Recently, I have developed skepticism towards certain outlooks taught to me as a child.
Specifically, the concept of “meta-narratives,” which, as defined by Oxford Languages, concerns interpretations of events that “[…] provides a pattern or structure for people’s beliefs and gives meaning to their experiences […]”
Basically, inferring purpose and that events are, perhaps, “meant to be.”
It’s not a frequently cited term, but it is noticeable in daily life, involving throughlines or finding a silver lining out of endurance, unveiling outlooks previously unconsidered.
This sentiment is shared by religions like Christianity, where verses like Romans 5:3-5 state that “[…] we also boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope […]”
Thus, we have the aim’s central view: finding hope and virtues in afflictions.
Why am I so critical of this view? Its implications are negligible and bother no one
Firstly, there is little to actually investigate, at least for non-personal forces.
Since we live only one life, anything can be “meant to be,” implying other alternatives that can never be understood. Thus, our unacknowledged biases come through, for which we feel vindicated in our assumptions, and call it fate.
Are there limits in citing fate?
Elections? Meant to be. Meeting the love of your life? Meant to be. What is not meant to be? The idea becomes superfluous as it’s implied to be a choice against randomness, yet it also implies everything follows some plan.
If you are molding clay, you don’t leave its shape up to chance, only forging around the edges. Neither would anything receive sole credit if they didn’t have a role in the process, except as a proofreader of creation.
If we look for omens, there they are.
We selflessly budge an inch, before sculpting heartfelt purpose from faith and thin air, and implications of omnipresent forces, living as an organ of the universe’s moral obligations. Allowing us, the craftsmen of the presuppositional crime, to wrap a bow, where at last the monument is finished, and by sheer bittersweet resolve, the charges are dropped.
However, my greater criticism lies elsewhere, as meta-narratives involving a deity are more convoluted.
Take “God put you into my life for a reason…”
Some notes: this implies that everyone is constantly being arranged into your life, while, regarding the views of others, you are also arranged into their lives at the same level of control, all for some moral, which becomes superficial at the level of the higher power, like chess pieces being mere ivory pawns and not, in themselves, soldiers of intellect.
Another debacle is good and evil.
If we are going by a deity’s purpose, then there is design and function to the deity’s creation of everything that exists.
We must ask, does this extend to everything? Yes. If one says, “I am responsible for all that is good,” then the question of whether the entity is responsible for all that is bad is yes. This is because the control of all that is good requires that the bad be vitally arranged with as much care, to make way for the good.
The terms lose power, being a means to an end. All interpretations lie in the entity at the helm, independent of our input and should only be taken as actions at our expense for a “greater good.”
Such actions disregard our needs, and applying subjective terms misses that such manipulations of events and the entirety of our lives are not a matter of love but of ulterior motives that place us like pawns in a game.
When people state some resemblance to a divine plan, it seems its full implications have not been fully considered, for any world where the fight to rid the world of poverty, hunger and war would have happened if a deity had held similar aspirations.
Instead, our efforts are outlined in vague promises of resolutions, where every failure tallied, every death statistic and ecosystems rendered uninhabitable by pollution, all exist merely as “the darkness” contrasting “the light.” The light is simply the immeasurably small glimpse of hope, dangling like an underdog with aspirations of a better future.
It seems such fortunate futures have evaded reality because 1. Free will, and 2. Life is a “journey,” and without conflicts, no one would grow or build character.
The problem with 1. is that forces are already manipulating us, so if free will is violated, they may as well violate it for an actual greater good.
For 2., the implication that we fight for justice because we like the outlook it gives us ignores that such progress is to eradicate the issue. Protesting war has not made us love the death and pain it inflicts. Curing diseases has not made us appreciate their debilitating effects, nor has combating prejudice made us appreciate discrimination in society.
If we suddenly woke up without these “evils,” am I supposed to think there would be disappointment?
The light doesn’t consider darkness an agile friend, but makes the case for its expulsion, and such contrasting mindsets shudder when met with real testimonies of those who saw blood and did not feel enlightened, starved but did not see heaven nor glimpse in their pain and thank God, for they could finally see him at last.