Been awhile, hasn't it? Well, sue me. I've had bigger fish to fry. The evil people in this place keep trying to make me learn. So far I've resisted, but they're draining my will. If I can just hold out for three more months, I'll never learn anything again.
So if you've been wringing your hands in desperate anticipation of another entry (as unlikely as that is), I hope that today's universally disturbing and controversial topic will give you the hack philosophy fix you need.
Death.
It's something that happens to all of us sooner or later and is about as natural as breathing, yet it's something we all try to forget. When we can't, we get all squeamish and teary-eyed about it or try to make light of it by having Sylvester Stallone kill a few billion commies whith a plastic spoon and a Styrofoam cup. We dispose of our dead as quickly as possible and push the almost dead (old people) away into the fringes of society so they don't remind us that someday we'll be JUST LIKE THEM.
Of course, it wasn't always like that. In just this past century have we ever been able to hold off death for a few more years. Back in the good old days (nineteenth century and before, pretty much), life truly sucked! Disease was rampant, nobody knew if they would have enough food to survive the year, infant mortality was abysmal, murder rates were much higher than today, war was always looming on the horizon and, worst of all, they didn't have cable! Life SUCKED. Our quality of life has improved drastically since then. Hell, it's improved compared to my parent's generation (compare the average number of tooth cavitites, for example). We are standing at the very PINNACLE of human development, and it keeps getting better! In some sick way, it would be kind of cool if we nuked ourselves back into the stone age. That way, we could tell our kids, "Yep, in MY day, we had it GREAT!" and mean it. The "good old days" would be more than a saying by some demented old fart who's just bitter because he's been impotent for the last 30 years. They would be the stuff legends are made of (or myths like Clintonus and the Starr Monster).
I just realized that if I was ever stupid enough to have a kid, "Clint" is not a possible name. Take out one letter and you've got classic schoolyard torture...
Anyway, why do we feel bad for somebody if they die? The way I look at it, the stiff's suffering is over, no matter what your beliefs. If you're an atheist, then that's it: Poof and the dude's gone. If you're religious at all, the corpse's spirit is either in blissful paradise and or hell, which they deserved anyway. So what's the friggin' problem?
I'd kinda rather prefer that there is no soul, so that when we croak, the show's over. I mean, it's not like we'll MIND, since we'll be dead. Maybe we spend our last moments saying, "Take my hand, brother Jesus, I'm coming home!", and then we DIE, never knowing any better. That wouldn't be too bad.
It would be much better than an endless stream of reincarnations, that's for sure. Wanna give me Hell? Spin me through grade school and puberty a few thousand more times. That'll just be so wonderful I could PUKE. And of course I'm only 24, so I gotta heluva lot of living yet to do. Maybe I'll find some time period I dislike even more than grade school. I've stayed up many a night in dreadful fear that I'll hae to go through all this crap again, and won't even have the opportunity to learn from my past. Nope, I'd rather just be dead.
Then there's the vague Judeo-Christian concept of Heaven, where everyone is happy all the time, and Hell, were everything sucks all the time. I guess Heaven is eternal intoxication, and Hell is eternal hangover. Nope, I'd rather just be dead, but as I noted in my religion section, nobody knows what's going on, and I'm not going to toss my hat into he ring until the voices in my head come to a consensus.
When somebody buys the farm, it's not them who's hurting anymore, its the live people. They're the ones who need to go through all of the ceremonies and need to believe that their loved ones are still watching them (and sometimes influencing their lives, as unlikely as that is). I guess it's just instinct, and as much as it pains me to admit it, I'm merely human and slave to the same instincts. Dammit.
Where I'm standing from, though, this is purely academic, for until proven otherwise, I am declaring myself immortal.
You read it here first.