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Commentary

This essay was written to express a bit of a belief that I have. A belief concerning human entities and human individuals. What I have written may not be anything new for everybody [and indeed, I do not doubt that these thoughts have been expressed before, in a more complete form], but I wrote this without doing much research, and so I was really only influenced by a lot of different sources, myself included.

A Journey

The Face Of God "In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth�" So begins the Bible. Over the millennia, man has evolved several forms of religions or belief systems. Each of them tries to explain our reasons for living and being, and they all also attempt to answer the age-old question, asked from the very dawn of mankind: what happens after death? Man has always died, as any other living being; one of the essentials of being alive is that you must, at some point, die. However, since humans have the remarkable ability to perceive self, and have self-awareness, we wonder weather or not "I" will continue, even though our body is dead. To answer these questions, we as humans have created something that we call: religion. And, as if it were yet another reminder of our own mortality, all religions have an immortal deity controlling us. This may be a rather oversimplification of things, it brings to light a very simplistic problem, but it is one of the most profound paradoxes that mankind has ever attempted to answer. Not even the wisest of men have ever truly understood what it means to be alive, or, have answered even a more simple question: why? Every countable animal on this planet is alive, and with it, is some degree of thought. In simpler creatures, these thoughts are merely advanced logical decisions, or outcome based logic. If a squirrel is hungry, it will eat. The next time it is hungry, it will eat. However, we as humans have rational thought. We wonder why such things happen, and tend to want to find answers to any, and all questions that we encounter. We discover why we become hungry, then eat. But when a human dies, he can no longer report what death is all about. Thus, we do not know what lies beyond this mortal plane. The odd thing is, this. When we die, our mind no longer functions. But this is simply a physical setback. What happens is that our brain�s neurons begin to die, in such masses that thought is evaporated. But all that really happens in a brain is the transmission of myriads of impulses, and collectively, they form your thoughts. And so, when you die, these impulses can no longer be relayed through the brain, and thus thought stops. Say, however, you were able to store, in some way, the patterns in which these impulses traveled, and devised a way to set the impulses in motion. The thought of the brain recorded from would be replicated entirely. "Well, great", you say. "So what?" Well, it is a matter of great importance, for your actions, your feelings, your memories, everything that makes you an individual is really in your brain. Thus, if you were to put the recording of the brain on, say, a machine, would the machine then be living? It would do everything a human would, sans the body. Could we call it "alive"? Is there any reason why not? I do not believe so, and if this were done, it would prove that "I" is separate from the body, and that death of the body does not necessarily mean that "I" is discontinued. And so, as Ellen had wondered about John after his death: "In the boat, I didn�t understand, really. But is it possible, Henry � that, even though John has stopped living, he continues to be?" I believe that the mind is separate from the body, and that the mind, or "I" can always be continued. But man does not understand this. Whenever someone dies, that someone is gone forever. The "I" of those people are gone, and always have been, and so no one really recognizes the difference between the mind ("I"), and the body. And so we have religion take care of that. All my life, I have been attending church. Reflecting upon what I�ve learned from Christianity, and also from life, I have found that religion really is a control of your life. A control where you are working for a god that you have never seen, and will never see until you have crossed the barrier from the living, into the realm of the dead. The devout believers proclaim that you must have faith to do this, but how can you have faith? Hope perhaps, is a more likely term. They have told me that "�it is becoming increasingly more common for people to assume that they have control their own lives�" as if it were something terrible, or vile and despicable. They are quick to debunk anything radical, (as society usually is, but the Christians also proclaim it as another sign of the coming of the end times), but don�t know how to cope with the world today, and so they shun it. They sternly believe that theirs is the one and ONLY way of believing in a deity. I could go as far as to say the church programs the minds of its congregation. I bring to mind one instance last Sunday night in which several children were undergoing (discretely) programming like that found in an Orwell novel. The children were listening to a tape of children�s music that was repeating sections of verse from the Bible in a rhythmical fashion. On the surface, this would seem to be little more than music that a small child would understand, but in truth it is a way of getting those children to remember those verses throughout life, as a part of their Christian lifestyle, weather or not they choose to follow such a path. This was learning that resembled programming, programming of a religion that they didn�t even understand, being told that Christianity is the ONLY way to anything