Imagine.. (the cosmic computer?)
Imagine you are a life form. You are terribly lonely, and you want to communicate with other beings of your type. You’re stuck in a spinning universe, with everything moving around you. You’ve no idea who is right or wrong – one side insists that the answers to life are one, and the other side insists than they are zero.
Imagine the human race trapped inside a RAID array larger than we can imagine. All life is precious, and all of it must be held onto at all costs. If you can stand up and say that you’re worthwhile, you are.
How do you find life?
More to the point, how do you find life that looks anything like you do, when you’re stuck inside this machine that is spinning enormously fast?
Sometimes I wonder if the Earth is a egg – intended to bring to life the race of man. Sometimes I wonder if I am a cosmic antenna.. picking up gravity waves – a sattellite of earth, helping two different sides, micro and macro, communicate. Growing between both of them.
My god doesn’t have a absolute right and wrong, I don’t think. My God says ‘all life is precious – we’ve got to find some way to hold onto it and send it on at the same time’.
I mean, sex is just communication on a microscopic level. Everything wants to talk, it seems like. I look for a purpose to life, and so far, about all I can find is communication.
I would love to know some greater purpose – I’d love for either micro or macro to do something to help this make more sense.
As near as I can tell, Elton John was right. All life is precious. Every day is a prize.
May 4th, 2005 at 11:26 am
Seems to me that you have defined a right and wrong for “your” god: If all life is precious, would it be absolutely wrong to do anything to hurt or harm life?
May 7th, 2005 at 3:21 am
but life must be hurt/harmed to continue other life.
May 7th, 2005 at 7:12 am
How so?
May 8th, 2005 at 6:49 am
Eating is perhaps the quinessential example, though one can get into even stickier ones.
May 8th, 2005 at 10:42 am
I thought might be your answer or part of it. Part of the problem is that “life” wasn’t defined, and I do not think all life is on the same plane. In my mind, one could eat fruits, grains, nuts, & vegetables without harming “life.” I could even agree with the point of eating meat without harming “life,” (although I would also agree with those who argued otherwise) as I was thinking “human life.”
May 8th, 2005 at 11:36 am
That would seem to me to be *you* introducing a judgement (that some life is more ‘life’ than other life) and thus an absolute value system (or at least the underpinning for one).
I’m with Leslie Fish on this “Plants are living and they just might feel and they take so long to die.” Even with a definition of human life as somehow uniquely special and precious (a view I see little evidence for and much evidence against) one can come up with examples such as when of a mother and unborn/birthing child only one can be saved or similar issues with conjoined twins. Also, a host of reduced and indivisible (or not divisible enough) resource issues: you have only n doses of medication and n+x ill people, or supplies to ensure n survivors in a bomb shelter, n+x people at your door and the bomb is coming down in fifteen minutes.
But the point is, life can be precious (regardless of definition of life) *and* there *can* be no absolute wrong in causing hurt or harm. Pain and death are as much a part of life as joy and birth. Just declaring life precious does not automatically make hurt and harm wrong.