1. On Happiness

Preamble - Religious Apology:

Aside from its everyday meaning the word "apology" can also refer to a "defence, excuse, or justification for a doctrine". This series of articles under the banner of From Particles to Angels (of which this article: "On Happiness" is the first) is an apology for religion. Since the Christian church stopped killing people for disagreeing with it, atheism and agnosticism have been on the rise, or at least have been more open in expressing themselves. The claims of rationality, materialism and physicalism have seemed to undermine those of religion. Religious war, the past burning and torture of witches and heretics, and continuing conflict with science and the freedom of self expression and diverse lifestyles, thought and learning have all put religion on the defensive. Add to this, revelations of the sexual abuse of children by priests and the corruption of churches in their handling of these, and "apology" in the more familiar sense seems to be in order. Fundamentally the issue of "dogma" has plagued religion. Dogma is not merely the declaration of certain ideas as unquestionable facts, but the opposition to free thought and experience. It discourages the frank pursuit of ideas where they lead, and of questioning and experimentation in general, instilling a fear of thinking and of natural feeling because they lead to unpredictable outcomes. By robbing people of their own critical intellectual faculties and their own personal intuition, religion lays ordinary people open to exploitation by hypocrites and the unscrupulous, who claim for themselves some "authority" or other, whether divine or institutional. In the absence of genuine criticism the truth is buried and lost under accumulating layers of fiercely asserted nonsense. In place of the bland security of reason, religion offers the supernatural terrors of primal superstition.

What then is a rational and virtuous person to do, if they have a religious inclination, or merely wonder if there "may be something to it"? In the modern setting, what justification or defence is there for religion? That is the prompt for this set of articles. However religion is not considered here for its own sake, but in terms of its relevance to the meaning of life and the pursuit of happiness. So that while these articles focus largely on the question of religion, they are ultimately concerned with happiness and the meaning of life.

Those who are religious because they were raised to be, and had instilled in them from an early age the conviction that to question the truth of religion is bad, and to fear that such thoughts are a path leading to doubt and possibly damnation, might still find something of use in these articles. Religion can be retained in the face of serious uncertainty and doubt and the free acknowledgment of all the arguments against it, not out of fear of divine punishment, or a "faith" borne of conviction, but for no better reason than you want to, because religion is founded on hope, not reason or certainty or an innate "knowing". The human being does not easily forsake something precious to it. Hope is clung to amid a storm of opposing forces. And there is no hope like the hope of life itself.

Religion that fears information is faithless, a terrible ignorance. Because it assumes its own fragility, that it will evaporate under the slightest questioning. It loses the wonder of curiosity and the dignity of knowledge. If one's faith is founded on certain assumptions and conclusions, and those assumptions and conclusions are questioned, undermined and lost, a crisis may be experienced. But beneath any such assumptions or conclusions is something more basic and primal. If the fear is relinquished, a hope that belongs to you personally, instead of a belief that has been handed to you by others, may be examined and found to be solid and enduring. Maybe God punishes the unbeliever with terrible tortures. Maybe the real fear here is only the realisation that such a God is a dick. There may be much in religion that does evaporate under questioning, but the desire and quest for it does not. Doctrine can be built up and torn down. Swept aside and renewed. Someone may resent and reject the religion they have been fed by force, yet have a firm personal conviction of what they think religion ought to be. All the jewel encrusted cardinals in towering cathedrals and immense libraries will not convince them otherwise. Neither will the physicist or neurologist. For some, religion is no God at all, but that is not the case in these articles. Someone, raised in a religion not their own, may simply prefer that God did not exist, that no one is watching over them, and are only keenly watching for an opportunity to say: "See, it was a lie all along". It is important to know at least, beneath any assumptions or conclusions, what is the true desire or one's own heart, and whether it is what you think it is.

I am not an expert in any of the subjects that follow, but have given the matter a great deal of thought over many years. My scholarship is not what I would like it to be, but I offer the following for whatever it is worth. I have attempted where I can to provide apt quotations to show I am not alone in my thoughts.

