Macabre

The thought of death and life increasingly grabs my being.  As I grow older, I fear death. Not because of any selfish preservative instinctual response to survival wont to be found in all creatures but because of the seed I will leave behind rudderless and lonely. It appears man is constantly and inexorably drawn to death as we contemplate life and its meanings to us.  The more we cherish life and all it brings, the reality of death and nothingness becomes increasingly frightful and less agreeable.  It is for this selfsame reason that humankind has always sought for a means of elongating its lifespan or of completely escaping eternal and timeless death.

One wonders what happens after the quietude of death. Religion has always attempted to provide an answer to sate the hunger of men for knowledge.  However, the spiritual answers we have obtained from religion hardly ever satisfies the more inquisitive and pessimist of humankind.  This is the root of all forms of  humanism and atheism.  It is a refusal to accept the divine and non-empirical explanation of the after-life.  The refusal is a natural precursor for a total refusal of even the forms of morality preached by religion (this happens in extreme cases). The refusal to accept the moral codes is simply a logical progression of the dialectics on the hereafter. The conclusion is that this world is without walls or fences, morality is relative and there can be no good or bad. Finally, there can be no hereafter.

Not that holding a belief outside the established religious dogmas is terrible in itself, events in history has taught us that humankind can only peacefully exist in a society with known precepts and rules. Religious precepts have been the most effective leash on the ferocious instinct of humankind for self, spiritual and material preservation to the detriment of all other creatures including fellow men.  It is this religious precepts that are being constantly attacked by waves after waves of rationalisation and demystification.  By the time the modern man is finished, God will indeed be dead as once proclaimed by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.