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MY PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE

posted 8/16/2007 12:01:29 PM |

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Pudge2u has become another of my heroes at AMD. He joins ShadowsAngel in the development of serious and relevant questions so large I am unable to speak to them with a simple response within the blog he posts to, and so I have created a separate blog entry to address the question he raises. Like Angel, Pudge has inspired me, and this is the greatest gift anyone can bring to my doorstep.

As a post to my blog entry entitled

The REAL Master of the Universe

, pudge wrote: The super wide view you take, so long into the past, so long into the future -- has that long view driven you a bit mad? If all else is truly futile, how can you afford such a long view?

And my answer is this:

Life is not profitably viewed in the microcosm. To think drawing breath has no meaning greater than can be found in the span from the cradle to the grave robs us of purpose, because it's plain nothing we can do while we're here will last long. You live, you fuck around for a while and then you die. Where's the point of going on when adversity crowds you?

Superstitious people address the issue of life's pointless nature by relying upon notions of the afterlife to bring meaning and purpose to their time on earth. They shape and mold their behavior with a plan, which corresponds to their religious ambitions after death.

My point of view...this business of the everlasting chain and the responsibility of each link to make a contribution, is what people who do not believe in ghosts come to when they address the very real need all human beings have to find purpose in their existence. I've often been asked by Christians, "Don't you think there's anything bigger than yourself?" The answer is, "Yes!" I am a small matter, but I am absolutely vital to the grander reality. Elevating this fact to the status I have simultaneously does a number of things:

1 - It allows nearly all human beings, no matter how bereft of talent they may be, to make a contribution which is equal to every other human being's in the longest possible view. We may owe the discovery of electricity to Ben Franklin, but who will know 10,000 years from now?

2 - It brings purpose to each individual life in that the shaping of values for the children we produce becomes the single most important activity that can consume any of us. I repeat, the achievements of men outside the home are hardly more significant than the activity of a child on the playground compared to the contribution every mother has the opportunity and responsibility to make.

3 - It is a very necessary and satisfying substitute for the comfort superstitious people enjoy in the belief that virgins are awaiting them in the afterlife or the streets will be paved with gold. Moreover, it is an ethic reasonable people can embrace more easily than the totem-mentality which has sustained humanity since the first prayer to a deity was uttered, because it is grounded in fact.

4 - It is equal to spirituality in the effort to control human behavior so that order can prevail and civilization can endure, rather than anarchy and chaos running rampant across the globe. The religious do it to get to Heaven. My ethic calls for each person to remember his obligation to the grander view, too. It is just a different grand view.

Finally, there is nothing I can see in bibles to help us negotiate the realities that have become plain to us since those books were written. There are no answers to questions about our obligation to explore space, except in innuendo and inferred intention cloaked in circumspect prose. Such a journey was not considered possible when our ancestors wrote these books. Nor is there anything but confusion added by bibles to such issues as DNA research and cloning. No information about what to do when transportation and communication become so refined global government is not only possible, but the only realistic alternative to nuclear annihilation. There is no solution to the overpopulation of the planet resulting from advice such as "be fruitful and multiply." In fact, we have outlived the utility of religious dogma, but life continues and the result of superstitious devotions is strangling suffocation in any attempt to find resolve to the thousand challenges before us, many of which are a direct result of religion -- not the least of which is war.

Still...we have a need for purpose in our lives. We have need for an ethic that molds our behavior into activity that results in order. And, perhaps most of all, we have need for hope -- hope that we will not have lived in vain, that our individual existence was vital to something everlasting and larger than any single human being.

Pudge asks if the notion has driven me mad. A lot of people would answer, "Maybe not, but something sure as hell did." My answer would be that it has preserved my sanity and clarity of thought in a world that appears to have gone mad.

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