On Happiness

In this first article we will consider the question: "Why have religion?" What is the point of it? What is the benefit? In other words, what is its bearing on the human quest for happiness?

ALVY (Continuing to walk.... He moves up the sidewalk to a young trendy-looking couple, arms wrapped around each other): You-you look like a really happy couple. Uh, uh ... are you?

YOUNG WOMAN: Yeah.

ALVY: Yeah! So ... so h-h-how do you account for it?

YOUNG WOMAN: Uh, I'm very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.

YOUNG MAN: And I'm exactly the same way.

ALVY: I see. Well, that's very interesting. So you've managed to work out something, huh?

(From the movie: "Annie Hall", by Woody Allen (1977))

"Without eternity there is no happiness".

(Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada)

There are two fundamentally different points of view here to consider: materialism and religion, each represented by one of the above quotes. If we think about it, there seem to be a few elements to happiness. The obvious things seem to be health, beauty, material conditions such as food, shelter and security, and the various pleasures. It is partly what you have, and partly what you are. In a way, it does not matter what you have, if you do not like who you are, you will not be happy. But even if you have all of these things, happiness can be elusive, or at least, lasting happiness, or profound happiness. Certain things can make us happy for a time, but then something seems to happen, and what once made us happy does not any more.

In the West, a kind of mythology has developed around the concept of romantic love, such that finding your "destined" soul mate is the solution to the happiness problem, a kind of eroticised solution to the meaning of life. This fantasy places a burden on actual relationships that can buckle and collapse as a result, as the search for the meaning of life turns into the search for "perfect love" among a sex- and emotion-obsessed community. But while sex, beauty and companionship are all great things, they are not equal to the task of filling the voids of existence, and the distorted love concept becomes just another distraction. There seems to be a general intellectual awareness that happiness is about having people to care about, people other than yourself, but while this ideal is liberally espoused, actually feeling it depends on something already being present within one's self, something other than a hole. So that for all their preciousness, other people are not the solution to the problem of the meaning of life, only company and solace, and a distraction in the face of it.

Some people are young and beautiful, and have young and beautiful lovers and dear friends, and are content with themselves. Maybe they have a job they love, or are studying or apprenticing for it. The world seems to be at their feet. Some people seem to have found happiness, to have always had it, and simply expect to retain it. Sometimes they do not think it is fortune that has smiled on them, but think instead that they have "got it right", and that if others would merely make an effort and do and think as they do, then all the world will be happy like them. They disregard that others may lack the beauty or health that they have been blessed with, the talents, energy or circumstances. Their conceit might be such that they imagine that everyone else's misfortune is their own fault (if not in this life, perhaps in some previous one), and by that means the problems of the world can be disregarded as they pursue their own selfish and arrogant course. Perhaps the secret of their happiness is that their minds do not turn to morbid thoughts, like self criticism, negative thoughts or insights. One might wonder if they are a painted mask, a great unknown to themselves. Not daring to look inside. Constructed of a careful mental discipline of guided thought. Or perhaps they are what they appear to be to those who admire them. Balanced and fortunate, appreciative of their good fortune, not taking it for granted, and sympathetic to those without. Humble and just trying to be good and to do their bit. Only not dwelling on things where it serves no purpose.

We cannot avoid the fact that we will spend the majority of our waking lives at work, so probably the luckiest people in the world are those with a job they love. Many people dream of becoming pop-stars, movie stars, sport stars, "reality" stars, artists, musicians, authors, scientific prodigies, great leaders or paragons of business. But most do not achieve these things. Perhaps it is not only a matter of them not living up to their potential, not manifesting sufficient dedication and faith to "achieve their dream" (the other great myth of the West). So if they are not happy, it is their own fault. Perhaps in fact, it is just as well, because someone needs to take the garbage away, and make sure water comes out of the tap, and that the toilet flushes, and vegetables arrive on the shelf at the supermarket, and to build roads and railway lines and make shoes and refrigerators. If everyone succeeded in achieving their dream, perhaps we would be a community of artists and musicians wondering bitterly why we have no social infrastructure.

