Meaning

Would I give up my last piece of bread to find it . . .

. . . or would I give up my last piece of bread because of it?

Why is discovering the meaning of life so important?

Watch our Truth in Two to find out (full text below).

Meaning must have a source outside of me to complete the need for meaning I feel inside of me.

 

Subscribe to MarkEckel.com (here). Find the MarkEckel.com YouTube Channel (here). Mark is President of The Comenius Institute (website). Dr. Eckel spends time with Christian young people in public university (1 minute video), teaching at Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis, and interprets culture from a Christian vantage point (1 minute video). Consider becoming a Comenius patron (here).

Picture Credit: Luke Renoe, Snappy Goat, By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33459720

 

 

FULL TEXT

As a Jew he lost his position as a doctor of psychiatry. He was stripped of human dignity and placed in Auschwitz, a Nazi death camp. He survived imprisonment, escaping the ovens designed to kill Jews. Liberated by the Allies at the end of World War II, Viktor Frankl returned to his chosen profession. As a psychiatrist he took his observations about human behavior from Auschwitz, writing the book everyone should read: Man’s Search for Meaning.

There is a passage that daily haunts me from Viktor Frankl’s book.  It seems that there were some in the concentration camp who gave their last piece of bread to another person.  Frankl responded to such displays of compassion with a statement I recite on a regular basis.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

Choosing my attitude is the key to Man’s Search for Meaning. Meaning gives us reason and purpose. Meaning is the answer to the question “Why?” Meaning addresses “Why should I get out of bed in the morning?” Meaning begins from a source outside me which changes the inside of me.

Christians believe meaning, reason, and purpose are given by something or someone separate from ourselves. The Hebraic-Christian view of meaning is found in God. The Bible’s book of Genesis opens with two chapters answering the question “Why?” Why does the world exist? Why did God make us? Why should I worship God? And why is the question “Why?” the most important question for all humans?

I agree with Viktor Frankl that all people search for meaning. I believe that all people have meaning and are therefore important. And, I believe that meaning for life, is given by The God of Life.

For Truth in Two, this is Dr. Mark Eckel, President of the Comenius Institute, personally seeking Truth wherever it’s found.

 

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