Their Culture of Death
I think I've mentioned somewhere in here that my idea of dying and going to heaven would be to wander the universe in some necessarily disembodied form, I guess, discovering the answers to all the mysteries the cosmos has on offer. This I call a reasonably good use of my eternal time.
I've always thought that one of the great things about being alive is that you get to learn stuff. This learning stuff deal has always, always given me the greatest pleasure. And the knowledge I pick up doesn't even have to be particularly useful to me. I just like learning it. I know that I am not unique in this regard.
If I ever get to the point to where I can't ever learn anything new -- because of physical or mental disability, or otherwise -- I guess you'd better pull the plug on me because as far as I'm concerned, I'll already be dead.
I'd like to be alive when the Most Amazing Discoveries of All Time come along. I'd like to be around when they discover how to let us live forever. I'd like to witness the first contact with an alien civilization. I'd like to pick up the paper some morning and read that somebody has discovered the trick to this human consciousness thing. I'd like to know if there really is a way to do the impossible -- travel between stars in a reasonable amount of time.
This is what I really hate about the idea of having to die someday. I probably won't last long enough to learn about any of those things. I will be long gone by the time any of those secrets are ever uncovered. That, you should pardon the expression, kills me.
Here's what I find so horrifying about the various turns my country is taking away from the Age of Reason, and toward the faith-based sciences. These people want to take the world I live in, the world I depend upon for the learning of new things, back to a time when science served their beliefs. They long for a culture of knowledge death, which is nothing more to me than a culture of death itself.
They tell me they have a right to their culture of death. Yeah, they do, but they don't have the right to kill my world by slowing or even stopping the birth of knowledge. They think I should just accept their culture of death, I guess. They think it shouldn't matter to me so much.
Well, it does matter to me. It is, as you can see, a matter of life and death. I think about that every time I get discouraged at the way things are going, and I get pissed off.
It's always better to be pissed off than to be discouraged. That's one of the many things the world of life has taught me, so far.
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