Page 78 - Liberating Liberals V2

The God-shaped Hole in the Soul
its basis, is a meaning that humanity has created — with or without God’s help. Thus the compassionate freethinker can take refuge in causes that help aspects of civilization that are meaningful to them. They may be suspect as to having eternal meaning, but they
may also be better than nothing. I take refuge in the meanings of nonviolence, sharing, humane work, leisure, and ecology. And though I don’t always have the energy or optimism to work for them, I keep them in sight and root for others when they make progress in them.
But as Vonnegut notes: “It is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn’t meant to be reasonable.”61 As well as exhausting to constantly find meaning in a universe that may just be a vast accident. We just need something to do! However:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters....Then God said, “Let us make man in our own image and after our own likeness and let them have dominion...over all the earth.... And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.”62
That is the meaning of life as proclaimed in Genesis. Meaninglessness is what we were before creation — the void. And God created in the void, and made meaning. For the last 2000 years much of the meaning of Western Civilization has been
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