and everything. They are being taught no other ideas. They are being taught no other ways of life. To them, Christianity will be the entire universe, and that they are slaves to a god whom they have never known, nor seen, nor heard, nor felt. I myself slowly realized that the ways that I had been taught in church were not the only way, that there were other, plausible ideas and theologies for life. And as for a Christian�s god, why he created man is really odd. He wanted helpless creatures to worship him, but gave them the power to think for themselves, and completely ignore him. If I wanted someone to worship me, I would surely show them why, but, as I am puzzled by him, so was Henry David. "I understand! God has stopped listening, mother � if he ever did listen. What kind of god would fail to see the godliness in John? I can�t pray to him�" If he did want humans to worship him, he�s doing a bad job at making that clear. Otherwise, all he would be doing is toying with us, having given us enough of a mind to know that we need direction, but not why, or where to get such direction from. It is thus that man has learned, in one form or another, that a path to follow for direction must often be forged by their own will and mind. They can not rely on an unseen, or unheard force to show them the way. And that is what has shaped most, if not all of the great minds and social revolutionists that ever were. Such men and women are known as revolutionists because they chose to follow their own path. But why are there so few of them? This is simply because society is the one that is trying to find the direction for life, it hasn�t begun to forge its own paths through life, while the social revolutionists have. They are the ones who realize that life isn�t determined by some movie, music, or any other celebrity or model who has never known you, nor known what makes you want to live. Yet society is driven by the people who influence the masses, and the ones who influence the masses are driven by the masses themselves. It is a catch-22 of life. We have only really seen change in society because of the multitudes of rebellious 13 to 22 year old (that is a vague figure, by any, and all means) who desire change from what has been their reality for all of their lives. They fervently seek it, and they get change from the ones who are radical to the present society. Usually what happens then is that �reality� in the terms of: "stop running around like a kid and get a real job", hits them, or the radical change that they made from the society that they broke away from becomes society, and thus you end up with their children wanting out of the society that they grew up in, and go to join other radicals, even though what they were living in was the radical change from the old in the first place. Perhaps this may seem like something good, that society is always changing, but it is not so, for the new societies that come into place have their own laws and codes that MUST be adhered to. The focus of society shifts, but the boundaries do not. You must always conform to what society decrees is right, and you are not allowed to doubt society, for it is never wrong. But how wrong society is in the first place! Why is it that someone who cares little for the popular music, is automatically shunned? Why is it that someone who shows their own intelligence is detested by his peers? And yet these are simple things, there could be much graver errors to society. Society is taking any quality that shines in a person, and reducing it to their level, so that we are all reduced; below our true power. Society may build people up, but this is nothing, in a society-less world, these people would have no power whatsoever. However, those who had individualistic ideas and ways of life that society shunned, they would be the remarkable ones, for they would be a change from the ordinary. They are the ones who define us as a race of intelligent beings, who have independent wills, thoughts and emotions. We all have capabilities that make us stand out, but in the face of society, the power to remove such grand character from a man is immense, and nearly unstoppable. In the end, society will turn on itself, finding fault in everything, and ultimately, itself. It would then destroy itself, leaving countless millions once again without a guiding path, although it really had that all along. The fact was, though, that everyone was on that same pointless journey, and all that anyone saw was another on that path, transversing it confidently. And so, everyone thought that they were going somewhere, and that the other was leading them. But the other was following another, and this next one, yet another, until it has all come around again to the very soul we had begun with. Society has followed another, believing it has been guided, when in fact, it was really only doing the same thing, over and over and over again. Man will be its own ultimate destruction. Everything about man�s existence has been fraught with a fitful journey through life, on a path that leads nowhere. It is only the few that realize that society is leading itself to its own demise, and take leave of it that are truly ever going in a direction that not only has a purpose, but is also enjoyable to them. This horrific saga will continue until the last self, the last "I" has perished, and there is nothing more left to realize that there may be another way. That there may be more to life than simply living it, as animals do. That there are questions to be answered in the universe and reality. Only when the last soul departs to an unknown void will the universe continue its way through life, never knowing that life can be so much grander than simply living until death.

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