To Make Something Beautiful
"Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives. And when he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?"
TO MATTER
INTRO:
I want to matter. That's not a particularly bold statement, but you're still going to have to take my word for it.
You want to matter too. You're allowed to admit it. It's part of the human condition. It's a wonderful thing. Few things in life feel better than mattering ("mattering" -- such a clunky word).
When I was twenty years old (twelve years ago), I became deeply convinced that nothing mattered, including myself. It was the worst two months of my life. I may (or may not) elaborate on how I philosophized my way into adopting that nihilistic belief in a separate article; more importantly, just know that I'm writing from personal experience in addition to the observations and research shared in this article.
There does seem to be an epidemic of people feeling like they don't matter. So we're going to explore the cause in such a way that allows us to appreciate the intellectually and morally bankrupt nature of its secular origins.
LET'S BEGIN:
If we were to examine what it means "to matter" we would need to define its meaning in relation to something or someone else. Perhaps we could even give "mattering" a synonym to make sure we've given ourselves enough room to work with on our metaphorical canvas.
So let's go ahead and define what it means for us "to matter" in relation to something beyond ourselves in first-person:
To matter, basically means that I mean something to someone. I want to matter in relation to another person, preferably lots of persons (family, friends, myself, etc).
Pretty simple so far. Here's a syllogistic and concurrent view of our idea:
I want somebody else to feel like I mean something to them.
While that's not the most dignified way of framing our idea (it sounds needy), it's nonetheless a true statement. We'll be revisiting this later on.
Moving along.
Theoretically, the most effective way to determine how much something or someone matters would be to measure or observe its environment via its absence, like a control experiment.
Such an experiment is eerily depicted in the film "It's a Wonderful Life" when the main character's existence briefly means nothing in relation to the other people in his life. His wife doesn't even recognize him. I won't share with you the backstory of the hero's journey that led to his despair in case you haven't seen it. Just know that the scene is deeply disturbing and sad.
So we get it. We each individually want to matter.
As we're about to explore in discomforting detail, there seems to be a strange phenomenon whereby people begin feeling like they don't matter when the sum of their environment is spiritually or religiously deficient. Meaninglessness seems to arise when people's existence remains unrelated to something greater and hierarchically superior to them.
TO HAVE HUMILITY
"When people stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything."
- Emile Cammaerts
Nobody has any explanation for the origins of energy that created matter. As Terence McKenna observed, "Modern Science is based on the principle: 'Give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest.'" Life is an unsolvable paradox that gives birth to ideas like acceptance and humility.
{Since there isn't a material explanation for the origins of energy, it does not seem unreasonable to consider an immaterial explanation for the existence of life. Tens of thousands of near death experience "NDEs" survivors describe how consciousness exists (and expands) in a divine dimension outside their body; many of these people held/hold no religious affiliation. Each of their experiences share stunning consistencies. One of which is they all say God is real (and they seem to say so with a sense of incredulousness) and that he is not represented in material form. I'll provide links to relevant content and literature at the end.}
Without humility, a society decays into incoherence, infecting individuals like an autoimmune disease infectiously decaying parts of its cell body. Humility goes adrift when its vehicle for expression (a person or community) is not anchored by an appreciation for something immaterial and hierarchically supreme (i.e. God or something divine).
In conjunction with meaninglessness, the "decay" of a society is represented by the increasing prevalence of depression, apathy, anxiety, and other related psychological struggles (the WHO reported a "25% increase in prevalence of anxiety and depression worldwide" in 2020 alone -- staggering). The increase of such psychological diagnoses coincides with the decline in belief in God in America, which has fallen 92% to 81% in the past eleven years. The 11% decline is particularly concentrated among college-age individuals, meaning that number is disproportionally higher among people under the age of 40.
Meanwhile, research has consistently shown a decrease in such diagnoses among people who hold theistic beliefs. A 14-year study conducted on 89,708 women between 1996 and 2010 found a 5x decrease in suicide among people who attended religious services ('JAMA Psychiatry's "Association Between Religious Service Attendence Lower Suicide Rates"').
Moving along.
The absence of a belief in God or something divine causes people to pledge allegiance to something in the material (secular) world as hierarchically superior to them in an attempt to find meaning in relation to something beyond his or her self. Modern day examples include environmentalism, feminism, vegetarianism*, scientism*, socialism, social justice, and quantum cosmology**.
{*Not intending to conflate vegetarianism with vegetarians as those are two distinct ideas; not intending to conflate scientism with empirical science for the same reason.}
{**Quantum cosmology is not something in our 'material' world, but it's treated as if it is. QC is comprised of mathematically misleading cosmological models developed by Stephen Hawking and James Hartle, who included "imaginary time" as a variable in their equations and presupposed a spacetime singularity when they developed their model for infinite universes with no finite beginning (they developed an incoherent model for something that doesn't exist). Their models paved the way for imaginary constructs like parallel universes, an idea that suggests everything has already happened and that life is meaningless.}
Here's the problem: Invoking something from the material world as hierarchically supreme suggests that our friends, brothers, sisters, parents, and ourselves, are parasitical creatures contributing to the consequences of whichever material cause the materialist values (allegedly) more than people.
When you value a material cause at the expense of devaluing people, there may be a meaningfulness gap. This is because the material cause cannot feel like you mean something to the cause (that's why we framed what it means "to matter" with our syllogism from earlier).
Implicit in their alleged altruistic endorsements is the idea that you don't matter or that you are burden on humanity.
