Barry’s Search For Meaning

Religion: noun. The belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods. (Oxford English Dictionary)

Most of us are given the meaning of life as soon as we are born – the meaning of life for many, if not most, people is their parents’ religion.

Fourteen days after my birth, I was baptized a Roman Catholic by Father Michael J. Healy at St. Augustine’s of Canterbury Church in Montreal – the same Father Healey who would marry Anne and me on a cold Friday in February 28 years later. In first grade at the local (public) Catholic school, Saint Antonin’s, I was taught the Catechism – a catalogue of everything Roman Catholics believe. I remember some of it by heart:

Who made me? God made me.
Why did God make me? God made me to know, love and serve Him.

At age 7, I went to Confession for the first time and made my First Communion. At age thirteen I was “confirmed” by the bishop. Through the sacrament of Confirmation Catholics reaffirm (as adults of sorts) the faith into which they were baptized as infants and are given a third name - in my case, David. It is the Christian version of the Jewish Bar Mitzvah. So, by age 13 I had all the meaning anyone needed. The Catholic Church, like all of the great religions, has all of the answers. As Pope John Paul II said to 19,000 students in New York City on October 3rd, 1979:

When you wonder about the mystery of yourself, look to Christ, who gives you the meaning of life. When you wonder what it means to be a mature person, look to Christ, who is the fulfillment of humanity. And when you wonder about your role in the future of the world … look to Christ.

It is all very reassuring. And it did work for me - for a time. I was particularly pious, if not religious, as a child. I remember that in elementary school I would walk to seven different churches on Holy Thursday (the day before Good Friday), as per the Catholic tradition. It took me about three hours. In retrospect, I probably liked the obsessive-compulsive quality of the task!

But somewhere in my mid-teens, I began to have serious doubts about my faith. I found myself pretending to go to Sunday Mass. I would leave the house at 8:30 – in plenty of time to get to 9 o’clock Mass at St. Malachy’s Church. But I would not go to church; I would wander the streets and return home at 10:30, so that my mother wouldn’t be any the wiser (my father wouldn’t have cared one way or the other). I felt ashamed of myself but not ashamed enough to actually sit through Mass. By the time I was 18, I was openly disdainful of believers. I mocked the pilgrims who, on their knees, climbed the hundreds of steps to St. Joseph’s Oratory on Queen Mary Road. I saw my mother’s piety as ignorance. At age 27 I returned to the Church because by then my fiancé, Anne, was the only meaning in my life and she was a devout Catholic.

There are two problems with inheriting your parents’ religion as the meaning in your life:

1. You don’t have a chance to properly examine all the alternatives, including agnosticism and atheism, and then make a free choice. Until my first contact with the Jesuits, at age 18, the teachers and priests in my life did not encourage me to study the tenets of the world’s other great religions. All of the great religions operate in this way. Like the Juggernaut of Hindu myth, the idols of the great religions are dragged along in procession atop an impressive carriage under whose wheels all questions and doubts are crushed. It is my view that if an individual discovers meaning in life, instead of being given it, that meaning will be far more robust. According to Viktor Frankl, “Meaning must be found and cannot be given”.

2. The other problem with inheriting your parents’ religion (or even choosing a religion) as the meaning in your life is more serious. It is the high probability that your religious beliefs are in fact false. There are four major religions in the world today: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism (the fifth largest, Judaism, is only 1/25th the size of the fourth largest so I am not including it). These four religions are not compatible with one another; indeed some of the varieties of Christianity and Islam are incompatible with each other. With my apologies for greatly oversimplifying, here are the tenets of the four religions:

• Christianity is the most populous and widespread religion in the world, with about 2.1 billion adherents in 260 countries. Christians believe that Jesus Christ was (and is) God and that mankind was reconciled to God through Christ’s death on the cross.
• Islam, with 1.4 billion adherents in 184 countries, is the second largest religion in the world. Unlike the Hindus, Muslims believe that there is only one God, called Allah in Arabic, and that the last and greatest of God’s messengers (greater than Jesus Christ, who was definitely NOT God) was the Prophet Mohammad. Islam is obviously not compatible with Christianity. If the Christians are correct in their beliefs, then the Muslims are misguided. And vice versa. (Many people may be surprised that Muslims love Mary, the mother of Jesus. Mary (peace be upon her) is the only woman specifically named in the Quran. The Quran discusses Mary’s miraculous conception as well. She asked the Angel Gabriel: “How shall I have a son, seeing that no man has touched me, and I am not unchaste?” (Quran 19:20). The Angel Gabriel said: “So (it will be): thy Lord saith, ‘That is easy for Me: and (We wish) to appoint him as a Sign unto men and a Mercy from Us.’ It is a matter (so) decreed.” (Quran 19:21). Mary then becomes pregnant. )

