Today at lunch my kids rejoiced at the announcement that our weekly Philosophy discussion was cancelled. I can appreciate how even the most zealous academic teens might not be so thrilled about wading through the words of ancient pundits. I wondered to myself, "where are those who muse today?" The masses of today's prevailing culture have been hypnotized by the expert marketers of materialism, the fast pace of Facebook and social media exhibitionism, and popularity's power over truth. The sentiment of the day is that the meaning of life or of anything doesn't really matter, what matters is what sells, or more basely, what feels good for the moment! By way of contrast a friend, with whom I enjoy a $1 sausage burrito once a month, shared this concise and coherent worldview test with me, which I now share with you. How would you answer these four simple questions?
How did you get here?
Why are you here?
How do you determine right or wrong?
What is your destiny?
These questions may provide a useful break from your life a-musement to instead muse upon a bigger picture, the purpose of your life. Your efforts to find answers to these questions may serve to give your life real meaning. Millenia ago Paul likewise challenged the pundits of Mars Hill in Athens Greece with answers to these questions.
22) Paul stood in the middle of the Areopagus, and said, 'You men of Athens, I perceive that you are very religious in all things. 23) For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription: "TO AN UNKNOWN GOD." What therefore you worship in ignorance, I announce to you. 24) The God who made the world and all things in it, he, being Lord of heaven and earth, doesn’t dwell in temples made with hands. 25) He isn’t served by men’s hands, as though he needed anything, seeing he himself gives to all life and breath, and all things. 26) He made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the surface of the earth, having determined appointed seasons, and the boundaries of their dwellings, 27) that they should seek the Lord, if perhaps they might reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 28) "For in him we live, move, and have our being." As some of your own poets have said, "For we are also his offspring." 29) Being then the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold, or silver, or stone, engraved by art and design of man. 30) The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked. But now he commands that all people everywhere should repent, 31) because he has appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he has ordained; of which he has given assurance to all men, in that he has raised him from the dead.'
Acts 17:22-31 (WEB)