Nevertheless, secular ideas remain incoherent. The climate activist would probably not sacrifice his or her self at the expense of vegetation in Honduras, for example. It's usually the other people who need to sacrifice themselves for whichever cause the activist is advocating.
Thus, there is no humility when people regard something from the material world as hierarchically supreme. Consequently, good people are blackmailed by their spiritually bankrupt counterparts (it really is a lot like an autoimmune disease).
TO HAVE MORALITY
While some people may debate whether humility is inherently objective, morality is considered an especially subjective trait (at least in the western world). In fact, people claim to have their own morals, often referred to as their "moral standards". You may think, "Yeah, I do have my own morals. Other people have theirs. What's the problem?"
The problem is that its profoundly incoherent/meaningless to define something in relation to itself (people claim to have their own genders in relation to their self-made definitions, for instance.)
Something as objectively wrong as stealing has found its way into moral philosophizing. If you don't believe in God or something spiritually superior to your existence, how is stealing objectively wrong? You may strongly believe it's wrong (I do too), but that's our opinion. If you are Christian, Catholic, or Muslim then stealing is objectively wrong. Have fun meeting Allah (sounds terrifying).
Moral opinions seem to be the bi-product of hyper individualism, a consequence of secularism at the expense of increased Godlessness.
Similar to how we defined what it means "to matter" in relation to something else, people inevitably define their morals in relation to something else. The problem is, that "something else" could be anything, meaning it's subjective. We call this collection of anything "opinions." Opinions are the poster child for what people don't care about. Even still, people expect other people to really care for their opinion (demonstrating a lack of humility).
The proliferation of opinions centered on fragmented individuality does not seem to foster a sense of meaningfulness. Yet, people incessantly express their hyper-individualized sense of self in an attempt to matter to others.
This is what happens when everyone is their own God.
TO HAVE RESPONSIBILITY:
Our life would feel reasonably meaningless if we never had to take responsibility for our actions. Unbeknownst to many, secularism has absolved people from taking responsibility for certain actions, causing them to feel like they don't matter.
Here's how it works: An authority figure from a secular institution diagnoses you as sick, meaningless, incapable, or some form of weak (I'm using "weak" as a blanket term for domains that have their own diagnostic adjectives) and then attributes the cause of your weakness to some kind of external condition, often times a permanent condition. Implicit in this narrative is that your deficiency is entirely attributable to something outside of your control (viruses, racism, obesity -- yes even obesity, mental health, etc. are popular narratives and/or attributes for such deficiencies).
{A Harvard medical spokesperson recently went on '60 minutes' to tell their audience that nutrition and exercise are not enough to not be obese and instead entirely attributable to genetics, implying it's not their fault if they're obese (fulfilling the criteria for an external, permanent condition). Hopefully you are not unwilling to draw parallels from narratives like this and other mechanistic, secular narratives that pave way for meaninglessness. It's always the same disempowering narrative. Always.}
As a result, you are absolved of harboring any responsibility for your deficiency, and (but) you get to be the underdog. (The underdog narrative may be worth unsubscribing from. Few things are more disempowering than identifying as the underdog. The main reason to be an underdog is to hedge your emotional response to unmet expectations and/or losing.)
Responsibility is the precursor to resilience and other respectable qualities, all of which remain dormant in its absence.
Let's now take a look at some of the incoherent, dehumanizing and disempowering secular narratives that result from the interplay of subjective humility and morality, in conjunction with lack of responsibility:
Obesity: "You are obese but there isn't anything you could have done about it."
Type 2 Diabetes: "We're going to give you increasing doses of insulin and treat you like a person who has Type 1 diabetes!"
*Abortion: This one is a can of worms, but it's the poster child for secularism because of how the scorecard reads: there's no humility, it's intrinsically dehumanizing, it's morally incoherent*, there is no responsibility*. {*This excludes pregnancies resulting from r*** }
Racism: Most notable here is its permanent condition. "Preceding generations behaved a certain way, therefore you're oppressed and incapable!" Unfair, yes. Disempowering, also yes.
Viruses: Viruses are characterized by their viral contagion, which has never been isolated nor proven to be contagious. (bacteria have been isolated and proven to exist, for instance) which makes the prescribed treatment for viruses incoherent. Thus, there is zero humility/morality/integrity related to this idea. This is the most difficult topic for people to intellectually grasp since it seems completely implausible for something as mainstream as viruses to not even exist (this doesn't mean the symptoms that get attributed to viruses don't exist). Read "The Truth About Contagion" or "Viral Mania" if you're interested.
The important takeaway here is that almost all secular narratives are predicated on the existence of permanent problems. What's amazing is that the problems are usually made up, inaccurately defined, or incoherent. None of them are permanent.
Always remember that conflict is your asset for creating something beautiful. It's an indispensable ingredient.
(Ah shucks. I reminded myself of something I wish I forgot to mention...)
We are going to elaborate on the previous paragraph. But first we need to take a look at what secular art/beauty looks like before I forget:
Here is a sculpture of a dog peeing on an art museum:
Here's human waste art accompanied by some dorks:
Here is art that was made to "glorify God."
TO FIND BEAUTY
Think of your favorite movie character. Or book character. A character you really like.
Is that character someone who never had to face some kind of adversity? Do you really like that character because their life was a nice breeze?
Of course not.
Your favorite character probably faced a lot of adversity. You may really like that character because they managed to handle their struggle gracefully. They managed to stay centered.
Conflict is blessing for creating something beautiful.
You're here to make something beautiful with your life. Always remember, we live in an unsolvable paradox that was created by something that has no material explanation.
It's a miracle.