Becoming a humanist, you feel the need for something to replace the rituals of private prayer and collective worship you’ve discarded.

Collective worship is easy to understand and there is historically more experience concerning how to engage with it. You can join poetry groups, knitting circles, writers groups or some other way of gathering together to share an activity. This could even be play reading. SF writers call it world building. It’s hard to start thinking of it as portraying something that hasn’t happened, something made up, in the sense of telling a lie. Might one be giving form to a pre-existing entity? If established, that would give your activity some objective validity, otherwise it might be nothing but the public expression of a shared feeling or, at the worst, lip-service to a tired old tradition.

Personal prayer, or rather private prayer, is harder to replace. Because it’s not clear exactly what need is being satisfied by it. Is it the creation of an artificial persona with which you can have a dialogue, or which can reassure and comfort you? What if you write a novel? Then you can engage in world building, and that world can contain all sorts of beings and agencies you can chat to.

You can also draw pictures or sculpt statues, and so construct a recognisable being with whom you can have a dialogue. Or you can use a dark mirror, and simply talk to a coarsened image of yourself.

Explicitly forbidden by Mosaic law. And not only Mosaic law. A cat of mine (Tommy) once unmistakably and explicitly warned me against talking to an inanimate object as if it was my daughter.

Now if you pay them some attention, you soon learn that cats have opinions. And Tommy was of the opinion I hovered on the brink of stark, staring, barking madness – and it was his role in life to bring me down to earth if I was being a space cadet: if necessary by tripping me up. I can see how in those madcap days I must have given him that impression. In this case he was mistaken: I was talking to her on the telephone, about which I succeeded in reassuring him by letting him hear my daughter’s voice calling his name. So the assumption or expectation of a validating recipient when signalling or communicating is not the preserve of human beings.

But there’s another aspect of private prayer which seems not to be satisfied by everyday humanism. Outreach. You may feel the urge to reach out to a being whose existence is independent of you, which you trust to provide input which is not already latent in yourself. Someone or something you can ask for advice, and not feel stupid.

To avoid a sense of absurdity, you need to have respect for the agency you are manufacturing in order to begin a dialogue: if it is only with yourself – that’s profitless. Ancient pagans made clay dolls, which they magically brought to life. Before doing so they would not even think of addressing the clay, even if it had a face. This is called idolatry. You are not just talking to a doll of your own making: you invite some abstraction not owing you its existence to descend from heaven – or arise from the earth – and come into your doll. Then you can validly bond with it and share your thoughts. At least you can if you overlook the fact that the doll doesn’t move.

What about a glove puppet? That moves. The thing about a glove puppet, or a ventriloquist’s dummy, is that you yourself are channelling the reply from whatever agency you pretend to invoke. Tellingly, both activities are done to impress or entertain an audience, rather than to provide the puppeteer with reassurance or direction.

In all this I have carefully avoided the word “meaning”. To me, meaning is a personal construct – and each of us is personally responsible for constructing it for ourselves, to provide the best fit for our unique lifetime’s experience. So don’t go asking me to tell you the “meaning of life” or anything else. Do so only if you’ve no idea where to begin.

And remember the proverbial Irishman’s response when asked for directions: “If I wanted to get to Tipperary I wouldn’t start from here!”