"...The meaning of life is not, as some people often think, just an item of unfamiliar information that can be communicated by someone who knows it to someone who doesn't, somewhat the way an astronomer would tell us how many planets the solar system has, or a statistician how many of us are alcoholics. The mystery of Being and the meaning of life are not 'data' and people cannot be separated into two groups, those who know the data and those who don't....Safarik correctly distinguishes between truth and information: information is portable and transmissible, whereas it is by no means as simple with truth."
"....Anything meaningful that has ever been said in this matter (including every religious gospel), is...remarkable for its dramatic openness, its incompleteness. It is not a confirmation so much as a challenge or an appeal; something that is, in the highest sense, 'taking place,' living, something that overwhelms us or speaks to us, obliges or excites us, something that is in concord with our innermost experience and which may even change our entire life from the ground up but which never, of course, attempts to answer, unambiguously, the unanswerable question of meaning (answer in the sense of 'settling the matter' or 'sweeping it off the table"). It always tends rather to suggest a certain way of living with the question."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
An interesting perspective on meaning/truth and information/data. A little overstated perhaps, but still a useful counterbalance to our tendency as Mormons to OVER value the INFORMATION that God has given (as well as to overestimate our understanding of that information) and to UNDER value our encounter with the truth and meaning given by our personal connection to God and the Savior. For example, I find attempts to reconstruct the history of the earth from the data given in Genesis far less useful than the truth and meanings that the passage conveys - that God is a careful creator, that his creations are marvels that deserve reverence, that they have a purpose, that we are created in his image and likeness.
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