God Has a Plan

Suggesting that life has inherent meaning is an absurdity. There is no meaning to life apart from the meaning we impose upon it. If we become the automatons our religions and our communities encourage us to become, who we really are (our self) will die.
This is one of the reasons I am an evolutionist. For me the meaning of life is in the struggle. Whereas so many people seem to see God as what they can control through careful manipulation (flattery, pleading, prostration), I see Him/Her/It (whether or not there is a God) as what can never be controlled and as an adversary giving meaning to my life (my struggle to survive which is manifested in my determination to dominate) through an eternal wrestling match, if you will. It is somewhat similar to the child wrestling with his father that I mentioned a few moments ago. He cannot win, but there is meaning in his determined struggle to overcome this overwhelming force which means him no harm but rather an opportunity to vent this drive to assert himself.
There is an affectionate interrelationship formed by close physical contact and by the exertion inherent in instinctual actuation. The world becomes a playpen. The fantasy of finally overcoming this indomitable force gives meaning to life. The fantasy will, of course, never be realized, but who really cares. The meaning is in the struggle. This is instinct at its very best. It drives us forward.
We are, unfortunately, educating our children away from primal instincts and toward a life of rules: scientific, cultural, religious, doctrinaire, etc.; the things that do actually give meaning to our lives (music, dance, poetry, prayer, meditation, painting, etc., our primal instincts) are rapidly becoming obsolete. Sadness, hopelessness, even rage, may be attributed to the feeling of loss we feel of these, our primary motivators, the things that make life most enjoyable.
I’m not a Darwinist. Today’s interpretation of that term seems to suggest using evolution to perfect humanity. Hitler pretty much proved that this is a dangerous direction, the immediate question being, “Who determines perfection?” The most appropriate answer appears to be, “As much as possible, let’s leave the direction of evolution in the hands of God (or of chance if you are not a theist)."
I am more interested in how evolution explains us. It seems logical to me that there must be a drive to survive, a sort of impetus to the action/reaction responses of instinctive behavior. I am concerned that the instincts that make us who we are, and which are expressed through artistic endeavor, are more and more being subjected to contempt through our obsession with the rational part of our nature. I also believe that religion is our attempt to express the irrational (intuitive, instinctual, artistic) urges struggling within us in an attempt to alert us to possible threats, keeping us alert, on our toes, and enriching our lives, making us passionate and fully aware of just how stimulating life can be.
Many of my views about life are existential, though my suggestion that we are determined by inherited instincts probably deviates from the basic assumption of existentialism (that existence precedes essence). I like to think, however, that I am merely challenging transcendental thought, not rejecting it, and that the essence of life at its very beginning precedes the existence of life. I also believe that the decisions we make, though I think we (the self) are figments of our own imagination (a byproduct of the balancing of our instinctual responses), play a large part in determining our essence.
There are two kinds of struggle, I believe: hostile and benevolent. We struggle to survive and we struggle to hone our survival skills. The actual struggle against that which would kill us focuses our instincts and stimulates in us a kind of rage that blinds us to everything other than our immediate goal -- to win. Benevolent struggle is an opportunity to share our survival skills with another and to learn more effective and efficient ways to respond to adversity; children playing is an example of this. Then there is the master/student relationship. This is the struggle to which I was referring a few paragraphs back. In this situation the student not only learns to hone his instinctual behavior, he learns to curb his rage because he cannot win; he can only exert himself to his utmost in an impossible situation (a child wrestling with his father is a really good example of this).
You are right if you say this is the very behavior that has gotten us into so much trouble. That is one reason why we must not lose sight of who and what we are in our attempts to rationalize the world. Unaware of our drive to survive which morphs into our determination to dominate, we rationalize our behavior as justified, even when what is simply our repressed emotional self asserting itself harms others and often even ourselves. Aware of our irrational emotional (instinctive) self, we can express it more positively through dance, painting, poetry, religion, and/or some other art form. It becomes productive rather than destructive and it adds fullness to our lives and enriches our rational nature.