Page 80 - Liberating Liberals V2

The God-shaped Hole in the Soul
sustainability? A world safe from bombs or the equation, E = MC2 — or from dying suns and colliding asteroids?
And the answer is ... we are completely free to select which meanings we want regardless of what those in the past have chosen, or what messages we’ve received from supernatural sources.
How a freethinker should perceive meaning is another matter. For instance, a belief in absolute meaninglessness is the freethinking equivalent
of believing in absolute meaning. Both are fundamentalisms. Neither can be proven true or false. Thus liberals can precisely pinpoint how meaningful life is or not. It’s how meaningful you think it is
— at any precise moment. It’s how meaningful the electorate thinks it is — with each new election.
Vonnegut suggests that World Wars I and II were, in part, efforts of Western Civilization to commit suicide.64 That is, they were a pronouncement that those pre-World War lives didn’t have enough meaning to continue to live. It seems a far-fetched conclusion, but Europe had really been fighting many world wars since at least the French and Indian War in the 1750s. They were all fought mainly over which European countries would have the most colonies in the entire rest of the world.
You’d think Europeans would have learned about the ephemeral nature of such acquisitions by what was called World War I, (actually about World War V)
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