We are it seems surrounded by trouble and strife. What I have written below came into my head almost complete – in one go. I don’t believe it came from God 🙂 But it might have 🙂 🙂
I live in the south of the U.K. and I am defined by the Government of the day as English. Do I, together with the millions who live with me in England actually “own” this land? Already I hope you can see what a stupid question this is, and where it is leading. Of course you do not “own” the land. For the moment you are a mere squatter on the piece of dirt where you were dropped by your mother and that’s about it. If you are extremely lucky you might be allowed to squat on your patch for around 80 years or so, not much more, and the way most of you go about business, it is likely to be a helluva lot less. But don’t you at least “own” the house you live in, the one that you have bought and paid for? Well you might think so, but does the house? When you peg out and the house belongs to someone else will they now “own” the house, or will they like you just be squatting there for a short time?
You do not own the patch of land you and your neighbours are squatting on, you are (very) temporary custodians, and to be frank, you’re making a pretty shit job of it on the whole. No land, country or house within a country actually belongs to you – you are simply a temporary squatter, get used to it.
Second in the list. We have a group of Philosophies that create anything but the peace and goodwill they claim to champion, we come to Religions. Don’t know if you’ve managed to work this one out for yourself yet (personal observation says that you haven’t) but every Religion on the planet is man-made. Do you get that? Every faith that you follow has been cobbled together by a man or a group of men. There is NOTHING that can be pointed to that has come “directly from God”. A man writes down words that he says God spoke to him. There’s a name for people that hear voices. A man claims that God has written “His thoughts” in stone, in metal sheet, on papyrus – you name it, God has written on it. You actually believe that? You don’t think for a nanosecond that the bloke that produces these wondrous relics actually wrote the stuff himself? Let me have your name and address – I’d like to do business with you. There may well be a God, but if there is, He does not intervene in your everyday life and He does not count the fall of every sparrow. It is now long overdue for you to start growing up – you need to start taking responsibility for your own actions – and that’s very painful.
Lastly, your ever so finite lifetime. Your one glimpse through the extremely narrow window to have a peek at what’s going on around here. The full window stretches to 4.5 billion years into the past, and quite a few billion years into the future, with or without Homo Sapiens treading the Earth, almost certainly without I would say the way things are going. You have this infinitesimally small window of a few decades (at best) that you are allowed to glimpse through and yet you act on a daily basis as if you have an infinity of time stretched out in front of you. Sorry but you don’t. The afterlife is something made up by the people in charge that don’t want their workforce going nuts on them. There are Indians in the Amazonian rain forest who on their deathbed will wail and scream before just death, Christians think this is atrocious and attempt to placate them with their Religion. Bloody right you should wail and scream before death because that’s the end of your all too brief time on this wondrous world, your allotted span has come to an end and you will not be around to see how things turn out. A finite lifetime is a stinking trick, a pretty sick joke, and we’re all the comedians.
Now tell me again what exactly you are fighting about and what you are so ready to lay down your (very short) life for.
POSTSCRIPT:
You come into this world with nothing, and you leave it likewise. The only thing you do have any control over is how much harm, or good, you do during your watch.