• Hinduism, the oldest of the big four religions, has about 837 million adherents worldwide but is found almost nowhere outside India. Hinduism has many gods, the greatest of which are Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Hindus believe that all creatures go through a cycle of rebirth (reincarnation). The cycle of rebirth can only be broken by spiritual self-realization – the union of self with the Brahman or Godhead. Hinduism is totally incompatible with the two most populous religions. If either of the other two religions is correct in its beliefs, then the Hindus are wrong. And vice versa.

• Buddhism. There are an estimated 350 million people in 92 countries who adhere to Buddhist beliefs and practices. Like the Hindus, Buddhists believe in reincarnation but that is where the similarity ends. The cycle of rebirth can be broken but not by union with God (The concept of a personal God does not fit into the Buddhist system of religion. In general, Buddhists are pantheistic in their view of God. Many view God as an impersonal force which is made up of all living things and holds the universe together); the cycle can only be broken by achieving Nirvana, the extinction of all desire. Buddhism, a religion without a god, is as different from the other three as it is possible to be. In fact, having no God, it does not even meet the Oxford English Dictionary’s criteria for a religion (see above).

My point in describing the tenets of the four most populous religions is that if the meaning in your life comes from your religion, the meaning in your life has, by definition, a very high probability of being meaningless. The best-case scenario is that the most populous religion, Christianity, is factual (Jesus Christ is God), in which case a little over 2 billion people embrace a meaning in life that, in fact, is real. But even in this best-case scenario, it means that the majority of people on earth, namely two and half billion Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists – not to mention the Jews, Confucians, and Sikhs, etc. - cling to a meaning of life which is, to put it bluntly, misguided.

Thus, we have here a true dilemma: on the one hand, only religion - not science - has anything to say about the purpose of life, but, on the other hand, most people who find meaning in life in their denominational religious belief are, by definition, wrong.

Of course, it is possible to believe in God without joining any particular religious sect. This is sometimes referred to as spirituality (as opposed to religion). The central defining characteristic of spirituality is a sense of connection to a much greater whole which includes an emotional experience of religious awe and reverence. But as meaning goes, the belief in God, by itself, is pretty thin gruel. The reason people search for meaning is that such meaning has implications for how one should live and the purpose that derives from such meaning makes it easier to bear the suffering that is inevitable in life. When you are all alone and it’s late at night, the thought that Jesus Christ is your personal Lord and Savior, may help you through the night. The thought that there is probably an unknowable Force that guides the universe is not much of a consolation.

Another way out of this dilemma is the Baha’i faith. There are approximately 6 million members of the faith and the center of the Baha’i faith is in Haifa, Israel. Founded in Iran in 1844, Baha’i teaches that the revealed religions of the world are in agreement and that the respective prophet-founders (Abraham, Krishna, Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, Christ, Mohammad and the Baha’i prophet, Bahá’u’lláh) of each of the religions revealed the will of God for a particular time and place in history. Boy, that’s a stretch! Well-intentioned, maybe, but a stretch. By this account, 2006 years ago God sent a messenger (Christ) who told us He was God, then, 570 years later, God sent us another messenger (Mohammad) who told us that Christ was not God after all. According to the Baha’i account, God keeps changing his (or her) mind or he (or she) has a strange sense of humor!

The bottom line (for me) is that the kind of meaning I am searching for cannot be found in religion. But who am I to say? Many people brighter than I am believe. The Jesuits who were my teachers at Loyola of Montreal are the most intelligent group of people I have ever encountered and they believe. Similarly, many of the Existentialists (see next chapter), like Kiekegaard, Tillich, Buber, Maritain, even Frankl, who admit that life, per se, is apparently meaningless, impose religious meaning on their own lives.

All I’m saying is that it doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t get me through the night.
So science and religion have not been helpful in my quest for the meaning of life. Maybe philosophy will provide some answers.