1 out of 4 stars
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In theory, The Meaning of Life by Gerald G. Frierson is a very short (34 pages according to Amazon) book detailing how to live your life in the best possible way. Gerald begins by saying that we have no reason to live if life has no meaning, and that God should be the reason we live. Living for God, earning His forgiveness/redemption and teaching others to be good people are the ways to not only have a purpose in life, they give our lives meaning.
As a reviewer, I always do my best to cover all the overall concepts of the book and sum them up in a few paragraphs. However, perhaps like the actual meaning of life, The Meaning of Life's lessons and points are buried beneath random stories, tangents that go nowhere, repetition and presumptions. In fact, it took every bit of my reviewing and note-taking skills to even come up with a few sentences summing up the lessons in this book.
To make matters worse, this book - a book I would've assumed was nonfiction from the beginning - is one of the most blasphemous, misleading books I've ever read. It has some good points - as a Christian I couldn't agree more that we should live to teach others to be good, to strive to be the best we can be and to let go and follow God. However, when a seemingly-Christian book says that God makes mistakes, that we all have things to hide from our spouse and parents instead of being honest and asking for forgiveness, or that God didn't blame Adam and Eve for what they did in the Garden of Eden and is going to ask THEM for forgiveness, it's scary to think people will actually believe these points. One of the chapters even says it was a narration by God and ends with it thanking the author for believing in Him, and the book itself ends with "Yours Truly, THE CREATOR".
In addition to the blasphemous points of the book, the author has a way of trying to be more poignant than he really is. He's successful occasionally, but the misses are more frequent than the hits. For example, the author states that there's both negative and positive energy, and that one of the things we should strive to do is increase positive energy while reducing negative energy. Gerald even gives a great example of this is a fire - if the fire is left to spread, negative energy will engulf more and more of the world. However, if we can put the fire out and rebuild the burned home better than it was originally we've removed negative energy and made it positive! On the other hand, the author says things like "the only way we can be perfect is to not be perfect all the time. In other words, perfection is the process of not being perfect all the time." I get that this is his way of saying we can't possibly be perfect and should strive for the best we can be, but it's misleading calling that "perfection". Also, there's a chapter that focuses on how one plus one NEVER equals two in the real world - it can equal one, three or more than three, but never ever two. He does a good job explaining that this is because one husband plus one wife isn't two people, it's one couple. This can be further extended into three or more with the addition of children into their family unit. Again, the point he's making is clear, but how it's said is a bit rough.
Finally, the author frequently goes against his own points, such as repeatedly saying in the text that God made mistakes, but then later says God never makes mistakes. He says that ignorance is never acceptable but then (jokingly) has a conversation between two people in which they say no one wants to know what's really in Chinese food. This would be a great end to this, and was a nice humorous touch, but then Gerald has to go on and say that we all have secrets to keep from our parents and/or spouse, and that hopefully it wasn't captured on film; even though we "have a constitutional right to remain silent", "pictures and videos can speak volumes" and "we can all relate to that". This flies right in the face of the point he's making about ignorance being unacceptable and it happens in the very same paragraph!
The Meaning of Life isn't without merit, but the bad far outweighs the good in this case. I lost count of the errors and the number of times I looked at this book in disbelief. I can understand finding dozens of errors in a long book that was self-edited, but this book is less than 40 pages long! I absolutely can't recommend it to anyone due to the self-serving messages within and the ridiculous amount of blasphemy in a book that talks so much about religion. I give the book 1 out of 4 stars.
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The Meaning of Life
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