Among all of this avid fantasy there is a reality, firm in its nature, and apparently not in accord with our glib hopes and ideals. Perhaps you feel happy, or perhaps, despite your relative happiness, you feel there is something missing, there is a blandness, or something present in the cellar. Something cold and dark, faintly ominous and ignored, and seems like a drain, a black hole that steadily robs joys of their meaning and sustainability.

"I have of late - but wherefore I know not - lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?"

(Hamlet)

"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

(Macbeth)

Because after everything else, there is one fact of life more than any other which impacts upon our happiness and meaning. It is the concern with this that is deflected and arises indirectly in other disguised forms, in so-called irrational outbursts of emotion, in obsessions and cravings, and the various demons and phobias haunting humankind, as we hold to mantras like: "There's no sense worrying about what we can do nothing about". Poking its tiny head up discreetly from a hole now and then, like a rabbit in a field.

"I think it would be better not to die, don't you?"

(Sonny, from the movie "I, Robot" (2004))

"I want more life fucker."

(Roy Batty, from the movie "Blade Runner" (1982))

The Distraction Theory of Living

Some people believe in personal mortality, and some do not. I will call this a "core belief", a belief that resides at the centre of a person and colours all of their other thoughts. We should pause a moment to consider how profoundly different these two beliefs are in regards the impact they have on the life of the person possessing them, and every other element and moment in the life of the individual. The question of religion is often presented as a moral question, or a question of faith, or a sentimental predilection, or an anachronistic superstition or tradition. But the driving force behind the concepts of religion is the human desire to not die.

To be raised in the knowledge of personal mortality can be mortifying. It can seem to turn everything into a nonsense, a pointless distraction. As the children play and the adults labour, the whole world can seem like a family cheerfully setting up a long dinner table on railway tracks. When someone calls their attention to the oncoming freight train they respond blithely: "Yeah, but it won't get here for a while yet." In such a context, why would someone spend time designing a dinner plate, or studying tax law?

"How strong and powerful must be your own mind, that in the fleeting pleasures of the senses you find substance! You cling to sense-objects among the most frightful dangers, even while you cannot help seeing all creation on the way to death. By contrast I become frightened and greatly alarmed when I reflect on the dangers of old age, death, and disease. I find neither peace nor contentment, and enjoyment is quite out of the question, for the world looks to me as if ablaze with an all-consuming fire."

(Shakyamuni Buddha, in "Buddhist Scriptures", Penguin Classics,
selected and translated by Edward Conze, p.41)

"Remember how fleeting is my life. For what futility you have created all humanity! Who can live and not see death, or who can escape the power of the grave?"

(Psalm 89:47-48)

"What is the meaning of life?" is an odd question. For the happy person, the meaning of life is obvious, it is the joy of living. For the unhappy person, the meaning of life is an insoluble intellectual puzzle. It seems as though what is really being asked is: "How can I be happy?", but why is the question being phrased as an intellectual puzzle to be solved? We might suggest that it is posed this way to sidestep some of the emotional content ("I don't want to die!"), but this does not do justice to the question. The author Kurt Vonnegut wrote a little parable somewhere about a rabbit that was smarter than the other rabbits, and set off on a quest to have its intelligence removed so that it could be happy like the other rabbits (in a kind of inversion of "Jonathan Livingston Seagull"). In his book "Galapagos" he again bemoans our debilitating "big brains".

So that it seems that the secret to happiness is to be like a grinning Golden Retriever (a kind of Labrador dog), drooling and affectionate. There is an adage: "Life doesn't bear close scrutiny" and the depressed person is simply someone who thinks too much. Indeed, neuroscientists tell us depressed patients "tend to exhibit a profile of overactivity in prefrontal regions" ("Cognitive Neuroscience" (3d.Ed.) by Gazzaniga, Ivry and Mangun, p.612 (2009)). This leads to the solution that I will call "The Distraction Theory of Living".

