The View From Some Distant Planet
Posted: Sun Jul 29, 2018 2:44 pm
At age 51, all other things considered to an appropriate degree and based on statistical probabilities, I feel a high degree of certainty (relative to other beliefs which I may also hold) in assuming I've passed the halfway mark in terms of my own lifespan. It seems to maybe make the topic of death more and more interesting to me. I also find it pretty difficult to ponder death independently of any thoughts concerning what is generally called "religion". Probably one of the first thoughts that protrude in my mind regarding religion (as I have encountered it) is the seeming wealth of claims that are made at any given point in time concerning the dead, by people who aren't nor have ever been dead to the best of their reckoning. Most of those non-dead people making all those claims seem to cite other sources for their own information. It seems fair to believe that if we traced all those sources back to the very first origins, the first people to ever make whatever respective claims, we'd probably find that those originary sources were probably also non-dead people who had never been dead to the best of their reckoning at the time they made those claims.
I sort of weigh this against how utterly impossible it has been for me to go through life and not encounter some kind of artifact relating to "religion" at almost every step of the way. By this I refer to buildings, institutions, professional occupations, copies of holy books of whatever variety as well as a deluge of secondary literature involving references to references to references, onward...
If some sort of bizarre physical anomaly wiped out every physical vestige of religion while miraculously leaving human beings perfectly untouched to go about our lives in complete independence of it, I sort of wonder what would happen from that point forward?
I sort of weigh this against how utterly impossible it has been for me to go through life and not encounter some kind of artifact relating to "religion" at almost every step of the way. By this I refer to buildings, institutions, professional occupations, copies of holy books of whatever variety as well as a deluge of secondary literature involving references to references to references, onward...
If some sort of bizarre physical anomaly wiped out every physical vestige of religion while miraculously leaving human beings perfectly untouched to go about our lives in complete independence of it, I sort of wonder what would happen from that point forward?