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What a load of baloney.
Life has no "meaning". Life only has 'purpose'. And the purpose of life is for gametes to use zygotes to create more gametes. If you insist that life must have meaning you are more than welcome to ascribe any meaning to it you like. Suck it up and be a Bokononist about it.
Tiger got to hunt.
Bird got to fly.
Man got to sit and wonder 'why why why?'
Tiger got to sleep.
Bird got to land.
Man got to tell himself he understand.
Eagleton's religious immorality is extremely dangerous. If one supposes that there is no natural morality and that morality only comes from "God" - or, more correctly, one's interpretation of "God's will", which has been used to "justify" the most heinous crimes imaginable. Which amounts to no morality at all.
It is easily shown that religion has only a tangential relationship to morality anyway. Keep in mind that Jesus preferred the kindly unbelieving Samaritan to the selfish self-righteous 'believer', and that his pet peeve was the religious hypocrite. Got plenty of those. But very few actual 'Christians'. So much for any religious basis to morality.
The only true morality is that Do Unto Others thing that Jesus paraphrased from the Pentateuch, whose authors got it from the Zoroastrians, but is really a feature of nearly all religions, including those which do not actually profess any belief in deities. Therefore, that morality does not necessarily have anything to do with "God".
If you are a truly moral person you do the Right Thing
because it is the right thing to do - not because some invisible man in the sky tells you to do it. How 'moral' can you be if your morality requires that your actions be micromanaged by mythical supernatural beings? Are you really so lame that you're incapable of being moral unless some Santa Claus (he knows when you've been bad or good) has you under constant surveillance?
Whatever. You can always prefer to just Do What You Wish, as mandated by Auryn. Just remember the consequences, and recall that Bastian almost didn't make it back.
