Jennifer Kabbany of The College Fix explains that, without God, nothing means anything, and when nothing means anything, the only thing left to do is party, shop, and drink your days away:

Today’s Culture of Meaninglessness – and What It All Means

America no longer holds Judeo-Christian values.

But how it changed, and why it changed, and the question of whether this country is doomed – those are still very relevant and important matters to parse.

The short answer, according to leading conservative scholars who sat down together to digest the issue last Thursday in Santa Ana, is godlessness has made this country devoid of meaning.

“What they are taught in American high schools and colleges that are secular is – you are a bag of sand,” Dennis Prager, talk show host and founder of Prager University, said as a panelist at the discussion.

“If that is the case, I want thrills,” Prager added, referring to the tenets of today’s American culture. “If I am nothing, if this life is nothing, if nothing transcends me – no God, no rule of law, no religion, nothing: this is it! Then man – eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may be sand again.”

Fellow panelist Dr. Stephen Meyer, a leading intelligent design philosopher at The Discovery Institute and author of the New York Times bestseller Darwin’s Doubt, echoed those sentiments.

“If you define a human being as essentially an animal with material appetites … then it’s a very short step to saying, ‘Well, the most important thing is the satisfaction of those appetites,’ and the pursuit of pleasure becomes … the highest good in the culture,” he said to the hundreds in the audience gathered for the discussion at Calvary Church of Santa Ana.

The comments were part of the aptly titled discussion: “Faith, Science, & Culture: Does God Still Matter?”

Cultural commentator John Stonestreet of The Chuck Colson Center added that with this prominent atheistic framework influencing so much of American culture today – think sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll – a vapid void has formed in the hearts and minds of many.

“We know the phrase ‘ideas have consequences,’ and what we mean by that is ideas have victims,” said Stonestreet, another of the panelists. “People are victimized by really bad ideas.”

And the bad ideas that have created the current “culture of meaninglessness” have shifted priorities for many Americans in the wrong direction, he said.

“Descartes said, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ In our culture, it’s ‘I shop, therefore I am,’ ‘I consume, therefore I am,’” Stonestreet said. “Our culture has convinced us that we are nothing but consumers, [but] what we are made to do is produce. And this might be the most dramatic generational difference between the Greatest Generation (and today).”

Today’s Malleable College Kids

The event was moderated by talk show host Hugh Hewitt, who asked how young people raised in America today – with all the benefits that entails – can still grow up and decide to shoot and kill their peers on campus, or move to the Middle East and become Islamic jihadists.

Modern American culture has created a society in which young people are searching for meaning, get swept up by empty promises, and are easily suckered by manipulation, the panelists answered.

“I work with a lot of high school and college students, and a lot of times we want to critique the younger generation for being apathetic,” Stonestreet said. “I don’t think they are apathetic at all, I think they are absolutely passionate about things that often just don’t matter.”

Most students are looking for meaning in a Godless world – and when they find something to glom on to, they embrace it.

“At the college level, students are very active in their political affinities and sympathies, and they will often react to the latest thing they got … on their news from Facebook,” Meyer said.

“That’s why it’s so easy to radicalize this particular group of people,” Stonestreet noted. “We have a culture that’s offering them nothing except playing video games 13 hours a day.”

Meyer suggested that, without God, “nothing in this life has the kind of ultimate meaning that our souls desire, and I think it does breed boredom, hopelessness.”