The Cynical Optimist

With an ever expanding Earthly population in an ever expanding universe, I often question the importance of individuality and whether or not it seems to be getting lost as we increase in numbers, and as the universe increases in size.  A congested freeway or a long line is both a subject of beauty and blight, for while the order in the nature of our behavior is to be appreciated, the impersonality of a vast world of strangers is, at the very minimum, a subconscious pressure upon the tribal human mind as it emerged from the environment of evolved adaptiveness.

It is with this mindset that I approach the expression that “life goes on”–that deaths reported in wars, accidents, acts of violence, or  in disease are often ignorable to the wide majority of us.  And while our families–our genes and our blood–may grieve our absence, and while our close friends may think of us now and then, the true lonesome nature of human life and the passing of the mortal being is a subject of concern.  For even when we hold high regard for the priceless value of life, we have learned to “move on” to the extent that we are aware of the possibility that our grief can be the premature death of us, and that we must protect our own health in refraining from excessive sorrow as a result of witnessing or learning (ignorance is bliss?) about the deaths of individuals who may not just share our genes and our friendship and love, but who also share a common sense of belonging to our race–the human race.

It is this beautiful tragedy, this paradox of life and death, which often pushes my agnosticism towards the supernatural paradigm, for I wish to find non material merit in our existence, and to know that our limited time, and its limited celebration and grief by our fellows during and after its existence, does indeed prevail in some form into an immortal future.

I bow to the moral atheist  but I question the origin of the Big Bang, the”God” particle, the “Higgs boson” from which the Big Bang (or the existence of the universe in any method) resulted, and I “pray” for conclusive results from the Large Hadron Collider.  And perhaps our individuality will become relevant once more–unless of course, “God(s)” is/are nonexistent, or a transcendent power(s) once existed, but has/have (ironically) died.

The ultimate question of life is not so much “how?” as it is “why?”, for it is in purpose that we find merit, not so much in the method.  Moreover, the method is dependent on the purpose, and thus the purpose of living life should be to discover the merit in the purpose of our origins, and not necessarily in the evolutionary (or divine, for the faithful) processes that led to the fulfillment of the purpose.

Unfortunately, and perhaps fortunately, the limit to unraveling the ultimate purpose of the creation of life can only be measured objectively if we wish for our philosophical observations to make sense; of course, those who take the supernatural path accept that they cannot make sense out of what is divine, and when they do, it is their holy thumos, and their sociological rationalization which leads them to believe that unexplainable phenomenons do in fact make sense even in the absence of objective observation.

Thus to ask “why?” when we face life, and to discover the purpose–if there is one–to the creation of life, we must yield either to science or to faith, as the inherent incompatibilities in these two entities create dangerous grounds for their symbiosis.  The self-righteous indignation and the devout loyalty inherent in the adopters of the latter paradigm is applaudable, but the doubt created by the ambiguity of this model offsets its superiority to the former system used for exploring the purpose of life.

So, my advice to you in my writing is to pick your poison wisely, and then to pursue the ultimate question of why?.