Plus, if happiness is a need whose fulfillment is continually possible, that’s a lot better than a memory, which relies on a specific set of circumstances and may not be able to be replicated. I think that someone who is happy has a mixture of good things flowing steadily into their life and flowing steadily from them; things like love and affection from other people, the autonomy to choose one’s own responses, freedom from shame, freedom from bitterness about griefs they’ve suffered, and enjoyable work to do that matches well with their abilities and interests. These are dynamic things that have to do with relationship, things that are continually created and maintained.

–Edit: sorry for the repeat post, it is regrettable that I never formally learned html. “What do they teach in schools these days?” - Prof. Kirke.

I think you’ve hit upon something missing in some popular trends in religious/spiritual conceptualization. What I mean is this: the universe’s immensity is part of our overall experience of what I will term “authoritative” truths. An “authoritative” truth is something that every human will experience regardless or preference, belief, or decision. For instance, gravity is authoritative truth because our actions will always be affected by it. Even if you make an anti-gravity device and live in that, you would still be under the authoritative truth of gravity because your action of building and living in and anti-gravity device was made necessary by the presence of gravity.

Anyways, experiencing things that are “authoritative,” experiences of principles that are not subject to human decision but only human response, ought (I think) to lead us to the general conclusion that we cannot self-define. As you bring up, Tim, we cannot define our relative size to the rest of the universe. We may find technologies or work with established physical principles to change that relationship, but we cannot define or decide those principles in the first place.

I feel that since we observe this trend in the physical world, we ought to consider the likelihood of the same situation in the spiritual realm (for those of us who consider a spiritual realm to be a relevant possibility). Just as we cannot self-define our physical relationship to our environment, I think it ought to be obvious that there is a high chance that we also cannot self-define spirituality.

I make this point because I think the current trend is that spirituality / religion is like consumer goods. We pick out religion like we pick out clothes in Target, based on what we like and/or prefer. But I think that our mainstream culture is wrong in lumping spirituality with the small category of things that are subject to human definition. Artwork, for example, is subject to human definition, and this correlates with the unspoken premise that spirituality is created by humans. Perhaps as Christians we need to be more distinct about exactly what we’re presupposing when we suggest that God exists. Because undoubtedly there are many people who do create an ideology of God in order to satisfy their emotional needs or something, but that is clearly not what we’re proposing when we say “there is a God.” We’re saying, “We propose that God exists, and that His existence cannot be self-defined by any individual, but rather we as individuals live subject to this analagously to our relationship with our physical environment.”