One of the oldest stories of which a record exists is "The Epic of Gilgamesh" (dating back to the 18th century BC). It tells the story of a Sumerian king of the ancient city of Uruk, a great warrior who becomes distressed and dissolute at the prospect of mortality after the death of his friend Enkidu, and goes on a journey to the underworld to seek immortality. He travels to the end of the earth where he discovers a tunnel, used by the sun to travel under the earth from west to east during the night. Passing through the tunnel, Gilgamesh arrives at the Garden of the Gods where he meets, as you might expect, Siduri, goddess of beer and wine, and asks her for help. Siduri gives him the following advice.

"Gilgamesh, whither are you wandering? Life, which you look for, you will never find. For when the gods created man, they let death be his share, and life withheld in their own hands. Gilgamesh, fill your belly. Day and night make merry. Let days be full of joy, dance and make music day and night. And wear fresh clothes. And wash your head and bathe. Look at the child that is holding your hand, and let your wife delight in your embrace. These things alone are the concern of men."

(Tablet 10, column 3, Jacobsen 1949 translation.)

The distraction theory of living has been around for a very long time. Alternatively some people dwell on mortality, such as a Goth might, surrounding themselves with death related iconography, making a statement of it. Some cannot shake the knowledge of it and the depression associated with it. In the movie "Melancholia" by Lars Von Trier, the depressed main character is the only person adapted to the end of the world. She has been dealing with the knowledge every day while the other characters had suppressed the knowledge of it, so that when they confront the reality, they are unprepared. Our own death is the end of the world as far as any of us is concerned, and it comes quickly. People give lip service to quaint notions like "living on in the memory of others" or "living on in our children", but death is death, and those others we are "living on in" will themselves be dead soon enough. Metaphorical notions of immortality are pathetic substitutes for the real thing.

It feels bad to be conscious of the fear of death, and it is debilitating. So people suppress it so that they can get on with their lives and find what happiness they can. But to suppress a central belief and core emotion is not without its consequences. Suppressing a belief suppresses ideas associated with it. Suppressing an emotion perverts our emotional responses. Suppressing important ideas bound intrinsically to strong emotions is like walking around with the lights off, stumbling and misidentifying as we go. And when we suppress our feelings, we lose touch with them, retard them, and the thing we are avoiding becomes like a boogey-man. It grows bigger as it hovers just beyond the threshold of consciousness. Sneaking its way into a concern about terrorists, devils, serial killers, germs, toxins and radiation. Even the hatred expressed by some against religion may be the sublimated fear of death manifesting as an anger at religion for not being true, for denying the reality of death and trivialising the emotions bound to personal mortality. It is as though human beings are meant to have a certain amount of anxiety, and when big problems are absent, we will merely inflate the small ones that remain, irrationally. We fret about embarrassment, image, or the minutiae of virtue; as if these things matter in the face of certain death. In a way, horror movies restore some balance and perspective to our lives. "I thought I was having a bad day, but at least no-one's coming at me with a chain saw." Even in the process of criticising religion, religious iconography and its power are borrowed, and the metaphysical emotions of extinction can be voiced among thundering industrial howls and heavenly choirs. If an artist decides to immerse a crucified Jesus in a vat of piss; if we remove the religious iconography, all that we are left with is a vat of piss. Fretting over personal mortality might be sublimated and dignified into a concern for the planet and nature, emotional outbursts about everything "stupid" in the world and a morbid belief that the world and the human race is doomed.

We cannot really know ourselves until we know our core beliefs and feel our core emotions. To be otherwise is to be confused and makes all of our other thoughts and statements into muddled irrelevancies. The despair of death is just one of the painful barriers we may meet on the journey inward to self awareness, since human beings are also in the habit of idealising and misrepresenting to themselves their own motivations and actions.

