Death and Co.

So it has been awhile since I last posted. Sorry about that, but things have been a tad hectic around here. Not to the point where I am losing my marbles (don't worry...I just counted and they are still there), but enough that it was a bit difficult to find time to write another post. Also, due to low self-esteem about these posts, I had to come up with a topic that would be interesting and thoughtful. That being said, let us now turn to the actual text of this post.

Caution: This will not be a very happy post, just so you are warned at the outset.

For my Intro. to Bible class we were reading some selections from the Apocrypha (for Catholic readers that would just be the books at the end of the Old Testament, Protestants do not have this in their version of the Bible) specifically in 2 Maccabees in which stories of martyrdom are presented and the characters are depicted as being heroic. The figures in these books were willing to die for their faith and refused to change deviate from their religious tradition simply because someone was oppressing them so badly. Jews in the text were being forced to eat pork, which is strictly against Jewish law. I then asked myself if there was anything I would be willing to die for, such as these martyrs did.

My initial reaction was that I could not think of anything that means so much to me that I would be willing to die for them. Perhaps this is because I am too young and have not experienced the world sufficiently so I simply have not found anything worth dying for yet. However, I thought that since I was unwilling to die for anything in particular maybe that meant I was a bit too open? Maybe you are reading this and it is making absolutely no sense, but I will try to explain. All right. So, what I mean is that since I do not hold anything quite so dearly or care about anything with immense amounts of passion that I am therefore open. That is to say, I am open by virtue of having nothing that I cling to so dearly that I would not be able to live without. Things in my life can come and go as they please because they are merely things. Maybe the universe has something better intended for me than clinging to these items. Perhaps an example will illuminate what I am trying to say. In the above example from the biblical text, the Jews in Maccabees had such a strong connection and relationship to their faith that they felt as if they could not live without it. I mean, they were willing to die before changing their ways. In a sense, it may seem as if they were stubborn or close-minded. Since I have no item or thing with this sort of connection, then maybe I am too open to change and do not hang on to items like that. Rather than clinging to one item and living a stagnant life, I am open to change in the pursuit of an interesting life. As a minor side note/tangent/disclaimer, I am not saying that if you hold on to things from the past that you lead a boring and monotonous life. I am suggesting that if you were to open yourself up to change that more opportunities would come your way and, in my opinion, would lead to a more well-rounded, balanced exposure to life and all this world has to offer.

Since there is nothing that I personally deem worthy of dying for, does that make me a bad person? I sure do not view myself as being a bad person, but my opinion is biased. I do not know of anyone who thinks I am a bad person, but that does not mean that I am a particularly good person. Maybe I simply am a person, not good, not bad, simply neutral.

I cannot provide examples of things I would die for, but that does not mean that there are not things in life that I would live for. There are tons of things to live for, and I live to hopefully someday experience those things and to continue to experience things I already experience. Friends, family, the prospects of a career in the future, a family in the future. All of these things I find extremely appealing and they are what keep me going.  Is this a more optimistic view of life as compared to what you would die for? Rather than being a Debbie Downer and thinking about dying, I am thinking positively and optimistically at life and thinking about the present and all the things I am looking forward to in the future. I dunno. Just a thought that occurred to me as I was writing this.

To move along to another aspect of this passage we read, I started to think about what comes after life and what it means to be dead. Pretty big, serious stuff, I know. Philosophers spend lifetimes pondering these things possibly never reaching a definite conclusion. However, I would like to tackle this issue. Maybe a little less than a tackle though...maybe more like a light shove or bump, since just this post is concerned with death at the moment.

I suppose that death can be described as the absence of life (which would definitely need a definition of life, another lifelong quest that many fail to ever conclude). But what happens once we die? Many religious traditions tell us what happens after we die. Buddhists and Hindus think we are reincarnated and then live another life. Many of the Abrahamic traditions describe judgment and then sorting into either heaven or hell. So there are plenty of answers of what centuries, even millennia,  worth of philosophers and previous human beings have described as occurring after we die, but how can they be certain of this? Have they experienced death? And if we claim that we have, how could they have experienced death and then written about it? As odd as this sounds, and I mean this in a strictly out of curiosity so don't go calling the cops on me or anything, but I have always wanted to die and then come back to tell my experiences to others. I doubt they would ever believe me (I'm not even sure I would believe someone who claims this has happened to them), but I, as well as many others I have spoken with on this subject, have always wanted to know what it felt like to die. Just once. However, this is highly unlikely to ever occur and even if it did, how can I be certain I was dead if my consciousness I had when I was alive would not be present with me when I am dead (and hence lack life). I dunno, this is just a fascinating subject that captured my attention many years ago and still has my attention and thoughts.

One final thought that was presented to me during my J-Term class here at Luther. Just as a brief reminder, my J-Term class was textual criticism of the Bible, meaning we looked at what other ancient authorities had written down as being part of the Bible and how that differed from the Bible we have today and of what, if any, significance these discrepancies were. Anyhow, during one of our discussions we got onto the topic of why our society is so obsessed with staying alive when such eloquent pictures of the afterlife have been presented to most of us. Especially in the Christian tradition, where the kingdom of heaven, at least during my upbringing, is so awesome and out of this world (figuratively and perhaps literally) that we would not want to go there immediately rather than living in this world of pain and suffering. An example we used in that class was when someone is sick, you want to get the best medical attention/care that you possibly can, so as to live longer. However, by living longer, you are delaying yourself from entering the kingdom of heaven in all its magnificence. Wouldn't it make more sense for people to be dropping dead every two seconds in hopes of reaching this heavenly realm of paradise? Why would anyone endure all the pain and suffering if they were promised so better conditions on the other side? Thinking about it now, I think I may have an answer to this question, which I addressed earlier in this post. People are not dying because there is something they value here that they deem worth living for.

Just some more reflections and thoughts....

Until next time.....