To show Christianity is Respectable, Desirable and Believable.
Messages on : Freedom, Meaning, Hope, Satisfaction, Identity (Part 1) and Justice.
Christianity has better resources for you.
You can’t live without:
- An identity that is solid enough to handle the ups and downs of your performance
- Satisfaction and happiness that can sustain you through the changing circumstances of life.
- Some way of determining what is right and wrong to do.
- Some way of having hope for the future
- A meaning in life that makes you resilient enough to be able to face suffering.
If one puts aside the existence of God (capture the rest of this…)
[Human beings are] little more than a chance deposit on the surface of the earth, carelessly thrown up between two ice ages by the same forces that rust iron and ripen corn.
Carl Becker
Life Magazine – Meaning of Life article cited
Even though the universe is purposeless and human life is purposeless, your life in not. You make your own purposes and they’re real.
Jerry Coyne
Blogger on the internet… “Does atheism make my life meaningless? Not at all! It’s true I don’t have an absolute purpose in life. I’m not dedicated to glorifying God any more but I find creating my own purpose is thrilling. I’m the author of a novel and that book is my life and the freedom of all this is exhilarating. Life is as happy and meaningful as you make it.”
Terry Eagleton …. Tigers are cuddly
Thomas Nagel – What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy – The meaning of life
From the outside objectively it wouldn’t mater whether you ever existed or not. But why dwell on that?
Thomas Nagel
Is there any meaning in my life that will not be destroyed by my inevitably approaching death?
Leo Tolstoy – Confessions
… Nature does not, in the long run, favour life. If Nature is all that exists — in other words, if there is no God and no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside Nature — then all stories will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without possibility of return. It will have been an accidential flicker, and there will be no one even to remember it. No doubt atomic bombs may cut its duration on this present planet shorter that it might have been; but the whole thing, even if it lasted for billions of years, must be so infinitesimally short in relation to the oceans of dead time which preceded and follow it that I cannot feel excited about its curtainment. …
… The universe is a universe of nonsense, but since you are here, grab what you can. Unfortunately, however, there is, on these terms, so very little left to grab — only the coursest sensual pleasures. You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behaviour of your genes. You can’t go on getting any very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it. You may still, in the lowest sense, have a “good time”; but just in so far as it becomes very good, just in so far as it ever threatens to push you on from cold sensuality into real warmth and enthusiasm and joy, so far you will be forced to feel the hopeless disharmony between your own emotions and the universe in which you really live.
C. S. Lewis – On Living in an Atomic Age
Each new morn new widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows strike heaven upon the face.
Shakespeare, Macbeth
Self-created meaning is far less durable (than? your book or you are cancelled etc.)
My meaning in life is to know God and enjoy Him forever. To glorify God.
Only if your meaning in life is rooted in something outside this world will you actually be equipped for life inside this world.
Recommended authors: Dr. Paul Brand, Richard Shweder
Larissa MacFarquhar – New Yorker, Latest Articles
Boston Review interview of Larissa MacFarquhar – Lives of Moral Saints
There is purpose and meaning in facing suffering for the christian.
- An Emotional Saviour
- Then Jesus wept – John 11:35
- … a deep anger welled up within [Jesus] John 11:33
- A Suffering Saviour
- The leading priests and Phara – John 11:37
- The leading priests and Phara – John 11:37
- A Risen Saviour
- Jesus told her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying. John 11:25
I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all the hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive – but to justify all that has happened.
Fyoder Dostoyevsky