Every so often, usually when I am trying to fall asleep, my ever active thinking process keeps coming back to many of the same topics, including several bad dreams I had when I was a kid, work related nonsense, and death.
I remember a night once way back when we lived on Maple Hill, I was probably 6 or 7 I’d wager, but I remember trying to go to sleep one night and I was thinking about mortality, about simply dying and that being it, nothing else, no more. It scared the shit out of me so much I was awake most of the night, I think. To this day it still scares me somewhat.
The concept of death is much like the concept of everything else unproven in this world, there is no logical basis for it. To what purpose does one have in life to simply just disappear? Now most counter-arguments to this will revolve around religion, remove religion from this, and put it into perspective, you obviously do not know what it was to live before you are born, you know what it is to live now, past and present, you don’t know what will happen in the future, and you will not know what happens after death. Sure, it makes every living moment you have on this earth worth its weight in gold, but every day you hear about victims of violence, natural disasters, and so on, and by now you’ve accepted death for other people to be a reality, it happens, it’s inevitable, right? It’s just when you realize all these people are robbed of the life that you presently have, not knowing what happens after death, it sometimes scares me. Medically, death means everything ceases to function, and since your brain is pretty much everything, once it stops, you stop. That’s it.
Religion is a funny thing really, when you consider how religions form and take root, I find it hard to place my belief in things like God, Jesus, and Heaven when they are basically beliefs created by people in the past, and considering how religion has controlled politics and people over the centuries, I cannot believe that it has only existed throughout time in order to control people into obeying the will of a few people. It is my belief that Jesus did exist, but as a person who helped those in need and when he threatened the political base around him, they had him executed, and his followers honored his sacrifice by forming essentially a cult that followed his teachings. Higher powers, Heaven and Hell, these are merely tools used to control those within the circle, to find the true followers from the disbelievers. The power of persuasion is very powerful in people after all.
I’m not here to mock religion or disgrace it, honestly, if people want to place their belief in such things, it is of course their choice. Me being a very scientific person, I simply cannot place my belief in something which does not exist and cannot be proven to exist. I’m probably going to Hell for that by most religions, but if an afterlife exists, I kinda want to see it before I get there, otherwise I am scared of simply ceasing to exist. Hell, it’s my wish that when I do die, that I see it coming and it doesn’t sneak up on me like in my sleep or some shit, I want to be able to validate my existence one last time.
Of course I’d much rather have my brain taken out and hooked up to a computer for all eternity but somehow I imagine that as long as religion is around, they won’t rather like me cheating death. The good thing is I can catch up on all those video games I’ve put off over the years. It’s things like this that make me wonder how my future will unfold, when you consider all the current science fiction and views of the future, it’s not far-fetched to consider something like this actually happening. Hell, it’s probably happening to Michael Jackson right now.