Life Worth Living

Yesterday on the way to The Poet’s house my mother, my brother, and I had a conversation in light of recent events, a converstion that exemplified everything that I had wrote about believing in God. Mid-conversation, I pulled out my Ipod and, like a secretary, frantically jotted everything down on the notepad, willing my brain not to forget the words before I recorded them.

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Warning: Extreme corniness and inelegance of expression up ahead. Please proceed with a forgiving mind.

I tread the thin line between atheist and agnostic. Most of the time I adhere to the belief that, as JT once put it, agnostics are just pussy atheists, nonbelievers who aren’t quite ‘there’ yet. Yet every time I really think about it, I find it hard to make sense of there being nothing out there. When you’re trying to find meaning somewhere, as corny as it sounds, you ultimately want there to be some, because otherwise, there just doesn’t seem to be a point to life. Where did existing—the world, life, thought—come from? The big bang? A bunch of matter floating out in the middle of nowhere that suddenly exploded into something? Yet what created that matter in the first place?

That’s the question that always has me thinking myself in circles, just as this post is quickly spiraling out into nowhere: where did this all come from, if not from some overarching force, or—dare I say it—a god? And then, where did that force (or god) come from? I try to logic my way through it, but inevitably I have to stop and tell myself that that’s just the thing—this is something you just can’t solve with logic. This is something that is bigger than logic, bigger than anything else. This is the question of the origin of existence, of everything.

So yes, it’s difficult to reconcile myself with the fact that this world is governed only by the laws of physics and nothing else—yet at the same time I find it hard to believe that a force (be it luck, fate, karma—and how do you define these, anyway?) sits at the top silently moving all the players. Maybe God exists for people who believe in him, who make him real with their faith in him. Maybe the same goes for the agnostics, and the atheists, who are too smart, skeptical, jaded, whatever, to believe in anything—there’s nothing for them. Perhaps belief is what each individual makes of it. We all ultimately come upon our own beliefs. Somehow, we’re all shifting through this world searching for answers that will probably never come.

During the process of transfers, I ran into this post on religion I wrote back in October of last year.

In a way, I think it made me sound as if I don’t believe in a god just for the sake of not believing in one, because I think it makes me a stronger person. Just want to clear that up: such isn’t the case.

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To not believe in divinity, a higher power, a god…it is sad, in a way. To believe our lives are transient, temporary. That we are all alone in this world. Left to fend for ourselves, to make of things what we will. And yet that in the end, everything means nothing, because there is nothing to live for. That this…this is all there is. And this is all there will ever be.

It takes a sturdy soul, therefore, I think, to be atheistic, because we as humans dont want to think that we are on our own here. We want to believe that life means something, and we are scared that when we close our eyes in death, the world, the universe will forget us and we will never be again. So we run to the comforting arms of a god or a divinity as a kind of refuge from the cruel cold world, because if in the end there is something more, then everything can still be okay, and we have something to look forward to, and we have something to live for, and we don’t feel quite so lonely. It takes a strong spirited person to be able to believe, and say “There is no God, no divine, only me, and when I die, I will cease to be.”

So I make the best of who I am, because there may not be anything more out there to catch me when I fall.

Humans are really, really complex. We have the capability to create not one, but a myriad of languages, some completely unrelated to one another, to build cities, governments, alliances, to make friends, remember the lyrics of hundreds of songs, to create our own songs, poems, stories, to blog, to laugh at each other and ourselves, to teach others, to raise our voices in protest, to harness nature to our will, to predict the occurrences of nature, to recall what happened to us years ago, to think and dream of the future, to love, to hate, to get along and sometimes not get along.

It seems just a little too easy to attribute all of this, of human life, to hormones and chemicals and signals in our brains and bloodstreams. It seems a little too wrong to simplify all our emotions and capabilities to simple physical occurrences. I want to believe that there’s something more. More to existence and humanity than chemicals and proteins. More than something that we, with the right technology and knowledge, can replicate in a lab. I want to believe that we are more complex than that, and that life is worth more than that. I want to believe that it’s not so easy to create life…And yet would a corollary to this be a belief in a soul? And what is a soul anyway? In believing in a soul, would one necessarily have to believe in an eternal soul, because otherwise death is just what occurs when the signals that enable life cease transmitting, and so if life is more than these biological signals, then it must be able to continue after the earthly body ceases to life. Is it necessary to believe in an afterlife and thus god or a higher order if all one wants to believe in is the moreness of the human being than biology?

This is why I hate waxing philosophical, because in the end, you just end up with a bunch of questions that have at best have a handful of vague answers which lead to another bunch of open-ended, interpretable questions. It’s just not for me. But I do still give in to philosophical musings now and again. Yet I am by no means a Sophocles. God forbid.