Peter, I fear the "crippling of imagination" is on show here with the earlier comments.

It was Socrates who insisted that unencumbered reason brings man into communion with what is true. Reason in our age of critical distance from reality is encumbered in the material of fact and evidence - full stop. The modern location of religious belief with stupidity by hard edged rationalists sees pride at work, and crippled imagination its product.

I am a "baby boomer" and the target of advertisers to pursue comfort as a goal. It really is sad that I now see more and more contemporaries suffer existential hollowness as they step, or is it shuffle, out the door of their career into their planned comfortable lifestyle choices. Sounds of empty gongs and clashing symbols amidst "happy" families and controlled environment. Lives lived with the certainty of their achievements but deprived of living the uncertainty, and its opportunities, delivered with living in the hope of the good, full life underpinned by trust in our loving God who seeks us. Depriving themselves of the desire for God sees life lived as personal achievement, or perhaps failing, and outside of the domain of prevailing promise.
In Christian living, the life of choice rises. To die without knowing this is life lived not to the full. Life to the full ( John 10:10) being the goal in life which we all seek. No?

I really do think there is a need for a special evangelisation ministry for "baby boomers". Successful outcomes would be the release of the wealth used to control our own existence and the lowering of costs of our caring by the Gen X and Y's, at least those dissenters among them who have inherited our utilitarian ways.

Cheers
Michael Byrne

Dear Peter,

I suspect that most people are sophisticated enough not to get their knickers in a twist about advertising. Most of us know that a new product is not going to make significant changes in our lives. Many people even though they may subscribe to a religion that promises certainties realise that if one lives a long time old age and death are certain, and most other matters remain uncertain. However, if one wants to maintain a sense of outrage one can maintain it over the exaggerations of advertising. Couldn't think of anything significant for a column to push your superstition, Peter?

Viktor Frankl in his book " Man's Search for Meaning" stated that he believed that there is no meaning for life- the elusive meaning most of us search for in a variety of ways. He believes after his brush with the Nazis as a Jewish doctor that we basically must take life as it comes each day with all its problems and it is how we face those problems that make our lives.

If my interruption is correct then our life's journey is fuelled by whatever motivation we may choose- spiritual or whatever as long as it gives the individual meaning. Good luck to you all in your journey but keep looking and doing as you age no mater how exciting or trivial it may be.

Peter is rightly concerned over 'style', of course, because it represents the things that people can aspire to when they are free from fear. Now that our modern secular affluent society has made it possible for a significant number of people to free themselves from the fear of hunger, the fear of poverty, the fear of persecution and the fear of plague, they can focus on the far more trivial process of making themselves happy.

Peter's job, however, depends on persuading them otherwise, and his imaginary deity is the ju-ju stick he has to shake and wave about in his attempt to deter people from the simple business of pleasing themselves. How DARE they!

To quote Viktor Frankl - founder of the third Viennese School of Psychotherapy (in distinction to the "schools" founded by Freud and Adler) - explicitly, “the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day ... What matters therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.”

To Frankl “existential neurosis is synonymous with a crisis of meaninglessness" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl), and he concludes his “Man’s Search for Meaning” indeed without claiming to have found a meaning that could suit everybody, however with words that, I think, also Peter can agree with:

“man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes ... he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. ... After all, man is that being who has invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who has entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”