Must We, As A Species, Accept Death To Move On?
I was having a conversation this morning and the subject of death was brought up in an offhanded way, but it made me think about our situation as a species.
Religion is something that has always put its greatest effort into holding back the human race. When it was discovered that the Earth is not the center of the galaxy, religion wanted to kill the man who revealed this truth. When science makes discoveries that can prolong human life, cure diseases, and even potentially “cure” some types of paralysis, it’s religion that wants to make it all stop.
Sure they have their reasons, but they really don’t matter. The only thing that truly matters is the results of their actions, and those “results” are holding back the human race in its entirety.
In addition to this we have the wars that we’re currently seeing in the world today. I am not so naive as to think that wars would never happen without religion, but they bear pointing out. These religious wars and killings are focused on control and, of course, on holding back entire cultures.
You see the running theme here.
So my question, as the subject of this post states, is “Must we, as a species, accept death to move on?”
The reason that I ask this question is because I think that the answer is “yes”. At its very heart, religion is all about “the after life” or “the spirit world”. Regardless of what you call it it’s “the place that you go to after you die”. The reason for this is because humans fear death (I certainly do, to be honest) and many people need these comforts.
The answer then is simple: In order to move beyond religion we - as a species - are going to have to come to terms with the fact that we’re all born to die. It’s harsh I know, but unless science makes some significant progress then we’re all likely going to die.
Even if science did make such a breakthrough then you could bet that religions would be screaming at the tops of their lungs in an attempt to prevent it, or even destroy it!
Which is exactly my point. If religion had its way we would all still be ignorant of the fact that our planet orbits the stars (and not the other way around). If religion has its way, stem cell research will be killed regardless of how humane the process of gathering those cells may be. Because religion has its way, many people even today still believe that the Earth is only six thousand or so years old despite how obviously incorrect that is!
For the human race to make the progress that it needs - from fighting diseases to elonging life and controlling our out of control population numbers - we are going to have to move beyond religion. In order to do that we, as a species, are going to have to come to terms with the idea of death.
It is of no small irony that only after embracing death will the human race be able to cure the worse of our afflictions and be able to live, perhaps even to the point of elonging our life span to hundreds of years or more.
Could insecurity be at the root of the greatest of all human evils?
~Steph
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Topics: Spiritual Theories |
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