I once made a joke to a religious person. While I was on my way to the gym, I said “Well, I gotta’ go to church. Be back in a couple hours.”. My “blasphemy” infuriated him. He demanded that a church is a holly place while a gym is merely brick and mortar. I attempted to explain that a “temple” is something you carry inside of you. By itself, no building holds any meaning at all. We are the creators of meaning and we decide what is holly and what is not. I told him “Just as you hold your church as sacred, I hold my gym in the same esteem.” That really got his goat, and I quickly realized I might as well have been talking to a brick wall. His thinking was so rigid, he could not distinguish between material and immaterial. Between physical objects and the meaning we assign to them. The only truth was his truth, everything else was a lie told by the devil himself.
Atheists fall into the same trap. They see the literal actions of believers rightly as absurd. They don’t see the profound inner experience that every individual has while navigating the “real” world. All religious acolytes are in a miracle realm of experience. They rightly see the profound nature of what is taking place, but they wrongly ascribe this miracle to some external author. “God” is some bearded old guy sitting on a throne in “heaven”. He is not here. He is not now. He is not ME! And the atheist experiences the same miracle of existing. He can try to explain it all away. These are all things! They are electrons, protons and neutrons floating around. They have no meaning. My experience is merely, electrical signals interpreted by my brain, the product of a million years of natural selection. Yet, no matter how hard he explains away what is taking place, it is no less miraculous. We cannot escape it. Life is simply a miracle.
In truth, the real world is an interplay between the internal and the external. It is through this interplay that we gain the experience required to know ourselves. But as long as we demand separation, as long as we refuse to acknowledge this deep connection, we will continue to act like egomaniacs. Just like we saw in the riotous left all summer; they tore down statues (temples of the heathen gods). They held their own view of the world as absolute. All other perspectives are lies from the devil! Interesting that the secular left acts so religiously, isn’t it? They are the thing they hate about the world. Their egos demand sole authorship over life’s meaning and condemn any other author! Yet possessing sole authorship would never be enough. After all, how could they blame the world if they were in charge. Eventually they’ll have to burn the world, and when they’re down burning it all to the ground, they’ll still feel exactly the same as when the started. The chaos we are seeing take place will only resolve itself when people begin to respect the meaning that others see, and take responsibility for what they see.