- Existential quandaries often create confusion and terror
in human beings. That is why life's "big questions" are best
pondered in a peaceful state of mind. Nothing is more dangerous than an
anguished Homo sapiens asking, "Who am I? Why am I here? What does
it all mean?" In a state of emotional agony, the answers one receives
to these questions will be distorted by one's pain.
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- Since I've been in the public eye as an internet essayist,
I've received hundreds of emails from people waxing philosophic about Life,
the Universe, and Everything. Their insights are often very thoughtful
and moving, but although I try to stay open to all input I receive, few
have succeeded in shaking the foundation of my personal "paradigm."
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- About a week ago, I found myself in the midst of an intense
spiritual crisis. I was confronted with the reality that a budding romantic
"relationship" was nothing more than an unrequited fixation on
my part. This sent me into a bit of a tailspin of depression and self-doubt.
Simultaneously, I was inundated with dozens of emails in response to a
philosophical piece I wrote entitled, "To Live Only For God."
Most of the responses were positive, but some were challenging, and even
hostile.
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- A few respondents took me to task over my assertion that
God is neither insane nor cruel. They essentially claimed that no one has
any objective, empirical proof that God is good, or even that he exists.
Indeed, they argued, God's insanity and/or non-existence might go a long
way towards explaining the perpetual fuckery of the human race.
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- Ordinarily, this brand of rhetoric has no sway over me.
I know the arguments of atheists and materialists like the back of my own
hand, and I've always found them amazingly shallow, illogical, and generally
too absurd for words. The notion that life is an "accident,"
and human beings are collections of particles that somehow learned to think,
feel, and love through the process of "evolution" has never inspired
fear or doubt in me. But for the briefest of moments, the blackness of
my thoughts pushed me into the abyss, and I pondered the question: WHAT
IF THERE IS NO GOD?
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- Uh...Whoops...Oh shit....
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- What followed this minor indulgence of dark curiosity
was a colossal mind-fuck straight out of a Twilight Zone episode. For an
hour or a day, I felt like an astronaut expelled into the barren regions
of space. The world turned into an alien environment, one as hostile as
it was insane. I considered the hypothetical ramifications of God's non-existence,
and I decided unequivocally that there is no word in King's English to
describe the awfulness of this scenario.
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- Never mind that "no God" would almost certainly
mean "no soul," and therefore, the end of my body would be the
end of my consciousness -- i.e., the extinguishing of everything in the
Universe. I suppose one could cope with this travesty by holding out hope
-- albeit quite flimsy -- that science might one day find the key to physical
immortality. But I could NEVER cope with the fact that "no God"
and "no soul" would ultimately mean the non-existence of love.
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- Think of it. If you are nothing more than the sum of
your physical parts, what you experience as "love" is just a
series of chemical reactions in the brain, a totally inane and animalistic
"biological imperative" necessary for the propagation of the
species. A parent's love for his or her child would be of no greater integrity
than an amoeba's instinct to reproduce asexually. I suppose this occurred
through billions of years of evolution, as our spongy little gray matters
somehow developed the concept of "love" as a defense against
life's inherent meaninglessness, to prevent us from destroying one another.
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- Of course, there is no REAL reason to love an animated
sack of muck and water, which, let's face it, is what we are if the atheists
are correct. We would only love each other out of brute NECESSITY. Oh,
and also, it might be "pleasurable" for some people.
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- Additionally, if there is no God, we can pretty much
throw into the crapper the whole concept that "all men are created
equal." How can a sack of muck (a human being) be intrinsically equal
to another sack of muck? Atheists have no answer to this, other than to
say that THINGS WORK BETTER when we think this way.
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- And what of creative expression and other intangible
beauties and joys of life -- music, art, literature, and all forms of subjective
truth? These things also have no intrinsic value, but are just the inevitable
by-products of highly evolved brains with the biological need to "entertain"
themselves.
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- Furthermore, if there is no God, then we are truly ALL
ALONE on this flying speck of dust and water. No order, no meaning, and
no help from anyone or anything. Instead, we are left with random chaos,
animalistic instinct, and every man for his self. Shit happens, and only
fools weep because of it.
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- These torturous fictions repeated in my head for a seeming
eternity. I never really bought into this irrational train of thought,
but it did manage to put me in a black mood and ruin my day. Eventually,
I sobered up, and these absurd ponderings retreated to the darkness from
whence they came. And it became obvious to me why I wasted my time entertaining
something I KNOW to be false.
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- The truth is, although I am a joyous person by nature,
I can barely remember the last time I felt genuine gratitude. How long
has it been since I uttered the phrase, "Thank you, Father,"
without a grimace on my lips? Life has become a complaint, because I cannot
seem to shake this feeling of LACK.
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- I can write of concepts like Oneness and Unity from years
of study and personal experience, but alas, for me, they are just concepts.
However, this was not always so. In my adolescence, I consciously discovered
Oneness, and I embraced it with the joy and abandon of a child at play.
But as I grew older, my experiences and revelations cemented into a thought
system, and I could not think of Oneness without thinking of LOSS -- as
in, what must I sacrifice in order to achieve union with God? Worldly desires?
Personal ambitions? Material acquisitions? Romantic love? These are not
things any human being would abdicate without a sense of bitterness.
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- A God who would demand sacrifice is as frightening as
the concept of God's non-existence. A God who would demand sacrifice might
well be insane.
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- My only solution to this terrible fear of loss is to
remember the occasions I saw and embraced the Truth - that God only wants
GOOD for all of his children. This was not a conclusion I came to conceptually.
It was an inarguable fact, as I bathed in God's love like an electric baptism.
And upon this experience, I knew that true Oneness with God does not entail
sacrifice.
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- In subsequent years, my intellect (a tool of the ego)
has created phantoms and bogeymen to try to frighten me off my path. I
can only live without fear of these imaginary monsters when I surrender
to the light of God's love. In this infinite aurora, everything real is
illuminated, and nothing unreal can hide.
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