Love, Suffering, Life, and Death

Squashed Asks: Are love and suffering anything more social constructs or evolutionary by products? Does our suffering have a purpose?

Short answers: Probably not, and no, not really. Meaning and purpose are things that we all figure out for ourselves, and one person’s “purpose” is sometimes another person’s soul-crushing hopelessness.

We human beings take ourselves incredibly seriously considering just how tiny and insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things. It’s not enough, for most of us, to try and live good lives, be kind to each other, raise our children, and die–we all want to live forever, or at the very least do something that will cause us to be remembered forever.

I know I do, anyway. I consider it a great tragedy that I won’t be here to see what humanity turns into a hundred or five hundred or a thousand years from now. We have so much potential that I’d like to believe it’s going to be good. If I can’t live forever, it would be nice to be remembered forever. How profoundly sad to think of a time when no one will remember my name!

When I finished reading The Five Ages of the Universe, years ago, I cried myself to sleep pondering the inevitable heat death of the universe–just imagine, all those molecules so far apart. Imagine the loneliness of all those trillions and trillions of years in the future when there is no one there to see as waves lengthen and strings stop vibrating and things just begin to fall apart at the quantum level. Even if that’s not how it all ends–and there’s no certainty, I suppose, that that’s how it will go–it’s a sobering thought, all that unimaginable cold and emptiness and no one there to see it.

Death is Really, Really Scary

What are your views on the afterlife? Especially, what happens to people who don’t agree that your religion is the correct one?

Anyone who has read my other posts in this series should know by now that I find a lot about religion, and especially about Christianity, to be entirely despicable. Christian doctrines relating to Hell and Salvation are among those that I find particularly toxic, and believers in such various doctrines range from entirely and purposefully hateful (e.g. Westboro Baptist Church) to blissfully (for them) unaware of whatever harm they cause (e.g. the vast majority of moderate-to-liberal Christians in the US).

"Still Life with a Skull" by Philippe de Champaigne. In this 17th century painting the flower, skull, and hourglass stand for Life, Death, and Time.

Here’s the thing: Death is really, really scary. It’s easy enough to explain what happens to our bodies and our stuff when we die. We decompose, and our things end up in landfills, thrift stores, or the dusty corners of our descendants’ attics and crawlspaces. The question that has preoccupied people for, in all likelihood, millions of years isn’t answered by that explanation, however. What we all want to know is where do we go? What happens to whatever it is that makes us, well, us?