feel a semblance of group membership and purpose. But sometimes I wonder if this is just a result of always having hoped that something ‘out there’ or ‘deep in here’ is going to fullfill that meaningless. To some extent, I wonder if this is all a hankering created by aspiration rather than an inherent spirituality. It may be the hankering for more that makes what is seem meaningless?

Maybe if we accept that life is meaningless, at least not innately meaningful, we can begin to find that it is not pointless? Maybe in that case there would be no need for spiritual aspiration.

Here is my own counterargument. I am not spiritually advanced at all. However, the hints I have had of mercy have been so wonderful that it does cause everything else to pale in comparison. Maybe it is easy to chuck spirituality in lieu of earthly existence, before spirituality proper has been experienced?

I think his main point is that hard-core atheists have so deeply invested themselves in the nihilism Shaeffer points out in Rorty and Singer’s perspectives that they necessarily fall back on “religious” habits of thought (keep in mind Dawkins’ “cultural Christianity”), the need to somehow make some sense of life. (I suppose that’s how they might avoid being consumed by Sartre’s nausea.)

If I were to ask my students to locate Shaeffer’s thesis, I believe they’d take me to the last sentence of his third paragraph:

Maybe, if wanting meaning is the way people are, and we are part of nature, then those feelings—however they express themselves—might indicate something true about the reality of nature and the way it actually is, rather than just signaling an emotional need for religious therapy.

One thing I especially appreciate about this thread is that it spurred Swami’s discussion of essential detachment. I find it eloquent in all the best senses of the word.

Are theists automatically endowed with high morality? The history tells us otherwise. Religious wars, religious persecutions, exploitation of the people by the clergy, religious fanaticism and bigotry form a major part of history and are with us even today.

The problem with many religious people is the tendency to whitewash history and make it fit their preaching efforts.

I had a Mexican friend named Jesus Rodriguez.
Everybody called him “HEY ZEUS”!

Well, I rest my case, and sorry about the misunderstanding, worm in stool. I must have read someone else’s post.

From my research, Jesus was a substantial qualititative improvement on YHWH despite the fact that hell is introduced as a concept in the Gospels. That seems more related to Roman religion than to Jesus. But hell is an immensely unpalatable concept that causes little but repulsion in me. Fear tactics do little to convince me of the need for faith.