Ash Wednesday. Lent. Not many Australians would register such things in the 21st. Century. Now, seeking solace in drink and drugs - that is more their style.

One can seek meaning in Christianity or other superstitions. One can accept that there is no supernatural or essential meaning, and we are organisms living in a world with other organisms. We can be kind, loving and seek knowledge for its own sake. We can enjoy our lives and the presence of other lives. Human beings have been around for millennia before Christianity was invented. The wars of the reformation, the crusades, the exploitation of native peoples, the Holocaust and the other loathesome products of Christianity seem to me to far outweigh the good that particular superstition has brought to humanity.

Yes, but that meaning and purpose may have nothing whatsoever to do with organized religion! Or the power addicted control freaks who would have us believe a version of events only committed to paper some 350 years after the event!

We are all of us the sons and daughters of the universe that is the unified field of energy that includes you and I!

Can the universe think or emote? Well, you and I can and we are an integral part of it!
Alan B.

At least our Western civilisation is based on Christianity, which has served us well up to now. Now, with fools thinking that we could have been just as 'nice' without it, and ignoring the difference between the Christian West and the Rest in behaviour and achievement, we are going down the gurgler.

ttbn Wednesday, 2 March 2022 10:01:58 AM writes: "At least our Western civilisation is based on Christianity, which has served us well up to now."

Tearful yearning for a vindication of this assertion will remain unrequited. Christian history is complicit in slavery, enforced marriage between the rapist and his victim and all manner of misogyny....just to begin with

"Now, with fools thinking that we could have been just as 'nice' without it,....:"

The secular consensus is that we could have been even nicer without it absent the divisive hostilities and hatreds that sepparate the different faiths and their myriad sects.

"ignoring the difference between the Christian West and the Rest in behaviour and achievement, we are going down the gurgler."

Religions are much greater dividers of humankind than is nationality. But you make my point for me whichever way you look at it.

Steven Schwartz - posted Wednesday, 2 March 2022 writes:

"In the meantime, like the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, we spend our years trying to give meaning to our lives."

You demean yourself in a failure to acknowledge that secularists, atheists and those of similar bent are divided from their theistic fellow humans only by a stubborn refusal to accept a theistic proposition on faith alone. Their intransigence is understandable given the great burden accompanying faith in doctrine, dogma and sacred text. The obligatory abandonment of reason kills the proposition, a tyrant's wrath and the threat of eternal torment notwithstanding.

The division being so trivial it should not provide any hindrance whatsoever to secularists, atheists and those of similar bent finding much the same meaning and purpose in their lives as the devoutly faithful do. The simplicity of the process, vis-a-vis christianity, is a significant factor for them as well.

We have but one life and this is a powerful motive for the realist. Yearning after eternal joy is intellectual indolence and will play no part in humankind's striving for mastery of its destiny.