Fandango’s Flashback Friday — May 13th — Just one day late
This is a 2021 flashback but I’ve done so much editing on it, it’s sort of a new flashback.
The subject of whether or not we have an afterlife keeps coming up in various blogs. I usually answer I don’t really believe there is an afterlife, but I would not object if there is. I really want it to be true. I want to meet all my friends, real and virtual, all my dogs, cats, and birds. I have more ghostly friends now than living folk.
Everything and everyone dies. If you don’t die young, you will get old. Then, eventually, you die. To all the kids who think age won’t ever happen to them, enjoy your sojourn through youth. Believe, if you like, that you are immortal. I don’t know if I felt immortal, but I surely didn’t think about age at until one day, I was old.
You can believe anything, but reality has an odd way of interfering with the fake stuff. Eternal life is one of those things. You can eat write, exercise, be in really great shape, but eventually you get to that final door. No avoiding it, dodging it or weaving away. No arguing. If you walk through the door and finally know what — if anything — is on the other other side, please call me and tell me all about it. I haven’t gotten one of those calls yet, but there’s an infinite world out there.
The other night, Garry said “I was wondering how come I never see the performers I remember and love until I realized they are dead, many of them for years. But I see them in movies, so they feel alive.” That might be one kind of life after death. Be a popular film presence. As long as those films are shown, you stay alive. I don’t think consciousness comes as part of the package, though, but at least you are remembered.If that’s important to me and I’m not sure if it’s important to me.
I don’t believe in anything organized. I want to believe. For a non-believer, I’ve have spent more time than anyone I know studying religions. Specifically, I want to know what make other people believe. What is it that enables them to take that “leap of faith” I seem unable to take?
In college I had enough credits for religion to be my major, but there was no religion major available at my college (I don’t think there is one even now). The heads of the Philosophy and Sociology Departments tried to invent one for me, but it was the 1960s. Schools were more rigid than now. Both the sociology and philosophy departments wanted me as a graduate student but the school wouldn’t allow it. It wasn’t in their “book” and they couldn’t make that minor leap of faith.
I studied in a yeshiva in Israel and at our local church. I spent time with Bernard Cardinal Law and any number of pastors, reverends, and rabbis. I always end up with more questions than answers. My last pastor said it was obvious I was waiting for Jesus to show up with a picture ID. I’m not even sure that would help.
This is why I need time travel. I need to go back (or forward) in time to really see what happened. I want to become a time travel historian. Anyone hear of an available job?
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Categories: #FlashbackFriday, Anecdote, Movies, Religion, Sci Fi - Fantasy - Time Travel
SERENDIPITY: SEEKING INTELLIGENT LIFE ON EARTH 
I recently found out — because this was said as self-reported on a fairly new video — about a specific news/commentator person I click on (YouTube) having largely studied religion in college. If I recall correctly, he was most curious about why people come to be taken in by the organized or institutionalized presentations; different, if I’m not mistaken, from your interest as to how a person gets over the threshold of believing something about eternity (as an example or what have you). He could be very contemplative, personally, per what faith might be or is to him while deciding the study aspect as a school subject set concerns incorporated categories. I find a focus like this, one way or another, fascinating.
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I supposed, based on your commentary, that you are agnostic. You don’t believe but you don’t completely disbelieve either. I think a lot of people are like that. It is hard to believe in a benevolent God when you know so much about humanity and what they can do to each other with not remorse or recourse. I believe that energy does not die and, thus, our energy must transfer when we die. I don’t believe in the manmade trappings of the church.
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My mother was an out and out atheist, but she came from a moderately religious childhood and I often wondered if she felt God was dead or had at least abandoned us. I believe in something, but I suspect it’s more “the powers of the universe” than a religion. At the end of every atheists long line of “it just happened,” is a question no one can answer.
Why? What created the big bang? What will un-create it? It’s like a murder mystery where you can’t put it together because there’s no motive. I’m looking for a motive. I know WHAT happened — at least to the degree that science decrees. The “why” hangs in the air.
Essentially, I have no opinion. “It just happened” doesn’t work for me. I need a motive. I think that’s why the whole Star Trek story is so popular. They are looking for answers — and never finding them.
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I think a lot of people feel the same way, Marilyn. Modern people are wired to receive explanations and answers and often there are none. For me its much simpler, I just see all the pain in the world and all the bad things and I find it hard to believe their is any higher power guiding our paths.
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Reblogged this on https:/BOOKS.ESLARN-NET.DE.
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There are many things in the past I would like to see, and many things in the future I would like to know. I guess I will take it one day at a time while I still can.
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We all look for motives. We don’t just want a “what happened.” We want to know WHY. How can you solve a mystery with no motive?
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My motive is curiosity to find out the motive.
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