"at the east of the Garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the sword with the flashing blade which turned round and round to protect and guard the way to the tree of life"

(Genesis 3:24)

It is not only atheists who think this way. For all their praise of the love of God and the joys of heaven, religionists well up with tears at the death of a loved one, not just over their own temporary loss of contact with them, but clearly over the apparently sad fate of their loved one. As if all their religious convictions are mere pretence and empty ritual. If they believe in heaven at all, it is not a heaven they want themselves or anyone they care about to go to. Perhaps imagining a relentless eternity floating in a dark bodiless limbo, communing with a conservative, moralising abstraction; a painless, joyless slumber of eternal rest; or plugged immovably into a hose of perpetual white, cocaine-like ecstasy of content-less divine love. It is often only on the death of a loved one that the feelings associated with mortality find their way into consciousness.

I am not suggesting here a morbid preoccupation with death, but if a person at some time familiarises themselves with the existence of, nature of, and power of the feelings associated with the knowledge of mortality, they will be better able to be aware of and take account of the secret influence of those feelings in the various departments of their life. Also, in general, a problem is not solved while ever it is being ignored or assumed to be insoluble. By looking at the problem we have the opportunity to decide whether we want to seek a solution to it, and to consider what such a solution might be. Death is the biggest thing in our lives, a vast and passionate mystery, a metaphysical monolith. By ignoring it we trivialise our existence and rob it of its substance and reality.

Religion has confused the notion of "salvation", turning it into a salvation from sin, a moral cleansing, salvation from hell, when the primary purpose and meaning of religion is salvation from the death of the body, pure and simple. When religion invented eternal damnation to threaten its followers with, it undercut this logic.

The God concept is a nonsense without the concept of eternal life. Eternal life is the rationale for the god concept. They are a package deal. Some are inclined to separate them and then to argue nonsensically against the existence of one, from the nonexistence of the other.

"You're a son-of-a-bitch, you know that? She bought her first new car and you hit her with a drunk driver. What, was that supposed to be funny? "You can't conceive, nor can I, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God," says Graham Greene. I don't know who's ass he was kissing there 'cause I think you're just vindictive.... There's a tropical storm that gaining speed and power. They say we haven't had a storm this bad since you took out the tender ship of mine last year in the north Atlantic last year... 68 crew. Do you know what a tender ship does? Fixes the other ships. Doesn't even carry guns. Floats around and fixes the other ships and delivers that mail. That's all it can do.... Have I displeased you, you feckless thug?"

(The West Wing, "Two Cathedrals" (2001))

If death is a transition to an eternal happiness in paradise, the above argument of President Bartlet with God doesn't make much sense. But the above assumes the premise that death is really death, and uses that to argue against the goodness of God, which is a stepping stone toward the argument that God does not exist. When a religious person becomes disillusioned because of death, it is an argument that God does not exist, founded upon a pre-existing assumption that He does not. It is simply doubt seeking to misrepresent itself as reasoning, because not believing in eternal life is equivalent to not believing in God, or at least a God that is to be of any benefit to us. But we need to be careful to make a distinction here between death and the sufferings experienced in life. While the promise of eternal life (if one is prepared to believe it) offers a straightforward answer to the problem of death, the problem of suffering poses a more serious challenge to religion. For instance, how do we correlate the torture and terrorising of children with a loving and merciful God?

