Existentialist-influenced people commonly say that religion is a way for people to avoid the task of dealing with
the objective meaninglessness of life. This is a difficult argument for a religious person to refute, since every religion does provide people with a sense of meaning.
Any solution to this problem is going to lie between two extremes:
- Bokonon. Argue that everyone, not just religious people, creates meaning for their lives and that a particular religious tradition, with its rich mythology and cohesive world-view, is a very useful aid in the meaning-creation process. This acknowledges that ones particular religious ideas are foma, harmless and useful untruths, and that you're going to continue to practice your religion despite your implicit awareness of that fact.
- Buchanan. Damn the reality, full speed ahead! This is where you say, "my belief system rests on blind faith and that's the way it is." It's remarkably self-consistent, but it's hard to maintain the cognitive dissonance necessary to hold this viewpoint for a long period of time.
There's a middle ground between these two, one that recognized
objectivity as a concession to
consensus reality. It's true that 10,000 data points are more likely to provide an accurate measurement than 1, but that doesn't exclude the possibility of a minority viewpoint--even a minority viewpoint of one--turning out to be correct. However, a person who is going to maintain a belief based on
subjective experience (that is to say, everyone who believes in anything) has to have a pretty high opinion of themselves.
This is where Christianity--along with other religions--and existentialism have a common ground. In order to maintain religious belief, a believer has to maintain faith in his (or her) own ability to come to some sense of what the meaning of life is. In order to have faith in a God or some other meaning-generating ultimate, believers also has to have faith in their own ability to determine the meaning of life. The leap of faith in God requires some same kind of self-confidence that existentialists require to creating meaning in the world.