RELIGION AND PURPOSE

We all seem to need purpose and meaning.  Without them we often flounder discontentedly. Ill at ease in our preoccupations.  Traditionally religions supplied these for us, but purpose and meaning handed to us by any external source discomforts us.  We sense not divine will but human manipulation through both institutions and traditions narrated by others.  Among religions that is easier for Buddhists with no deity to contend with.  We want to trust ourselves, focus on our enlightenment and a good life free from other constraints.

I have avoided the entanglements of lineage.  I am not even a deist.  I am a theologian with no god, if that does not seem contradiction.  Yet I impune.  I look for intention.  I find intention in myself and therefore I seek it in the universe.  Anthropomorphic thinking?   Possibly.  But I wonder why I am so constructed.  Born of an agnostic mother into a family that avoided any mention of what they did not feel equipped to understand – leave that to the professionals who claim knowledge – with a faintly superior cynicism about the self-serving claims of the followers and uncritical believers.

Is it only that I want there to be a purpose – to the creation, to life, to my life?  It feels right that there be and that I should seek it.  And the responses that seem acceptable truly do satisfy some need in me.  What about you?  Does the concept of God resonate with you.  What is your sense of what you maybe here for, or what you ought to be doing with the gifts life has given you?