What Does It Mean To Be Human? What does it mean to be human? What is the point of this existence as a creature such as I am; with all the abilities and consciousness with which I have been endowed? To what end is all of that directed? Simple reproduction? A rough genetic copy of myself whose sole purpose will be to create yet another rough genetic copy of him or herself? Simple physical pleasures? Should my life be devoted to exploring the tingling and buzzing sensations of the flesh? Acquisition of material things? Should my existence be a struggle of amassing as much wealth as I can so that it can be distributed to my genetic copies upon my death? Or is there some other reason I have been granted this consciousness? This awareness of myself and the goings-on of the world? This oft times poignant and then painful perspicacity? I find purpose imbedded in music. In the emotional evocations of musical adeptness. There is a great mystery to our existence. The one great question; what happens when I die? I am here now but I know that one day I won’t be here, but I am presented with the problem of where I will end up. I don’t know the answer to that question and it grinds away at me everyday. I’ve had my brushes with death. I wrote synopses of the lives of hundreds if not thousands of people when I wrote Obituaries for the Citizen-Times in Asheville. I summed up people’s lives in ten lines or less over and over again. Is that all my life is to be? The summation of my existence? Some conglomeration of successes and failures; pain and pleasure; love and hate all with no meaning? Is that what our lives are? Meaningless randomness expressed through the process of evolution and all of its dispassionate direction? Is that the sum of my parts? Just randomness? Arbitrary? I want to be an atheist because this world is so full of horrors that I cannot believe there would be a good caring god who would permit such horrors to exist. It is a much easier thing to live in a universe with no god rather than a god, an omnipotent and omniscient being who is defined by malice and wants to see his creations suffer. A magnanimous god is simply impossible considering the deadly terrors with which we live; only an evil god could exist to explain all of this suffering and pain. I would rather that weren’t the case; but the meaningless randomness of atheism seems almost as bleak; the moral and perceptual relativism imbued in that anti-religion is frightening to me in its lack of structure; there are no boundaries there. Humanism goes only so far in restricting the behavior of mankind to common decency; it permits for relativistic interpretations of right and wrong; what is good for one person is bad for another; the man mugging you is bad for you, but his act of mugging is good for him and probably his family if he has one assuming he can get away with it. There’s a thousand choruses of people singing various answers about the purpose of our lives; the meaning behind our often painful existences. Some say we are to seek god’s law and enact it. Some say we are simply here for discernible reason and we should just try to be happy. Some say we make our own fate and determine our own purpose (which I find as preposterous as someone suggesting they designed their own hand or brain in the womb). I don’t know what the hell is going on here on this planet. I don’t know why the hell I am here or what I am doing. I have things that I desire now and then. Now I want a 2004 Toyota Tacoma double cab pickup truck into which I can pour the small amassing of my worldly belonging and escape whatever horrible social catastrophe I’ve created, or perhaps was created around me. But I feel, in my heart, at the center and core of my being, whether that be a soul or just the delusional mirage of some such thing, that there is some grander purpose to our existences here as people, as human beings with all of our capacity for thought and feeling and understanding. Science is our window to the world opened through which truth’s refreshing breeze can pass, but that truth is not so easily summed up in the details of the human genome, astrophysics or particle physics. Those details imbued within those disciplines of observation point to a greater truth, which, if ignored, denies the whole purpose of our having come into being. Science is a wonderful thing in that it can provide us the means to overcome nature’s unrelenting desire to destroy us entirely, but even if we survive for millennia henceforth into the future the nagging question of why remains. A race of squirrels could also establish some method or mechanism by which they circumvent the universe’s inclination to destroy in whole or in part, but what would be the point? No matter how hard you fight, death will find you somewhere down the line. Everything must end and in the brief period of time before it does, a purpose a meaning to the existence of that thing should or perhaps must be ascertained otherwise all was for nought; all the material wealth accumulated lost; all the pleasures forgotten and empty theatrical productions of sensory organs and tingling nerves; all the invented meaning dissipated with the inventor. A universe without truth is incomprehensible. It is a tragedy.
Posted on: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 04:40:27 +0000
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