The god religions, the river religions, and the world of supernatural enthusiasms do not serve you. They force you to rein in your intelligence, they… - Eric Maisel

Any modern person, believer or atheist, can feel this way (i. e., that the universe is meaningless). The believer, to take some comfort and to find some solace, allows his brain to perpetrate a trick that it is quite willing to play: to conjure a god and a more pleasant universe. So he turns to religion, even if to find that solace he must ignore his religion’s monstrous contradictions, swallow his doubts, smile at ludicrous claims and accept that he has transformed a metaphor into a pseudo-reality. Before the advent of modern science and the last four hundred years of increased knowledge, believers may have believed in some seamless way, uninterrupted by doubts. Now every sensible, educated, modern believer knows in a corner of consciousness that she is buying her solace on the cheap—she knows that the pope is not infallible, that god did not give the Jews a piece of land, that there is nothing like nirvana, and so on. So she bites her tongue and tries to get as much out of her religion as she can, covering her eyes to all the rest—and not really dealing with the central issue of cosmic indifference.

This individual is regularly nominated not only by himself but by others as well: by the ordinary townsfolk who beg him to save their town, their world, or their galaxy because they see that he has the strength and integrity that they lack.

We are on the threshold of understanding a shining idea: that each life can have meaning, even if the universe has none.