Nihilism 101

You are sitting all alone contemplating life and death. Well, death mainly. Before you can draw any conclusions, you quickly change the subject in your mind to something more pleasant, like your outstanding credit card bills, or those nagging household chores that you've been putting off for months, or wondering if that lump is cancerous.... *whoops*! credit card bills, credit card bills, credit card bills. It's a wonderful defense mechanism isn't it? Distraction, avoidance, whatever you want to call it. Anything at all to send you off course, off the path that you almost traveled towards a very cold and lonely place. A place where you may find that what you actually believe is that all you are is dust waiting to happen.

We have no place for mysticism left in our lives really. Life is now all filled up with deadlines and infomercials and over-consumption and trying to attone for that over-consumption and keeping up with techology and keeping up with Joneses and trying to keep track of what idiotic plan of world dominion our nation's leaders are trying to put into effect. Our religious leaders don't stand much of a chance against all that. We don't have the time or the energy to believe in anything anymore. We barely have time to muster a little hope. We want to try to hope that there is an afterlife, something beyond this life. We'd love to have a second chance at finding happiness or continuing what happiness we've found. So we try to find ourselves a niche in one of these religions that'll give a chance to pull this off. One where the teachings and mandates seem plausible, but aren't too constrictive on our activities of daily living. Or activities of daily killing as the case may be. Or daily coveting. Or daily lying.

Simple religious mandates regarding not killing and coveting appear to be optional for our nation's leaders. This sends a pretty clear unspoken message about their fear for their souls. And having a savior that died for your sins is a bit bloody convenient in my humble opinion. Either you have morally sound religious convictions or you do not. You either live your life according to these tenets, or you do not. And your soul, if the bloody thing even exists, should be weighed against it's actions in life. That's right, your soul's actions. You apparently have it now, and you'll have it then when you are dead. It's your link between now and then. Your soul has killed people or told other people to kill people, or it has not. Your soul coveted oil or bore false witness or it has not. Your soul has religious convictions and has lived by them or it have not. Either Hitler's soul is waiting for you in Heaven or it is not. And we can all long discources about gradient scales of good and evil until the cows come home. I'll always bring it back to the thou shalt not kill thing. Which seems pretty frelling clear to me. Of course the pragmatic argument comes up, but there are differing aggressive viewpoints in the world and we need to protect our "worldly" interests, blah blah blah. Then I guess our tarnished souls rate a close second to our pragmatic "worldly" interests. Thanks for making my point. It's nice you have a hobby, I mean a religion.

And when we look up at our nation's leaders and see that they profess to be "religious people" and that they "just got off the White Phone and God sends His Love" it makes it so much easier for us to look up to them and quietly say in our minds: "Well if that murdering lying coveting wretch of a man thinks he's going to make the cut, I'm a shoe in for sure." That'll definitely help keep you off the path leading towards that empty dark place deep inside that is beckoning you to really contemplate your expiration date.