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It seems to me that Mr Map has managed to completely misread both Eagleton and Laura Miller on the issue of "absolute" meaning. The point is emphatically not that Eagleton feels that something cannot have meaning (that, for instance, torture cannot be wrong) absent some divine will or dictum. Rather, what he is saying--and Miller makes this quite clear--is that the post-modernist impulse to relativize absolutely everything is, ironically, born of the same conviction which drives certain religious fundamentalists to assert that the meaning of a thing depends on perspective which is not of this world.
To put it another way: If I am the sort of person who feels that all is relative and up for grabs because nothing can finally be founded upon the will or intention of some celestial authority, and you are the sort of person who believes that everything which is right or wrong is so because of the will or intention of some celestial authority, then the two of us have more in common than we might like to think. Ivan and Alyosha were both brothers Karamazov, in other words.
The middle ground which Eagleton seems to want to occupy looks something like this: While "The" meaning of life might vary to some extent from place to place and from time to time, what is inescapable and constant is the simple fact that people everywhere and always will be concerned about life's meaning. Mr Map's letter is actually pretty good evidence of this. He begins with a mini-rant about how only biological imperatives "really" matter, and yet somehow still finishes up with several assertions about morality which have little to do with simple biology and a lot to do with the "golden rule," which--as he correctly points out--is not the sole property of any one religious tradition.
If I might recommend a bit of further reading: Anybody interested in this kind of thing might also want to have a look at the excellent After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre, another Marxist with a background in theology.
