So Long As We All Shall Live

Today a wise, caring and gentle scholar and friend shared an interesting thought and observation with those attending the seminar he led. He focused on the repeated use, by the author of the book being discussed, of the word "absurd". That is a word which I have used to describe my view and reaction to life in several conversations with friends, conversations both deep and casual.

I've often said that life is so absurd that only shared humor is palliative.

I've hesitated to articulate what I really believe, and have gotten past fearing, that life on earth as we know it will ultimately succumb to the same kind of mass extinctions that science tells us befell previous life forms on earth. The odds are small in the short term, "short" in the sense of even millennia or epochs. But Nature is not confined by time. Given sufficient time, as measured by that peculiarly human construct, all possibilities will escalate to probabilities which will ultimately manifest themselves as realities.

Just as ice ages and tropical ages have taken their turns in sculpting and influencing the relative viability of life on our planet, and in the long run will continue their alternating cycles, so will explosions and extinctions of life on the planet continue to take their turns.

Our species, homo sapiens, is thought to have appeared on the scene within the last 200.000 years, still a mere blip in geologic time. While it might be essential, even healthy, that we think of ourselves as special, an attitude conducive to and encouraging of not just survival as a species, but enthusiasm for sustaining our species through procreation, we are creatures of Nature, however much some might prefer to be Children of God.

Science tells us that the Universe is full of births and deaths of stars, numbered in the billions. Even our most expansive imaginations have difficulty comprehending stuff of that magnitude.

We should and must judge ourselves within the scope of our own reality as we perceive it. We are all in this boat together, those in both the bow and the stern are vulnerable and will succumb. None of us gets out of this life alive, in the sense that we experience, if not understand, what we call physical life.

So how then shall we live? Neither believers in Ultimate Reality(as God) nor Atheists who don't believe, nor Agnostics, who, by definition, admit they don't know, have any leg up on life. As scientists might say, 'The biota exhibits a one hundred percent mortality rate'. In other words, everything dies.

Perhaps, as the contemporary critic of human constructs of theology and icon(read idol) laced structured religions, Karen Armstrong, recommends, we would do well to elevate a world view of compassion above the more typical and prevalent world view of competing methods of salvation; salvation in the sense of bodily life after physical death; to wit, 'I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes unto the Father, save by me'. That's a Christian construct. Other religions insist their own constructs are the real truth and work best.

Karen Armstrong advocates the elevation of compassion, empathy, and walking in the other person's moccasins, over the insistence of theological constructs and arguments, as most reliably representative of Jesus' message. If we could strip away the absurd claim that Jesus was physically and factually the flesh and blood Son of God, and in its stead substitute the more significant truth that Jesus, as one of a select number of special human beings, had the gift of insight into the soul part of human minds, like Albert Einstein, as one of a select number of special human beings, had the gift of insight into the imaginative part of human minds, the Jews, Christians and Muslims, most all of whom credit Jesus as a messenger of and advocate for peace on earth, which means among human beings, might someday come to understand that, since we all die, we would do well to care for each other, help each other, comfort each other, so long as we all shall live.

We could vow to try.

It would be well with my soul, yours and theirs.

Lee

aka Leanderthal, Lighthouse Keeper
http://leesvoicecryinginthewilderness.blogspot.com