January 9, 2006

• Topic: Deep and shallow thoughts, conversations on life and death, growth and decay

  
  

  I have titled this post “deep and shallow thoughts,” because I want to address how our culture perceives thought.  Yesturday, while watching the Giants season come crashing to an end, my friend and I had one of those conversations that overflows into a wide-range of topics.  Were we just 2 friends conversing away our afternoon, or 2 people engaging in real intellectual thought?  When 2 professors get together to discuss the philosophy of life, the psychology of thought, the sociology of human interaction, the history of religion, the economics of poverty, are they engaging in real intellectual thought, or are they just 2 peers conversing away their afternoons?

  
  

  Our conversation about religion and life led me to some startling thoughts, which were mundane things that others had already discovered before…I was just discovering them in my own way, maybe wasting my time re-inventing the wheel.

  
  

  Anyways…I was thinking how a human body is simply made out of cells, which are continuously growing and dying.  When I scraped my hand, my body grew new cells.  Our limbs, skin, blood, brain, everything about our bodies are simply a collection of cells.  The process from conception, to birth, through aging, and to death, is a scientific process.  We may be unable to explain why the process happens as it does, in the same way we can’t explain ultimately why gravity exists, but i’m going to hold off on those ultimate questions for now.

  
  

  So…what makes a couch different from a living organism?  Well…eventually a couch will decay and turn into dust, just as a plant, an ant, an elephant, and a human being will.  The various forms of matter that create us, are everchanging.  I’ll have to dig up my biology notes from freshman year of highschool to get you that definition for a living organism.

  
  

  I’ll save all the biological speculation, and get to the idea of what it means to be human.  What is a human life?  Well…humans are a unique species on this planet.  We evolved from chimpanzees, to the point where our unique brains allowed us to do unique things.  Most unique, was the development of language.  Just think how many thousands of years it took for cave men to evolve language from simple grunts, to some of the complex forms of language that we now use.  The combination of language and tools allowed our species to differentiate itself from all the others.

  
  

  We can study the psychology and sociology of animals.  Some species of monkeys have relatively complex forms of communication, using different sounds towards different family members.  Animals have unique mating habits, and unique ways of organizing themselves in community.  Human beings have made enormous leaps beyond other animals, but these leaps do not make us anything more than animals.  We’re born, we live, our cells grow, our cells die…ultimately our brains, the sources of our consciousness, turn off, like an old computer.

  
  

  To many people, these ideas (incomplete as they are), come off as upsetting.  The idea of our mortality is upsetting, as is the idea that their may be no greater purpose for us as human beings.  However, I’d like to note that with our great developments as a species, we are most likely the only species that has woven meaning into the fabric of our lives.  No other species comes close to the level ot thinking and action done by human beings, that would constitute “giving life meaning.”  In addition, we’re perhaps the only species that has the knowledge of the inevitability of decay.  We know we’re going to die.  But, we also know how to “live.”

  
  

  So…through rational thought, we may come to discover the spirituality that many seek in this otherwise meaningless world.

  
  

  your thoughts…
   

  • 12:10 pm
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