Screaming Out Loud by Jill Carattini

Take approximately 5 minutes to read this shortened version of yesterday's 'A Slice of Infinity'. Post comments to the blog for spiritual collaboration. Please email your prayer requests too.

Why do you now cry aloud—
have you no king?
Has your counselor perished,
that pain seizes you like that of a woman in labor? Micah 4:9

Slice of Infinity Snippets:
In his book The Doctor and the Soul, holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl writes, "If we present man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity, and environment, we feed the nihilism to which man is, in any case, prone."(1) Believing God is dead and humanity is the measure, the shrieking figure carries his philosophy to its logical response.

When the starting point is one without God, a philosophy of meaninglessness is an unavoidable outcome. Antitheists readily admit this, seeing meaninglessness as a logical consequence to life in a chance-driven world. And yet, they dismissively champion it as liberating or, at best, irrelevant. In an interview with Life magazine, paleontologist Stephen Gould stated plainly, "We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures... We may yearn for a 'higher' answer--but none exists. This explanation, though superficially troubling, if not terrifying, is ultimately liberating and exhilarating."(2)

But is this really possible? I fail to see how meaninglessness can ever be liberating or a pointless existence irrelevant. Without screams of despair, I fail to see how we are to understand our lives.

Yet more so, how are we to understand our own cries?

Perhaps it is an incalculable error to determine our cries are not real and telling, the hunger for meaning not a signal of meaning's very existence. Screams of futility do not make sense if there never existed One to hear them. If life were at base merely chance and matter, there would be no need for purpose. Behind the cry of a life that searches for meaning, there is a mind that seeks the unsearchable and a heart in which eternity has been set. We cry aloud because there is a King.

Comments:
What does your world present you as? Reflexes? Material? Or maybe nothing more than chicken noodle soup that was struck by lightning? Don't listen. Don't trust in man's 'knowledge'. The issue is not the degree of difference between you and a monkey, but the difference is in kind. Trust in God who made you and formed you. Trust the one who knows who He created you to be.