Usually these stay un-pubbed, un-shared in my Journal. But today is different. So here it goes. So it goes.
6/4/24 1130AM
Taking stock. Re-reading my Jamie Wheal takedown. Fuck his rapture bullshit. We live, we die, We weren’t here for the previous 13,799,999,917 years (assuming a typical human lifespan in 2020 of 83 years!) and we wont be here for the next billion, trillions of years after. Where do u go after you die? Where were you before you were born? You weren’t anywhere, you hadn’t been built yet. Where were the pyramids before 2,600 BC? No-where- just like you. They hadn’t been assembled out of a million or so blocks – just like you, an assembly of trillions of cells.
The unique combination of atoms, molecules, and cells that make up any individual human- assembled only once, through pretty typical developmental process, and thousands of millions of cells at a time over the 9 months we all spent in our mother’s womb – will slowly disintegrate at our deaths, and the neural firings that made our muscles move and thoughts emerge will cease, taking us with them. We will be no more, just as we WEREN’T for billions of years prior.
No rapture, no transcendence to the spiritual realm, no nirvana and breaking of samsara. No reincarnation into a lesser being. Nope.
What we have learned in 5,000 years of wishful thinking by the world’s religions, and through 200 years or so of in-depth scientific examination is exactly that and nothing more.
We live, we die. We weren’t before and wont be after. Done. Every silly hopeful spiritual explanation offered up thru the millennia by the world’s religions has never panned out. What we have learned is like every other vertebrate mammal or primate, “we” as individual humans develop in the womb and live for a time and die.
How is that bleak? It is what it is. And we can have just marvelous, rapturous (in the emotional sense of the word) experiences during our stint on earth. Brief in geological and cosmological time, but not at all in biological, cellular time. Many insects get a matter of days, most mammals a couple of decades or so. Your skin cells get a few weeks. With modern medicine, we are getting lifespans for the average person now into our 80’s routinely around the world. Enjoy it.
You were born at the best of times and have access to incredible resources and cooperative relations with more of your fellow man than any time in human history. You can hop on a jet and fly anywhere across the globe and land in any number of countries and buy a meal, a room, sightsee- and not be killed for your belongings. It still can happen in some areas, but in the vast majority of cities around the globe, you could enjoy the local geography, history, and its people without fear. In fact, in most places they are waiting to serve you and treat you with a level of civility that might be unheard of throughout most of human history. How lucky we are.
The sooner we end old tribal hatreds and repressive rules ensconced in religious claims- I’m looking at You Abrahamic religionists, the sooner we can ramp it all up another notch of human tolerance, cooperation, mutual support, and safety. End religion Now.
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