Irish Leaving Certificate Religious Education

The search for meaning as a human constant

People in every age and culture have asked what life is for, why there is suffering, and how one ought to live. The questions are not confined to philosophers or religious believers; they come up for anyone who has lost someone, made a big decision, or woken at night wondering whether any of it adds up. Religions are one long-standing set of answers, but the questions themselves come first, and they are also asked by people who hold no religious belief at all. The word meaning here covers the sense that one's life has a direction and a point, and values are the convictions about what is good and worth striving for that follow from that sense.

Three great questions

Three questions recur so often that they can be treated as the main strands of the quest.

The goal and purpose of life

Is there something life is for, or does each person have to decide for themselves? Some people answer in terms of a goal outside themselves, such as serving God or humanity. Others answer in terms of personal fulfilment, relationships, a career or creative work. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived Nazi concentration camps, wrote in Man's Search for Meaning (first published in 1946) that people can endure almost anything if they can find a reason for it, and that meaning is found through work, through love and through the attitude taken to unavoidable suffering.

Good and evil

Why do people do harm, and what makes an act good or bad? The question is raised whenever a news story shows cruelty or courage, and it sits behind courtroom dramas, superhero films and the stories children are told. Is evil a force, a failing in the individual, or the product of a damaging society? Different traditions answer differently, and the question is a reason why morality and religion are so often studied together.

The experience of suffering

Illness, bereavement, poverty and injustice raise the sharpest form of the question: why does this happen, and can it mean anything? Believers may ask how suffering fits with a loving God. Non-believers may see it as simply part of a universe with no plan, and look to human solidarity for a response.

How the search shows up in contemporary culture

The search is easy to find in the culture that young people meet daily.

• Music. Many songs deal with purpose, loss, hope and injustice. John Lennon's Imagine (1971) pictures a world without possessions, divisions or religion, which is itself a proposed answer to what a good world would be.
• Literature. Douglas Adams made fun of the quest in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979), where a supercomputer says the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42, and nobody knows what the question was. The joke works because the audience recognises the question.
• Art. Edvard Munch's The Scream (1893) is a widely known image of anxiety and isolation.
• Film and youth culture. Stories of heroes who find a purpose, or of characters who discover that the life they were given is not what it seemed, draw large audiences, as do the debates among young people about identity, belonging, mental health and what kind of future they want.

Any song, painting, novel or film can be read in the same way, by asking which of the three great questions it raises and how.

Factors that block the search

A person may want to ask the questions and still find them crowded out. Several features of contemporary life are commonly named as obstacles.

• Consumerism and materialism, which suggest that happiness is something to be bought and that having more is the goal.
• A very busy life, with school, work and constant digital contact leaving little time for stillness or reflection.
• Peer pressure and the wish to fit in, which can make serious questions seem embarrassing.
• Media saturation and entertainment, which supply distraction faster than a person can think about what matters.
• Cynicism, or a belief that nothing can be known for certain, so that asking is pointless.
• Hardship. When a person is struggling to eat or stay safe, there may be no energy left for questions about meaning.

Indifference

Indifference, sometimes called apathy, is a stronger obstacle than any of these because it is the absence of interest in the question rather than a distraction from it. The person is not rejecting an answer; the question simply does not seem to matter to them. It appears in the shrug of "whatever", in a life organised around comfort and entertainment with no reflection, and in the assumption that questions of meaning are for other people. It differs from atheism and from agnosticism, which are positions taken after thinking about whether God exists, and it differs from the active search of a person who has doubts and keeps looking.