When I was 12 to 14 years old the most important thing in my life was science fiction, including the original Star Trek. I literally got high off of it - I felt what is called "the sense of wonder." I don't have to explain it to those who understand; those who have never experienced it, I can't explain it to them.
In my imagination I ranged across all of time and space - and before them, and after them. I traveled through parallel dimensions and alternative universes. I encountered a vast array of aliens - talking cats, winged beings, and those that lived under the sea, or in space. It was heady stuff.
Because it was the most important thing in my life at that time, it was in effect the meaning of my life. Others got their meaning from sports or music. Billy Joel, for example, once said that rock 'n' roll was as close to a religion as he had.
I am grateful that I encountered SF at the age I did. I think if I had run across it a few years later, although I would have enjoyed it, I would have never felt that intense sense of wonder. I sometimes wonder about those stuck in ancient and ossified cultures, who've never been able to feel what I did. Almost all SF - as Norman Spinrad noticed, the only visionary and transformational literature - has come from America and England, two of the most free countries in the world.
At the same age as I began reading SF, I quit going to church. It bored me immensely. I got the awe and wonder from SF. From church I got nothing but boredom. The latter held no meaning for me. How can anything be called a religion when you get nothing but boredom and meaninglessness from it?
I have for years felt that SF was for some people a substitute for religion, or, in some cases, complimentary to it. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien exemplified the latter (although, to be accurate, Tolkien wrote fantasy.) For some people it gives community and meaning. Watch Trekkies, in which one of the characters comments, "We are always recruiting."
All people seek meanings to their lives, even if they deny there is any meaning to life. Richard Dawkins may be an atheist, but obviously his obsessive promoting of Darwinism is his meaning. People will never choose something boring for their meaning in life. It must always give them excitement and a sense of community.
People who may be a bit more sensitive, imaginative and intelligent than others may be lucky enough to encounter that "sense of wonder," what the original Outer Limits called "the awe and mystery." But what about those who aren't so lucky, who are far more limited? What do they seek for excitement and community?
Sometimes - oftentimes - they choose war...