While most people consider the question of the meaning of life to be the biggest mystery of all, in fact it’s one of the easiest questions we’ve confronted together in Questions from the Unsettled Mind. Why? Because we already know the answer! What is less clear, perhaps, is why it is the answer, but even more importantly for human destiny, why we ignore it.

Sometimes religious people have this idea that religion allows you to shortcut the normal human processes of agony, misery, decay, and death. I mean, if God is with you, why shouldn’t he enable you to be happy? But that’s not how it works. In fact, with respect to grief, St. Paul himself warned that we Christians do grieve, just not as others grieve—without hope. So, in every other way, Christians are as crushed by grief as anyone else. We differ only in the confidence that we will one day see our loved ones again, a confidence that does little to overcome the loss, loneliness, and crushing emptiness that we experience now. “Filling your life with God” won’t help you here, because God himself became a man, and he too was “acquainted with grief” as “a man of sorrows.” When God makes the saint, he does not unmake the man. There is no way to shortcut normal human processes through some secret powers built into religion. That’s not what religion is for.

There has been a trend in modern historical methodology to pretty systematically ignore tradition. The irony with this approach is that it is fully anachronistic, imposing contemporary categories onto the past, since all ancient cultures embedded their history in tradition, in practices that could be handed down to future generations. Many cultures lacked written languages, while those that developed the written word saw minimal literacy rates. As such, memory rather than the tablet, was the primary form of preservation and transmission. To aid in memory, ancient cultures used a handful of mimetic tricks that are well-known to us: rhyme, song, and ritual. Many of us remember learning to say “i-am-bic-pen-tam-eter” when we were first introduced to Homer. Meter and rhyme contributed handsomely to the ancient Mycenean’s preservation of their historical defeat of the Trojans, a war that helped to define what we now think of as classical Greek culture. Thus, tradition—ritualized and poetic practices—rather than anything like modern historical textbooks provided the Greeks with their identity. Why? Because tradition is lived practice, formalized or ritualized in some way to enhance memory, mark significance, and transmit ideas to future generations. The rituals, festivals, songs, poems, and sayings of the ancient peoples preserved and handed down to future generations what fragile scrolls rarely survived to save. Tradition requires the survival of a people, yes, but a people can rarely endure without it, because their identity and meaning are defined by it.

Esoteric knowledge is one of those things that sounds very cool—that word, “esoteric”—but for most of us lacks a clear definition. It conjures up the mists of the East, ancient riddles, dark secrets, and the promise of ultimate power—all things that entice many contemporary human beings, because, whatever esoteric knowledge is, it seems that an exciting offer is on the table. As with most offers, however, what is really on the table is a transaction. So, to assess esoteric knowledge, we need to know not only what we are allegedly getting, but what we are trading away!

While various Protestant sects have their go-to complaints with what Catholics believe about salvation apart from grace (Catholics don’t believe that), worshiping saints (Catholics don’t do that), or even that the pope is the anti-Christ (he isn’t), there’s probably no one issue that galvanizes them more than the Marian doctrines, that Mary is elevated to the level of a deity. When Protestants hear her called “the mother of God,” they feel that their case is made, that Catholics are indeed pagan idolaters in “Christian clothing.” The real Mary, they think, would be horrified that she has been elevated to the status of a goddess by the Roman Church, since she was probably just a worship team leader in her local congregation. Okay, maybe they wouldn’t go that far, but still, Mary as the mother of God? It certainly sounds suspicious!

Of course, it is! Re-incarnation strictly means that the human soul-spirit is reconnected to the body after being separated from it. We have enormous evidence of this happening in near death experiences (NDEs). During an NDE, a person experiences separation from the body and its associated processes (especially pain, but also all sensory links to the body), and usually initially finds himself floating above his body. At the conclusion of the NDE, the person is drawn back to his body and finds himself reconnected as usual. Thus, separation from and reinsertion back into one’s own body occurs.

When faced with an enemy assault, it is critical to identify the strategic objectives of your enemy, for once these are known, you can create effective counters to his aggressive moves. However, as we know from metaphysics, evil is not a positive objective but instead is classified as a privation by philosophers, meaning that it merely negates what God is positively trying to achieve. Thus, in order to confront our spiritual enemy effectively, we must begin with the divine plan that he opposes: what is God up to?

We often pray to God as our Father for things that we think would very much improve our lives, yet we usually find ourselves empty-handed afterward. We are told to pray harder, so we try that, but the results are the same. Church leaders might suggest that we give more, and though we rightly smell a rat, we very marginally increase our giving just to test this hypothesis, but again find that nothing changes. So, how can God be our Father if he doesn’t give us what we want?

The problem of evil—that great suffering is permitted by God in this world—haunts many people. It seems that if God really loved us, then he would do something to assist us. So, if he does nothing, it appears that he doesn’t really love us, in which case he isn’t all that good. But if he isn’t good, then he isn’t God. As such, it seems that God cannot exist, because great suffering does occur in the world.

In a previous podcast, we examined Plato’s famous “Myth of the Ring of Gyges” story. In that story where, as usual, Socrates is Plato’s primary dialogical character, we faced the ultimate moral challenge: what would we do if we were put into a situation (the invisibility ring) in which all of the rewards for justice were replaced by all of its penalties in this life and in the next, in which the reputation for justice were replaced by its opposite in the view of both gods and men? Is justice—is a just soul—still worth it? And wouldn’t it be more profitable to choose injustice if we attached to it all of the rewards usually associated with justice, all of the praise of gods and men, in this life and in the next? And if so, then perhaps the real reason we choose justice is that it happens to work. In reality, however, we value power over goodness, might over right, for justice is merely a means to an end, but, because we happen to be too weak to secure our own futures through power, we pretend to love justice.