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…