Recent events have reminded me about the fragile nature of life. It's something that I usually don't think about until I'm faced with death. Death is the reason that people are religious, why religion came about in the first place. Whatever it is about humanity's "higher consciousness" caused people to ask questions: Why do people die? Is that it? Are they gone forever - at least, the part of them that is uniquely "them"? If they're not gone forever, then where is it that they go? What happens to them when they get there? Somehow, people came up with answers for these questions, because the alternative - no answers at all - was too horrifying for people to live with. It's all a matter of comfort. It is comforting to believe that death isn't simply the end of someone - of everyone. It is comforting to believe that death isn't simply random sequences of events, that there might be some greater purpose behind it all. I suppose that it might be comforting, regardless of any "heaven" or "hell" that a person may end up in after they die, to know that they still exist.
I'm not saying that all religion is meaningless and that there is no God (or whoever). I just believe that if there is an omniscient being (beings?) keeping tabs on us, then I think it very presumptuous of us to believe that we know how this being works, thinks, or exercises whatever supreme power it might possess. I cannot make a definitive statement either way (and who would accept it if I did? I'm not an authority on the subject). I think that people (over very long periods of time) have projected human characteristics on this being because they want to think that they know this being, or at least that it knows them (and I'm not saying that it doesn't - it's impossible to know).
A discussion on religion and the existence is God was not really the course that I wanted this posting to take. I haven't been thinking so much about religion and death, but rather about life. A gun barrel tilted just a few degrees to the right or the left would have missed the femoral artery completely. The same barrel turned 180 degress would have seriously wounded or killed another person I know. A car five more miles to the east would have been closer to the hospital. The same car five miles to the west wouldn't have had a chance of getting to the hospital in time. How many times a day are we inches away from death without even realizing it? Leaving 30 minutes early from work would have put a car right in the middle of a deadly freeway accident. If a person had been looking in a different direction at a certain moment, they would have stepped into the path of a vehicle. Life is a game of inches, and we don't even know when we're playing for our lives.
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