The Purpose of Life

I was raised Catholic and, as a child, very religious. After church one Sunday, my parents and I were stopped at a traffic light where a large group of people were crossing in front of us. They were all dressed in black. Many of them were wearing odd looking hats. I saw a lot of long beards and braided hair. So I asked my mom, "Who are these people?" "They're Jews" she said. There was a tone of sadness in her voice. After a short pause I asked, "What are Jews"? She replied, "Jews don't believe that Jesus is God."

I was horrified! Until that moment people such as these were pagan, idol worshipers of the distant past. I never thought I'd encounter living examples in the present day. Yet here they were. "Doesn't that mean that all these people are condemned to Hell?" I asked. "Yes, it does" she said, "It's very sad." As we waited for the light to change, I remember saying, "I must be really lucky that I was born into the right religion!" As I was saying this, a boy and his parents were crossing in front of us. Our eyes met for a brief moment. Before I could finish the sentence, I realized - - - he probably felt the same way.

It was at that moment I asked my first meaningful question. What if I'm wrong? If I was wrong, how would I know? The conventional answer is that these things are a matter of faith and everybody is entitled to their own. But that wasn't good enough. My soul was hanging in the balance, and mere faith wasn't going to cut it. I needed to know for sure.

Most religions promise, or allude to, some kind of life after death, provided you follow their rules. Jews believe that the dead stay dead until the end of the world. Then, while the credits are rolling, the "chosen" are brought back to life and live forever while the not so chosen just stay dead. Christianity adds an extra twist. If you don't follow their rules, you still get to live forever; you'll just be tortured for all eternity. This has produced some very unpleasant consequences for believers and non-believers alike.

Then there are, what I like to call, the green religions. Green religions believe in recycling. At the end of your life, you don't exactly die. You reincarnate, and keep reincarnating until you get your karma just right so you can ascend to a higher plane of existence; whatever that is. The hope here is that if you don't get it right in this lifetime, you may get it right in the next, or the one after that. But what if there is no next. What if this is it?

My argument here assumes, of course, that there is an afterlife of some kind and a means to achieve it. It would be very disappointing if, in fact, there were no afterlife, no soul to save nor God to save it. If that were the case, many of us would find little reason for being alive outside of personal gratification and the defraying of funeral expenses. Mother Teresa and Ted Bundy would would both end up in the same place, with us.

So let us assume, for now, that there is an afterlife and it is possible to live indefinitely. How would that work? As I look around, nothing in the physical world does this. The pyramids of Egypt, the Sun in the sky, everything, sooner or later, will cease to be.

Well, except for maybe this ONE thing. But you're not going to like it.