I have a picture of Albert Camus on my wall. For a non-atheist, this might seem incongruous, but my attachment to him is that he struggled to rationalize doing the right thing, even when everything and everyone around him was falling apart. He was, in the latter phase of his career, a sincere moralist, even if he struggled to justify it.
Perhaps the word most associated with him is Absurdity. Life is absurd, if we know we are going to die, and if we know it is final. I well remember one character from his novel “The Plague”, who spent his life moving a pile of beans (or something similar) from one side of the table to another, one at a time, then back again. Qualitatively, was that worse than a life of selfless service to others? Intellectually, I think Camus thought no. Affectively, he was unable to accept this, though, and didn’t. He broke with Sartre when the latter insisted in his Communism, when the extent of the brutality of the Soviet regime became clear.
It occurred to me this morning, though, that life is just as absurd when we believe in God. Intellectually, how do we justify anything? My entire project is oriented around the generation of feeling. Feeling cannot be justified. It is simply awesome when good, and horrible when bad. It is the root of experience. If we must experience, and if rationally experience is extended beyond this world, the only rational path forward is figuring out how to generate positive experience. The experience itself is still ridiculous. We are not machines, and as such are messy. There is nothing wrong with this, but it is silly. You have to laugh at us.
An analogy I have used in the past, and used in my “Goodness Sutra”, linked on my other site, is that of bubbles. I once had this image of each of us isolated as bubbles in an endless ocean, unsure of where the sun was, and unsure even what direction up was. What to do? Can we not relate to one another, with love? Certainly, we can use hate, but does that decrease our sense of isolation? I think it enables temporary groupings relative to other groupings, but it is forced, and not natural: it is not comfortable.