The Paradox

The purpose of this brief discourse is to develop a deeper understanding of why people prefer an eternal, deity-granted salvation over a truncated, finite existence. The former is vastly more appealing, though, in all probability, merely a construct designed to allay our feelings of meaningless and ultimate insignificance. The former promises immortality, while the latter reduces us to nothing.

It is not terribly surprising that people still subscribe to some sort of religious belief, notably Christianity. What is the appeal? In a word, fear. In another word, meaning. The fear of being eternally vanquished to Hell underlies Christian faith. In fact, it is my belief that many Christians are not such in order to worship god and spread the word of Jesus Christ, but rather to "hedge their bets," in a manner of speaking. Hell is complete judgement, a complete rejection by god. There is supposedly fire, torment, and torture that continues endlessly, offering no respite. It is the ultimate deterrent. Submitting to god also provides meaning. It is much easier to think of oneself as a unique creature with a destiny, a creature that can transcend the darkness and death of Earth and live forever. Consider the alternative, that we are organic, sentient creatures who will one day disintegrate, leaving behind everyone and everything that we have ever known. Christians constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real. And we know why. The real world is simply too terrible to admit, it tells man that he is a small trembling animal who will eventually decay and die. Illusion changes this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, part of some divine plan, immortal in some way. The distinctive human problem from time immemorial has been the need to spiritualize human life, to lift it onto a special immortal plane beyond the cycles of life and death which characterize all other organisms. Religion takes one's very creatureliness, one's insignificance, and makes it a condition of hope.

Why are we here? "I don't know" is an incredibly unsatisfying answer, but the only answer. The conclusion is beyond humbling. Theists look for patterns, a perfectly human trait, and assume there is a creative purpose behind the patterns they find, but many times patterns are coincidence and nothing more. But how can we come to exist without god? Theists demand an answer when they know that only limited guesswork now exists. The assumption is that because some things are currently unexplainable the explanation is supernatural intelligence. That is a massive leap. Humans, as creative, social beings, try to impose our thinking on the universe. There is no objective evidence on which to base this leap. The unknown is not an excuse for god. At best, god is an eloquent metaphor for the human condition, it offers ownership in divinity, supreme purpose, and it cushions our primal repression, that one day we will die and all will be forever lost. At worst, god is a business partner who doesn't take a cut. Consider his sales pitch: a cosmic zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your maker so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.

Instead, we exist in a reality ruled by entropy, where suffering and death are the sickening defaults for every living thing. The question isn't whether you will suffer and die, but rather how much, and when. Some may be luckier than others but in the end no flesh is spared. The shadow of death and misery hangs over us like Damocles' sword and poisons our pleasures. Ours is a brutal natural order where organisms have to kill each other for food, the struggle for status and resources is constant, and disease, violence, disasters, and accidents perpetually vie with steady degeneration in their bid to inflict suffering and death upon the living. In a world such as this, it is hardly surprising that many seek blissful oblivion via drugs, sex, religious psychosis, or suicide.

Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature, as the Renaissance thinkers knew. Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways - the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.

It is fateful and ironic that the lie people need to live dooms them to a life that is never really their own. Immortality tends to devalue life. It is the awareness of death and its finality that intensifies existence and gives life its deepest, most beautiful meaning. Just as the drama without a final curtain is hardly a drama, endless immeasurable time is not time at all. Our individuality becomes almost godlike and nearly unbearable. Too many of us are disassociated and inhabit an abstraction which is an anti-life. We are dead to the real and alive to the simulacra. We are alive, though strictly in the organic sense.

In the final moments of Meursault's life he opens his heart to the "benign indifference of the universe." Such gentle indifference reminds us that life is worth living because it is all that we have. Living a life and living it well is more important than knowing what it means.