What is the Meaning of God?

The theist assumes that our penchant for finding meaning itself means there must be some ultimate meaning of life to be found. This is a bit like assuming our desire for food means there must be some ultimate food for us to find, or that our desire for entertainment means there must be some ultimate game or amusement that we are meant to find. It is to assume, in other words, that our every desire only points to the existence of some ultimate satisfaction for everyone of our desires, that will surely satisfy them all forever after. 

This, of course, is the basis for the Sunday service every week, since "church" is sold as a pregame show of heaven, that provides attendees with an earthly example of the eternal food and entertainment they can expect to find in Heaven, once they Donkey Kong their way past the demons of this world, and into the bliss of a heavenly Guyana with God. 

In this way, the Christian concludes that our desire for ever more life, as C. S. Lewis has argued, means there is life forever after to be found, just as much as our desire to be "happy" proves that life is a story, written by God, that ends necessarily with a "happily every after." But simply wanting this to be true does not make it so.

As Lewis argued and countless Christians simply chose to believe (despite not a single shred of evidence to support such claims other than an emotional "desire" to simply believe it, and nothing more), our desires for "ever more" of everything is certainly not evidence of the greed that Christianity condemns as one of the seven deadly sins and Capitalism exploits for "the love of money," but of the irrefutable existence of a heavenly abode prepared for us by a "God," that Lewis assured his sheepish followers will surely "satisfy a desire which no experience in this world will satisfy."

For the Christian and the Muslim alike, however, we can only have this eternal "experience," in a fairy-tale land of "happily ever after," if we but beseech the (alleged) author of all life to give it to us, and grovel accordingly for the rest of our days to show our gratitude for "his" having done so. And we must do this, mind you, even though we have no garuntee that we will actually reach heaven, despite having spent our entire lives thanking god in expectation we would.  And if after we die, we discover we are bound for hell nevertheless, there isn't a bloody thing anyone can do about. No wonder people in hell are said to all be gnashing their teeth - they are complaining about " the divine plan" that, despite their life of prayers, landed them in a lake of lava. 

And by "grovel accordingly," I mean dutifully finance that professional priestly class who live off of the tithings of their parishioners (in accord with "his" divine will, of course), who are all told to seek salvation by giving some percentage of their income to the "Church" every Sunday, even as some of those same priests and parishioners both denounce the welfare and healthcare offered to the poor by the state as nothing but the evil of "socialism" and "communism."

For the Christian, our mind derives "meanings" from its environment, not because that is simply what our mind does, and for no other reason than to simply help us survive, but because God wants us to find Him as the "meaning" behind the curtain of reality. And He wants us to find "Him" so that we may "survive" eternity; and preferably on a warm sunny beach somewhere, rather than in the belly of a blast furnace, that He alone is responsible for creating. 

That God chose to use so ambiguous a means of "saving" us from the blast furnace he prepared for all those who's compass of "meaning" leads them to any other conclusion, rather than pulling back the curtain of reality and simply showing Himself to everyone (that would be much too vain, apparently), never deters the Christian from insisting that the 'compass maker' is still a really "good guy" nevertheless, even if he decided to punish everyone for getting it wrong (the great flood being but one example of this). 

In this sense, the theist thinks our penchant for finding meaning is proof of the meaning we find, but only if that "meaning" leads us ultimately to a belief in God, and a particularly "Christian" God at that. 

Monotheism, more than polytheism or paganism, has been famous for wanting people to follow their quest for "meaning," straight to a single God, with anyone following that quest to any other conclusion being labeled as either a heretic who knowingly choose the wrong meaning to follow, or a "sinner" who simply misunderstood the true meaning they found, and which the Christian is only too willing to provide.

Hence, for the Christian, the "meaning of life" is basically God. But what is the meaning of God? 

Is not the meaning of God's eternal nature but a reflection of our own desire to live forever? Is not our desire to "know" God simply a reflection of our desire to be God?  And if we answer "no" to such questions, how can we ever really know for sure that we are not simply lying, and perhaps to no one so much as ourselves? 

Indeed, the only one qualified to answer such questions would be God Himself; a God, mind you, who has decided in his infinite wisdom to leave us all to figure it out for ourselves, by giving us an ambiguous stack of holy books to choose from, and a desire for finding "meaning" that is only surpassed by our inability to ever find one that satisfies such a desire for very long.