One of Man's Blunders

We killed god. For all of human history we had a point, the gods told us what to do, what to build monuments to, what to fight and die for. But we killed god at the altar of the individual, bit by bit as the renaissance turned into revolution over the centuries. It was right and it was good, in the sense that it destroyed something cancerous in the human spirit. We overthrew arbitrariness, but we neglected to replace the one thing that it gave us. We never replaced purpose. Purpose is arbitrary and irrational. Purpose cannot be derived, it cannot be worked out from first principles. Purpose is in and of itself arbitrary. But how can we face a world without purpose? We must either invent purpose, or live lives without it. The former is the source of every horrific ideology of the twentieth century, the latter unthinkable.