The core lie, that "I don't mind mortality" or "mortality is good because it makes my life more precious" may serve as the foundation for an accumulating stack of lies. Happy people tend to succeed, successful people tend to succeed. Unhappiness is seen as a form of failure. To be identified as a loser is to have doors to opportunity close to you. One becomes a loser by being so identified. If one is to access the opportunities and good things that life has to offer, such as sex, companionship and money, in the short time that one has to live, then how one is perceived by others is important. There are many ways to lose your life other than by physical death. The loser is the walking dead. The fear of this kind of death serves as a strong incentive to: if you cannot have what you want, to want what you can have. A self-talk starts up in the person's mind: "I love my job. I find it rewarding for the following reasons", "I love my life and spending time with my family and friends", "I like to think and do and like the things that other people think and do and like". Communal activities such as criticising the same politicians or identifying some other kind of common enemy serve as a socially acceptable vent for dissatisfaction, at the same time as cultivating a sense of belonging. In this context we fret about embarrassment, image, or the minutiae of virtue as defined by our immediate peers, because they mean the difference between life and death. If certain ideas are unfashionable in your peer group, this may serve as a strong disincentive to embracing them.

This solution maximizes social and professional success, but in the process the person becomes more alienated from their true nature. The accompanying sense of emptiness and insubstantiality serves as another prompt to the question: "What is the meaning of my life?" Feelings of emptiness can trigger obesity or a variety of other addictive and compulsive behaviours. Couched in the fragility of positive thinking this life really does not bear close scrutiny since this could bring down the whole house of cards. Introspection then becomes an enemy to be feared.

"What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?"

(Matthew 16:26 or Mark 8:36)

But the price of not doing this may be greater if the soul has only a fleeting existence in any case. At its best, the "connected" world is a marvellous realm of expanding creativity, free expression and community. At its worst it is a trap of stereotyped, pretended conformity to the interests and values of the mob, the dread of globalised humiliation and ridicule, and a society of strangers treating each other with the kind of callous indifference reserved for characters on tv, chasing the imagined pleasures of the "in" crowd.

The Meaning of Life

The significance of the word "meaning" in the question: "What is the meaning of life?" is that happiness requires meaning. True happiness requires an intellectual gratification together with the sensual and emotional. The dilemma of materialism is the effort to make sensation and emotion alone provide for the meaning of life, because the intellect can provide none. Pure sensation is not sufficient for lasting happiness, and neither is the chemical bath of the emotions. Happiness requires fascination and profundity, and this consists of more than just marvelling over how many stars there are in the sky, the miracle of evolution, or moments of poignancy in our dealings with others.

There is one essential characteristic of meaning: it cannot exist in the finite. A chain of justification must be endless, because if an end is ever arrived at, it immediately raises the question: "Well then, what then was it all for?" And if some further purpose is not forthcoming, the whole line of dominoes falls down right back to the very beginning. It becomes: "It is all meaningless." The essential nature of happiness therefore requires eternity.

The air is sucked from today's joys by the knowledge that they will one day come to an end; at least, if one thinks about it. So the secret to happiness becomes not thinking about it, but to appreciate and live "in the moment". But the moment is a small and trivial thing, and ultimately boring if it cannot draw meaningfully on both a past and a future. In a moment I can pick up a coffee cup, listen to a song, sip a beer or touch flesh, but I cannot complete a complex task or build an engaging life.

Some people suggest that they would get bored with living forever, and eventually would want to die. They may assert that the meaning of life is derived from its impermanence. The life of the May Fly then becomes the pinnacle of existence. Life becomes the more precious the more precarious it is, so that one is never so alive as on the battlefield or in the race car, or hanging from a cliff face. But to make death the source of meaning, is to make death God, a kind of death cult. This I think shows a lack of imagination and blunted emotion, a lack of faith in the ability of existence to provide for an engaging existence. It presumes that reality cannot keep us interested for eternity. It imagines the future holds no surprises and excitement. Life lived in a hurry because time is short, gives less time to examine reality, so that reality seems banal. But the more you learn about physics, the more fascinating the universe becomes; the more you learn about biology, the more fascinating nature becomes; the more you learn about history, the more fascinating becomes the long unfolding drama of human evolution: its advances and setbacks, its pivotal figures, the poignant moments of ordinary people dropped into extraordinary circumstances.

