Well, H.E. Baber, I confess you greatly surprise me. I’ve known a number of people who don’t have – or anyway don’t seem to have – any interest in questions about the meaning of life – people who seem to just cruise innocently and unquestioningly from day to day until they drop unthinkingly into their graves; but I notice your areas of specialization include the Philosophy of Religion and Metaphysics. I really have no idea how one could study those subjects and yet say that they don’t find questions about the meaning of life interesting or related to a deep human need (or important, I think you said) .

Words, I confess, fail me. I really don’t know where to start. Do you really believe that religions through the ages have been nothing but “a pseudo-technology aimed at making the corn grow, getting babies and curing diseases”? So, all the great writings on religion – the Bible, the Upanishads, the Buddhist writings, and much more – all that is just empty words, the strange delusions of men and women who let their imaginations get the better of them?    

I am not religious, I should hasten to add. I’ve been an agnostic since my early teens and am likely to remain so; but I have never for one moment doubted the importance of the questions religions address. (I mean the major questions, not those related to doctrinal niceties). Of course, it’s not only religions that address those questions; I’m not suggesting that. Many writers have done so – and some still do (not usually philosophers though: they now seem determined to confine themselves to trivial issues). But questions about the meaning of life are at the very heart of religion. Without them it would simply have no point.

DA