Outworn Explanations of Meaning

A common meaning system is based on the assumption that human beings are mortals who unlike the gods must die. One version of this is that we are the mortal creatures of a war lord god who can be rewarded with world domination or immortality in the afterlife if we obey his commands to worship and obey him. Another common meaning system is scientific materialism based on dogmatic reductionism. In this belief system we are machines driven and selected to survive by chance. Marxists insist that historical economic forces, of which we hardly aware, determine human history but we comfort ourselves into believing that we or various gods are in charge. Psychiatrists believe that we are animals whose complex nervous systems are easily disturbed to the point where we believe in the reality of demons and spirits etc. when we should be believing that we are soulless automata driven by reason, sex, reproduction and economics to work from nine to five for fifty years in enclosed boxes. The most radical form of this mechanistic reductionism is genetic determinism. This is the belief that genetic processes are the only real part of the evolutionary process but our amour propre causers us to delude ourselves into thinking that we ourselves or supernatural beings with their own inscrutable purposes are in charge.