About the End Humanities Article |
As one actively engaged in a personal end-life crisis, I have given a great deal of thought to this subject. Having defeated cancer, a broken neck, a heart attack and several strokes, I feel qualified to discuss what most prefer to avoid. My enemies could fill a wall in a museum and they have blessed me with the ability to overcome just about every form of hatred and oppression in existence. My friends, I am grateful to say, triple the foes. I have done rather well in several professions and have no regrets, nor do I ever look back. And to top it off, I have succeeded in finding and marrying my soul-mate after floating around aimlessly for fifty years. Science says matter cannot be destroyed, only changed. Unfortunately, science limits itself only to empirical data, that which can be observed via the five senses. Because of this restriction, it cannot analyze or measure feelings, thoughts or dreams. You cannot prove you are in pain, nor can you prove you loved your parents. Numbers, for example, obviously exist as thoughts because we use them all the time for measurements, but they are not real. One cannot touch, smell, hear, taste or see them walking down the street, just imagine their usage. Numbers also leave us with an insoluble paradox. There can only be one of everything, so two cannot actually exist. However, the concept of one also implies zero, its absence, which gives us a very disturbing concept of binary, a duality in a singular universe. How does any of this relate to our end? We are, at the very least, thought. The body and the brain may disintegrate, but our thoughts continue if we record them. Science has been unable to prove whether thoughts originate in the brain or simply use that organ to express themselves. Most people tend to believe that thoughts continue to exist as a reality beyond the end of the body, though there is no evidence to support that faith. To bolster this hope, humans imagine a Supreme Being out there somewhere, waiting for us to return to He that created us and the rest of the universe. Every sort of god or gods have been assigned supernatural attributes to account for a Creation that mystifies our science. Pascal, a 16th century philosopher, theorized that we all participate in a logical wager concerning the reality of this deity. If we believe in Him, and He is real, we go to Heaven when we die. If we do not believe in Him, and He is real, we go to Hell. If he is not real, we simply cease to exist, both body and thought or soul. There are innumerable other ideas that accompany this logic, such as reincarnation into plants, animals and other humans before completing a perfect journey, paths to enlightenment, laws to obey or be punished, deities that must be served, agnosticism, atheism and Unitarianism to mention a few. Unfortunately for all these concepts and religions, no single dead person's soul or thought, out of all the trillions allegedly available, has ever contacted a live human being and presented evidence of itself. Science, that which controls our lives with technology, accepts the logic that we all cease to exist when the end comes. I think this analysis fairly presents the cases made for and against the concepts of a god and a soul. I would like to suggest an idea the philosophers have omitted when thinking about a Creator. If we all agree that we are at least thought, then it is reasonable to suspect that like begets like, that all our thoughts originated in or with a superior thought. It is the greater entity that creates the lesser. The nature of this superior intelligence is undoubtedly beyond the ability of human beings to imagine, else it would have occurred by now. But if it created us, it may also have created locations for us to experience life, ergo, the universe. Whether or not Earth is the only location available for thought is not arguable until we investigate the universe. The one objection I have faced when presenting this argument to philosophers is my concept that thought is separate from the body. They tend to say that the brain creates thought, that it cannot exist outside the body. I have brought up the occult theory of astral traveling and out-of-body experiences, the unconscious association of dreams, the medical assertions that persons without a physical brain have still been able to speak or communicate and the biblical references to the creation myth, those who claimed to have witnessed Him, and demonic possession by discarnate personalities. Of these, they give credence only to the medical facts, but cannot account for them. Theologists believe the thought-soul is distinct from the body, and usually accept my theory as an article of faith. So, what does this all mean? It means that no one after Pascal's Wager has thought of a better way to describe who we are, where we come from or where we are going, assuming we are going anywhere. It means that all the religious concepts are possible, meaning that the universe was planned. It also means that none of it can be true, that the universe is chaos and accidental. In other words, we come back to the paradox presented by the human invention of numbers, a binary system of two possibilities where there can only be one of everything. If the paradox itself is unreal, then our end is inexplicable because we are not capable of imagining it. And if it is real, we can't explain that either. Considering all this complexity, I conclude that worrying about things we cannot control or influence is very likely a complete waste of time and energy. Therefore, the end will be whatever it happens to be and that is all that anyone can say about it. W. A. Rieser |
