It’s not a question of value or rewards. It’s a question of truth. You’ve displaced the quest for truth for the quest to make yourself feel good.
You do understand what the word “meaning” means, no?
It entails apprehending the importance of anything.
It might be “true” that I have a certain amount of lint in my pocket, but that would be insignificant and inconsequential. Are you going to accuse me of abandoning my “quest for truth” if I don’t spend an inordinate amount of time on a quest to identify every strand of lint because such an enterprise doesn’t suffice to “make me feel good” and I should not abandon a quest for the truth about lint?
So, NO, I haven’t “displaced the quest for truth.” What I have done is refined it, by distinguishing “meaningful” truth from insignificant truth according to the criteria I deem the most serious and sublime.
It isn’t a matter of “making yourself feel good,” it is a matter of discriminating one’s taste for “truth.”
One of Jesus’ most important sayings is, “Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.”
The reason I think it is key is because it doesn’t apply so much to us, as if we have any pearls or any sacred valuables to cast, but because God does. Jesus was speaking of himself in the saying and, only, by extension, to the Apostles after their rebirth. It was an analogy referring to his mission undertaken to the darkness of the pig sty or dog run.
We are the dogs, the pigs, that only recognize slop (or straw as per Aquinas.) What is required of us is that we become less swine-like in order to recognize the pearls and sacred things cast our way, which God will not, in any case, give us so long as we remain piggish or houndish. The more brutish we are, the less likely we are to see things of value as having value. Pigs are only interested in one thing - devouring what is before them and trampling the rest in the mud.
So God’s problem is how to get the boars to see the pearls and value them.
If, like boars, our interest in “meaning” pertains only to what we can consume, then our meaning “detectors” will be attuned only to slop and we shouldn’t expect God, as pearl-caster, to give us anything more than detritus.
And, if we are only attuned to slop, our perspective on the nature of the “slop-giver” will only lead so far as the hand that drops it, since we only have interest in consumption to the point of satiation. A pointing hand means very little to a dog, but a hand holding a bone is quite a different story.
My perspective, as a discontented boar (or prodigal son stuck in the pig sty,) is that slop is insufficient, but in order to recognize, first the pearls and, only then, the hand of the pearl caster, I need to retune my boarishness away from an appetite for slop.
The irony is that you view that enterprise as “displacing a quest for truth” as if slop had any truth beyond that it is useful for fattening pigs.
Unfortunately, a leopard cannot change its spots and neither can a hog its appetite, which is why Christianity, especially Catholicism, with its view of our predicament (fall into the mud of concupiscence), Christ (the pearl caster) coming into the sty, our need for conversion from boarishness, grace as a vehicle for redemption from the boardom, all fit with where I am at.
It is not so much that I have misplaced my quest for truth, as having lost my appetite for eating slop and wallowing in mud, but having realized that, as a boar without much of a “taste” for pearls and sacred things, I have to rely on the pearl caster to work a miracle and change me into a being who recognizes that slop and mud do not have enduring value in order to see where real meaning is to be found. Metanoia is required, lest I end up trampling the pearls and turn against the Keeper of the Sacred.
. That sounds like a good place to me.