The eternity required of happiness is not a straight line, but a spiral. It must expand as it travels forward, encompassing more with each revolution, from your own personal concerns, to family and friends, to your community, the human race and on; because what made us happy today will bore us tomorrow. As children we were satisfied with our toys, but when we are older we require something more "meaningful", more profound. If human personality is the supreme creation, this too may have bottomless depths to be plumbed, so that our journeys are both outward an inward, within ourselves, within others, within deity. So that even the same actions are imbued with new and deeper meanings. The future is an amazing place, but usually does not seem so for those for whom it is the present, because they are underdeveloped and take it all for granted. It only seems amazing to the old, those fading remnants of previous generations before they depart this world for good.

So if (1) the first required ingredient for happiness is eternity, (2) the second required ingredient is a never ending expanding capacity for profundity.

The belief in personal mortality, the inescapable death of ourselves and everyone else, is the ultimate no-win scenario. In the context of this belief, the distraction theory of living is the only solution. There is no meaning of life. There just isn't. Life is a nonsense that happens to include some joys and profound feelings.

The believer in personal mortality must in a sense dumb themselves to encompass what little they believe they can have. A meaningless existence makes countless questions nonsensical. At some point the struggle for self development ceases to make sense and is replaced with a coasting along, waiting for death, and the acceptance that: "I will never be more than I am now." While one who is a citizen of eternity sees and prepares for unlimited potential.

So there you have it. That is the nature of happiness and the meaning of life. So now the only question is: "Can we have that?" Is such a thing possible? The evidence seems to imply "No", real happiness and meaning are simply not real. When someone's body dies, we lose touch with them. It seems to be the end of them. Any evidence to the contrary is highly questionable. So is there any alternative to the distraction theory of living? The materialist might place their hope in advances in medicine and technology eventually providing us with immortality, although one imagines it may be a precarious immortality. It would be a great tragedy to belong to the generation immediately before such a breakthrough was made. Physical hypotheses about parallel dimensions and time travel might offer another possibility, one couched in nature. Another alternative is "spiritual" as opposed to "religious" beliefs, that is, that the human spirit and consciousness is a part of something eternal in nature, and might transmigrate from body to body as described in Buddhism, or occupy the aether, some other set of dimensions or "plane of existence". While immortality is necessary to make sense of the god concept, the converse is not true. Immortality might be posited as natural and innate. Arguments for a god have a different source and rationale.

In this article, I sought only to clarify what is the meaning of life and the elements of happiness. I have argued that aside from the distraction theory of living, each of these require the existence of something whose existence cannot be demonstrated. So that real happiness has as a necessary element, an unfounded belief or hope. In fact, if we can possess that hope, we can even attain happiness in the absence of virtually all the other elements of happiness.

“In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”

(Viktor E. Frankl, "Man's Search for Meaning")

If we have a future, we can have hope that the future will be better, and that everything we suffer now is merely part of the process of making us who we are. Even the person born with severe incurable deformities and a short lifespan can have hope. If we live a long life, it cannot be anything other than a struggle; and if all of that knowledge, wisdom and character will simply disappear when we die, what has all of that struggle been for? What meaning is there in it? But if we can take the fruit of that struggle with us on our eternal journey, and build on it ceaselessly, then everything that happens has meaning in that context. For the person who believes in personal mortality, every problem and obstacle only wastes precious time, robbing them of what little life they have.

The person who believes in personal mortality and the person who does not, are two very different creatures. One faces the inevitable end of the world, the other is making plans for eternity. One stands at the end, the other at the beginning.

"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

(Isaac Newton)

This blog currently consists of the following 19 articles. More are planned, but those already posted are the bulk of and most important of them.

In the next (second) article of the series: Cosmic Conspiracy (Part 1) - Deus Absconditus we will consider why there is an absence of evidence for religion.

Any comments welcome.

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From Particles to Angels

1. On Happiness

Preamble - Religious Apology:

On Happiness

The Distraction Theory of Living

The Meaning of Life

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