Palm Sunday. We had a visiting priest talk about how suffering is meaningless without Christ's passion, an argument that I strongly dislike, for 2 primary reasons:

1) I'm not sure it's true. "Meaning", as we usually think of it, is probably a human creation anyway, and non-religious people can (and do) find all sorts of meaning in their suffering if they choose. One could even make up an evolutionary story -- suffering is "meaningful" because those who suffer the least incur the fewest fitness penalties etc.

2) Even if it is true, it makes an assumption about the causal direction -- that is to say, it's equally reasonable to say that maybe religion only exists because suffering does. This is the Stark and Finke argument, essentially -- we believe, and invest in belief, as advance payment for the mitigation of suffering on earth. It's then utterly necessary (and, the skeptics would say, very convenient) that our suffering is arbitrary and orthogonal to the strength of our belief, because otherwise, there would no longer be any need for this external and inscrutable source of meaning to exist. Thus, at the very best, religion and suffering are symbiotic -- if we could directly negate our suffering with good acts, if there were any correlation whatsoever, there would be no need to appeal to (a) (G)od for our lives to make sense.

It's very clever really, because here you have one piece of evidence that can be used -- equally convincingly -- both for and against the existence of God. Not that you would ever hear this coming from the pulpit, but I thought I would share.