This is a difficult topic to talk about because so much of it is tied up with powerful emotions… Not just my own but almost everyone on the planet… Anyone who holds out for tomorrow in the belief that when this life is over there will be another one to go to, a better one, regardless of your religious tradition the afterlife you imagine for yourself is one of beauty and light, paradisaical.
I used to believe this, at times I still wish I did. What a comfort it is to think that despite all the wrongs of this world, despite the pain and suffering, despite all the inequality there will be a time when all wrongs are righted, where justice will be served and peace will reign and that we will be there in the presence of God. I know the power of that comforting thought, it was one that I clinged to for most of my life. I know longer feel that way, worse I think that it is a lie, a terrible lie! It blinds us with a beauty we can do nothing to create while we waste the time we have here now. It tells us that we are fallen, rejected beings living
on a fallen rejected planet. It denies the glory of our existence and our ability to change the world today, now. It excuses us from acting on the injustices we see around us today, it absolves us of the horrors we create here and shifts all the blame and responsibility for correcting it on an invisible, unknowable deity, who at some point in the future, always very near but never quite here, to correct. This is a madness and a sickness. If today we vowed to live like there was no heaven and hell to absolve us, this world would be a paradise and the need for one far removed would fade into oblivion. Man is not fallen, nor is Nature corrupted, beauty and justice are obtainable now. I wish is was as easy as abandoning the lie and moving forward. But I don’t believe as seductive as it is and yet I’m no better than the faithful. Knowing something and acting on it are not analogous to each other.
Acting is always the hardest part. Daily living is just so much habit and change is overcoming a terrible amount of inertia. Living like every moment counts and as if you can change the world is exhausting. Which is why it rarely ever is. I’m just as guilty as everyone else. I go through each day in a haze aware of but unsympathetic to the injustice that surrounds me, inured to it from daily exposure. How do you overcome this? How do you do so without losing yourself in it? I don’t know. I hope to stumble upon a way.
