The search for "meaning" or "purpose" is a particular characteristic of humans which we don't see in other animals. Our brains evolved to become incessant thinking machines, whether planning our next meal, our next sexual encounter, our safety from predators and injury, our protection of property, etc. This definitely gave us an advantage in the world, but also burdened us with asking questions like "why?" and "to what end?" and "how does this happen?" Inevitably, "what's the meaning of life?" became one of our most mysterious and richly explored questions.

As a scientist and a Buddhist, I see this yearning for what it is: the craving of my rational/emotional mind for answers. Words and concepts are just contigent, impermament, and illusory tools we use to navigate our lives, but they have no inherent reality in themselves (just as we humans don't, being conglomerations of matter and energy). Through meditation, once can still the mind and achieve a level of being/awareness free from thought and emotion, leading to an abiding sense of peace and loving-kindness (though these are also just imperfect lagnuage-bound concepts). Ethical behavior in the world can only be freely chosen and willed when it stems from this inner understanding. Otherwise, it is based on on the reward/punishment paradigm and becomes a form of enslavement.

The meaning of life then becomes right action and right understanding borne of rigorous self (or non-self) awareness.

Dear Ms.Miller,

Thank you for an engaging and wonderfully written article.

Sincerely, David Terry www.davidterryart.com

Sorry, an old reflex.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to become a sofa.

Of the possible answers tendered so far to "What is the meaning of life?", the Golden Rule is closest to the correct one. It misses the essence, too, however - not because the GR is not good and true and useful, but because it isn't an answer to life, but rather a strategy for living.

I clicked through to Eagleton's review of Dawkins' screed on religion. His critique of Dawkins' arguments could be applied just as well to Eagleton's own. Both authors have feet of clay and choose to wrestle with opponents of straw. The context for the meaning of life is surely much broader than just the meaning of human life. Dawkins knows this when not jousting with windmills, but Eagleton appears not to. Perhaps to be an apologist for Marx requires first being an apologist for humanity.

The best answer to the narrowness of Dawkins' caricature of religion is to be found in Dawkins' transcendent "Ancestor's Tale". And the best rejoinder to Eagleton's circumscribed purlieu might be found in his own "How to Read a Poem" - for instance in his analysis of Auden's poem, "Musée des Beaux Arts", beginning:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

Meaning arises not in semantics, but in the synthesis of a personal worldview from disparate, often conflicting, facts and conjecture. This synthesis is aided by casting our nets widely and by reading not just deeply, but broadly. Science AND poetry AND philosophy.

The meaning of life is in the apposite opposite. The tautology of an oxymoron.

This refers to the article Sister-wives by Carol Lloyd. Like the Mormons the Muslims also believe in polygamy but as a rule cannot have more than four wives at a time. However, unlike the Mormons the Muslims hardly practice it on account of stringent conditions controlling laid thereon. I think there is a tendency among women to share and this sharing-nature sometimes helps them to cling together with a single husband. Another reason which comes to my mind regarding women agreeing to wed a single husband is due to the circumstances factors. For example, women living in tribal systems or in clans , widowed women, unmarried older women, abandoned women, etc have good reason to get matrimonial attached with a single man inorder to ensure their security from the bad eyes of other men and live under gregarious conditions with their sister-wives. The husband of these women is under full liability to feed, clothe and shelter them as well as to provide them honor and security for their valence. However, this may not happen exactly in practical life yet it should be a matter of consolation for women who if left on their own may ultimately indulge in prostitution. Polygamy also helps to eliminate adultery from society. There is no pre-marital sex in Islam. Sex enters a Muslim women’s life only after marriage. It’s the same for men as well but as you know men are men! Who knows if they go on dipping their nibs in inkpots out of matrimony? I think men regardless of whatever women may think of themselves comparatively do have an edge over them in many respects, physically at least.if not intellectually. If the Mormons practice polygamy like the Muslims I believe they are rendering a service to humanity especially in the plethora of ever increasing female population in the world. If all women are not engaged in a matrimonial relationship they are bound to go astray and indulge in adultery. The only course left for them is thus polygamy. Flowers look more beautiful in a bouquet, don’t they??

mazhar butt

As a recent (and solidly middle-aged) recipient of a Master's degree, I didn't come away from my education thinking that the modern or post-modern projects meant that everything is relative.

Look at all the letters written in response to this article -each has a different sense of what the meaning of life is, even if they think it's a stupid, irrelevent question.

As I survey the infinite diversity of belief, culture, and individuality across earthly time and space, connect to the "indeterminancy of reference" inherent in language (the fact that language is always an agreed upon and problematic "pointing at" rather than an objective truth), I am left with the sense of the incredible necessity of each of us to create, adapt and defend the meanings we find "true." I am a huge fan of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The golden rule is one I believe in. Evolution (growth and development) IS and should be pursued. All these are my opinions but I have the sense that these values may be transcendant in origin. I don't think I can really know that, at least in this lifetime.

So as nations and individuals, if we have these beliefs in common, then to me, post-objective philosophy suggests that we better get busy making them, living them, creating them. Humbly perhaps, always with an eye towards what we don't or can't know and how we can grow in our understanding, but if we don't, other competing philosophies that believe other things are perfectly willing to grow into the spaces left by our inattention.

Pirsig ended Lila by simply asserting that "Good is a verb" and indeed the etymological root of god is just that...good.

ps.I'm loving the civility of the discourse!