Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe

The phrase suggests that what we were given to be at birth, the role predestined for us, may yet be improvised in a different direction. Nor is religion the only stimulus to this kind of rebirth. Counselling and psychoanalysis can have the same effect, as they encourage us to explore our own history and identify the facts and forces that formed us.

they are both obsessed with questions of meaning. Sometimes I think this is just a way of winding up those atheists who betray a religious or evangelical intensity in promoting their atheism.

there is a clear tendency in subsequent generations of believers to overdefine and concretise the original revelation.

‘When will the kingdom come?’ Jesus said: ‘It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying, “Here it is” or “There it is”. Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.’

Apart from the mistake of believing that the Old Testament was a coded message intended to be understood exclusively by them, the other big mistake the early Christians made was in reading its stories literally rather than symbolically, as news reporting rather than as an artistic creation.

It is the claim not that God demands suffering from us to appease his honour but that, like a heart-broken lover, God pays all our debts because he feels all our sorrows. It is the idea that when we suffer, God suffers in, through and with us.

fictions can be true or false. True in the sense that they tell us something valid about the human condition, false in the sense that we can wilfully misread them. Religion is full of true fictions, stories that carry meanings we have to work for,

This is why some of our noblest thinkers have felt obliged to hope for another life. Not for their own sake, not because they selfishly wanted their own lives to go on for ever, but in order to squeeze some moral sense out of the universe and even out its colossal injustices.

that we have been lucky to arrive in the one whose particular chemistry enables us to exist.