"By examining our lives, we may be able to wrest ourselves from inherited answers and hand-me-down values long enough to make contact--not with pipe dreams or idealizations--but with what is true and authentic about ourselves and the world. While we may not, ultimately, save ourselves, we can stand up to the disintegrating universe, our destroyer, and in the midst of our annihilation take stock of what is really going on before the world hurtles us and then itself into oblivion."
Daniel Kolak and Raymond Martin, Wisdom Without Answers, (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1998), p. 98
Those who hope for eternal life after this one show an incredible amount of ingratitude for the life they have. The degree to which they expect eternal reward for the life they are living is equal to how much they feel they deserve for having been made to carry the cross of life itself as they have, straitjacketed by dogmas out of hope for eternal freedom beyond the grave. And the surest proof they have in such hope is merely the fact that they require it to be so, for why else would they feel such a need for it to be so if it wasn't for the fact that God had designed them to know He was as real as the paradise they desire and the hell they wish to avoid, by designing them with such a longing?
I once asked my brother if it was enough just to be alive, to have his wife and daughter with him, to feel the sun on his face, the wind in his hair, the kisses of his grandson, and not need eternal heaven or the God as defined by his Catholicism to be overlooking him and grading him to see what rewards he is accruing and entitled to after he dies.
He said "absolutely not. That would be the worst thing ever!"
To this, I told him, "then you are not free to choose to believe in your religion, because to choose otherwise is like choosing to throw yourself into a volcano, because the suffering you feel at the loss of your religious ideas that promise you paradise in exchange for enduring this life is like being cast into a kind of hell itself."
What he was admitting to, in other words, was that his suffering was so great that it could only be justified if the reward for enduring it was at least as great as how much he felt he was suffering. We can endure any how, as Nietzsche said, if we have the right why. And for my brother, the only "why" of his suffering was Heavenly reward for having endured it all. Of course, this also means that all of his "prayers" to the God who put him in such a predicament in the first place all mount to complaining about it and begging him to change it all, or reward him forever after if He doesn't.
In this sense, the "gift of life" is only tolerable, and bearable, if the person has "faith" that they will be rewarded for being born human by being turned into a god that lives forever. And wasn't it the desire of Adam & Eve to become like God that robbed them of their ability to remain in Eden? Hell, that was the same desire that got Lucifer thrown out of heaven in the first place!
Like Buddhism points out, the cause of our suffering is craving, which robs us of being able to have any gratitude for what is.
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