Suicide and God are two sides of the same coin, if you think about it. While the former is a desire to stop existing altogether, the latter is based on a desire to exist forever and ever, Amen. While one may conclude that life is too meaningless or painful to go on, the other entreats us to believe there is a far greater meaning than we can even imagine. Both may be only "good or bad," as Hamlet put it, because our
"thinking makes it so."
And there's the rub, for both our thoughts that life is ultimately meaningless or that it has the greatest meaning of all, directly from God, are still only our thoughts, and nothing more. Such thoughts serve as bookends to a human mind possessed by the ever growing need to find meaning in a world that is only ever growing increasingly meaningless.
Whether you are a nihilist that believes life is meaningless or a theist that thinks God gives life all the meaning in the universe, the fact that humans have the curious need to always and everywhere find a "meaning" to everything, seems to be a need possessed by humans alone.
This habit of finding the meaning to everything no doubt grew out of our need to understand our environment in order to survive all those things that are everywhere trying to kill us for their own survival, and this includes everything from bacteria to other species, and from our fellow man to our beliefs. Our "beliefs," in this sense, are like an auto immune disorder, where what we have "believed" has always been to help us survive, but has grown to the point that we should be willing to sacrifice our very lives so that the beliefs themselves may live.
Our beliefs, in other words, are far more important than we are, in this respect. And because they are, "suicide" for our beliefs is praised as an act of the highest moral virtue for some. Even the Christian would rather be fed to lions and hailed a martyr for their obstinate devotion to their own infallibility when it comes to their beliefs, rather than ever admit that they may be as fallible as the rest of humanity in their beliefs.
Thus the same religion that boasts so proudly of its ability to convince people they are only human, also convinces people they should be as obstinate as God himself in claiming their "beliefs" amount to divine "truth," no matter the universe of evidence that stands everywhere before them to the contrary.
Even God and religion, therefore, do not lead people to so much always avoid suicide, as to only be willing to engage in it in the right ways (by having someone else feed you to lions, crucify you, or even burn you at the stake like Bruno) and for the right reasons (such as questioning the authority of any institutional Church as much as Christ himself!).
And if we are all called to be like God, then for all we know, the "big bang" was the result of God pulling a Hemingway and blowing his own brains out with a shotgun! And all of existence may be simply the material remnants of the immaterial mind of a suicide God.
"thinking makes it so."
And there's the rub, for both our thoughts that life is ultimately meaningless or that it has the greatest meaning of all, directly from God, are still only our thoughts, and nothing more. Such thoughts serve as bookends to a human mind possessed by the ever growing need to find meaning in a world that is only ever growing increasingly meaningless.
Whether you are a nihilist that believes life is meaningless or a theist that thinks God gives life all the meaning in the universe, the fact that humans have the curious need to always and everywhere find a "meaning" to everything, seems to be a need possessed by humans alone.
This habit of finding the meaning to everything no doubt grew out of our need to understand our environment in order to survive all those things that are everywhere trying to kill us for their own survival, and this includes everything from bacteria to other species, and from our fellow man to our beliefs. Our "beliefs," in this sense, are like an auto immune disorder, where what we have "believed" has always been to help us survive, but has grown to the point that we should be willing to sacrifice our very lives so that the beliefs themselves may live.
Our beliefs, in other words, are far more important than we are, in this respect. And because they are, "suicide" for our beliefs is praised as an act of the highest moral virtue for some. Even the Christian would rather be fed to lions and hailed a martyr for their obstinate devotion to their own infallibility when it comes to their beliefs, rather than ever admit that they may be as fallible as the rest of humanity in their beliefs.
Thus the same religion that boasts so proudly of its ability to convince people they are only human, also convinces people they should be as obstinate as God himself in claiming their "beliefs" amount to divine "truth," no matter the universe of evidence that stands everywhere before them to the contrary.
Even God and religion, therefore, do not lead people to so much always avoid suicide, as to only be willing to engage in it in the right ways (by having someone else feed you to lions, crucify you, or even burn you at the stake like Bruno) and for the right reasons (such as questioning the authority of any institutional Church as much as Christ himself!).
And if we are all called to be like God, then for all we know, the "big bang" was the result of God pulling a Hemingway and blowing his own brains out with a shotgun! And all of existence may be simply the material remnants of the immaterial mind of a suicide God.
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