Meaning In Tragedy

One rea­son hard­core athe­is­tic mate­ri­al­ism has never caught on in sig­nif­i­cant num­bers is that it is unable to address any exis­ten­tial human issue. It presents no con­so­la­tion con­cern­ing death, and it offers so sys­tem of mean­ing or pur­pose. We humans are more than highly evolved ani­mals. Our needs are quite beyond food and water.

Human tragedy is the fod­der for the nov­el­ist as well as the psy­chol­o­gist. Over the cen­turies, it is still best han­dled by spir­i­tual com­mu­ni­ties. In Chris­tian­ity, the cen­tral fig­ure meets a tragic end but turns it into a life that never ends — a life with none of the lim­i­ta­tions of this tem­po­rary exis­tence. Athe­ism has no offer to match this one.

(I am reminded of the true story of the athe­is­tic uni­ver­sity phi­los­o­phy depart­ment chair that had a heart attack in his office, and insisted that he be bap­tized at a church on the way to the hos­pi­tal. The dis­tance between intel­lec­tual the­ory and sin­cere prayer is found in as lit­tle as a micron of col­lapsed heart blood vessel.)

We over-believe our mea­ger sci­en­tific dis­cov­er­ies. Worse yet, we gen­er­al­ize from them into other aspects of the mys­ter­ies of life — look­ing for some sort of pre­dictabil­ity and con­trol. Despite sci­en­tific progress, peo­ple still die. From cra­dle to grave we are more taken by myth, story, reli­gion, and the arts than by the atoms, mol­e­cules, tis­sues, and enzymes. Our hearts are found in our com­mon spir­i­tual aspi­ra­tions. Life is more than a head-trip.

Holy places out­num­ber uni­ver­si­ties, hos­pi­tals, and lab­o­ra­to­ries com­bined. Unless we find mean­ing in our tragedies, there is lit­tle rea­son to merely extend our years. Even the vil­lage idiot knows that there is more to the story of life than what merely meets the eye.