Death

I don't know why but I have had a morbid cast of mind for a long time now and it is increasing. I have the feeling that death is in the future, but I'm not quite sure how far away it is, yet. It can't be this month, I don't think, but could it be this year? How would the scythe connect with me--by car, stroke, heart attack, or bullet? I don't know. Perhaps I am mistaken and this morbidity is a manifestation of fear for the economy and of my future financial prospects, which have an influence upon one's health. I do feel older, it is true, and I feel acutely aware of aging, but I'm not aging any faster than most of my friends. Perhaps it is a natural part of the aging process to contemplate death and to think about what will happen after one is gone. I've always given thought to the future, even to the distant future, and I plan in advance for possibilities as well as certainties, so it is natural for me to think about the end. There are little signs and signals that let one know that the end is approaching, such as silver hairs, arthritis, bodily aches and pains, intolerance of alcohol and sugar, and fatigue. It would be foolish and short-sighted not to prepare and not to contemplate the meaning of existence.

I have no patience with theology, which seems like the outgrowth of egotism. We should be humble, because we are humble, and it is arrogant to suppose there is an afterlife reserved only for us, and that all other living organisms are condemned to be ephemeral. Our intelligence permitted us to construct an imaginary solution to the terrible problem of death, (and death really is terrible and horrifying) but whatever solace the solution offers, it remains imaginary.

I feel like I am compost, that my body is just a rental and after I'm dead, that's that, and some other life forms will feed upon my body, or if I'm cremated then most of me will transform into gas (ashes constitute only a small portion, since we are mostly water, which converts to steam during incineration), which will also be used by other creatures, inhaled by them. I suppose each of us has breathed the same air molecules that once composed part of the body of Buddha, Jesus, Shakespeare, and Mark Twain.

I don't expect to be mourned by more than a few, and don't really have a lot of regret about departing, as it is part of the deal for the human existence. I have no ambition, or only modest ambition, because the things of this world besides necessities do not interest me, and the barriers to the occupations I really would prefer to occupy, like doctor, writer, programmer, scientist or professor, are insurmountable, in today's market, to someone of my age and means. I've accomplished about what is possible given who I am and my environment.

Life is a roll of the dice. We are humble, feeble creatures, which we forget, or don't even understand when we are young, but we are temporary and our grip upon existence is tenuous at best. Life is just a series of probabilities that we will survive each successive day. Notions like justice and goodness and love are rather abstract and when we are gone they fade away from us, because we become part of the stage where other actors get to play and think about justice, goodness and love and make their own decisions about such weighty matters, decisions which have nothing at all to do with us, because we are dead and gone, part of the soil that their feet trample over, as the living think about each other without any thought to the irrelevant dead.

There is a bittersweet sense of equality that I feel with everyone, low and high, great and humble, ancient and modern. Because in the end we're all the same, aren't we? We're tilled under the soil and consumed and the earth doesn't remember who we were. What remains is the earth, for a time, and then the earth will be gone too, and the Sun as well, and the Universe. Just like that. Blip!

It is not given to us to know the meaning of existence, no more than it is given to ants to understand the secret of combustion. We are not advanced enough, not smart enough, yet, as a species, I think, to understand the reasons for our existence, for the existence of the Universe and of all things, assuming that there are reasons, and I hold out the possibility that there are, and that there may even be some kind of Creator that is unknowable and mysterious and perhaps not at all like us, but far more advanced than us, just as we are more advanced than ants. So that is why I think atheism is an appropriate description of my philosophy, because all the conceptions about God that I have heard are probably false in one way or another. If there is a sort of God then it seems probable it is unlike anything that men have described so far, and it may even be something that encompasses the totality, or a portion of the totality, rather than being a singular Being. God is probably more like gravity than a human being.

By describing God in this way, all of the common ideas about God are rendered moot, and God becomes a rather abstract thing indistinguishable from natural forces and natural law, and religion becomes superfluous. So it is possible to believe in this kind of God and be described as an atheist, because this kind of God is pretty much a phantom God that doesn't fit any of the world's major religions, but is perfectly compatible with Science and reason, and it also follows that advancements in those areas help one to understand the ways of God.