Religious fundamentalism is the neurotic anxiety that without a Meaning of meanings, there is no meaning at all. It is simply the flip side of nihilism. Underlying this assumption is the house-of-cards view of life: flick away the one at the bottom, and the whole fragile structure comes fluttering down. Someone who thinks this way is simply the prisoner of a metaphor. In fact, a great many believers reject this view. No sensitive, intelligent religious believer imagines that non-believers are bound to be mired in total absurdity. Nor are they bound to believe that because there is a God, the meaning of life becomes luminously clear. On the contrary, some of those with religious faith believe that God's presence makes the world more mysteriously unfathomable, not less. If he does have a purpose, it is remarkably impenetrable. God is not in that sense the answer to a problem. He tends to thicken things rather than render them self-evident.
From Terry Eagleton's The Meaning of Life
Love this paragraph. I'm often amazed at how people think that religious belief makes everything easier, and that this is its appeal. For me, religion generally makes stuff harder. It would seem rather easy to account for things like tsunamis and the Holocaust and the suffering of children and animals if you suppose there is no God. The really tough thing is accounting for stuff like that if you posit a loving God.
Plus, that whole house-of-cards idea, although most people who accept that type of metaphor would argue that the underlying support is not a flimsy card but rather an invincible Rock. But all too often their supposed basic principle without which everything else falls is something like the One True Church Which Has Never Been Wrong or the The Inerrant Scriptures Which Contain No Contradictions, Errors, or Flubs. These ideas are just so obviously easy to refute that you have to almost admire as well as pity the incredible intellectual contortions they undergo in order to stick with those views.
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