Afterlife
I was thinking about death and the afterlife, and how silly the idea of an afterlife is. If we're all headed to this other place for eternity, what does it matter what we do in these 70 or so years of life? Life has to be more significant than the afterlife, somehow, otherwise it would be pointless for us to go through with it all. Reincarnation, maybe, makes more sense (though it introduces a different problem of lacking a grand design; also scary). But neither of these is what my religion says is the case. My religion says that this life is the all-important test to see where I'll end up for the rest of eternity, also all-important.
Do the math, it doesn't add up.
In short, I concluded that all is vain but for the glory of God. A most absurd conclusion, I know, and I'm definitely not the first to make it. I guess the thought of death is so terrifying that I'd have to have a rock-hard heart to accept that there's nothing else after, that the ones I've loved and lost are obliterated forever like they were never even here. My head would explode before I can accept something like that. So the only other solution is to believe that some things lie beyond my comprehension. The logic of the universe is not my logic, but perhaps it makes sense to
All the finest of human achievements were done for the glory of some god. In the western world (the world I know best, unfortunately), art was religious all the way up to the Enlightenment. During the Englightenment they kinda stopped making art all together (except for some forgettable stuff), and it wasn't until Romanticism that people tried to find a new purpose: the universality of personal experience. That is, they tried to find to beauty of interpersonal connections as a way of replacing the beauty of a connection to God. Then they realized that it didn't quite work the way the old system did, that it still left one with a sense of purposelessness and loss, and hence came Modernism, the articulation of isolation, despair, and nothingness. Since then we (or at least I) have accepted these as synonymous with the human condition.
A teleological story of western art (and society) in a nutshell. All/vain/glory/God.
Do the math, it doesn't add up.
In short, I concluded that all is vain but for the glory of God. A most absurd conclusion, I know, and I'm definitely not the first to make it. I guess the thought of death is so terrifying that I'd have to have a rock-hard heart to accept that there's nothing else after, that the ones I've loved and lost are obliterated forever like they were never even here. My head would explode before I can accept something like that. So the only other solution is to believe that some things lie beyond my comprehension. The logic of the universe is not my logic, but perhaps it makes sense to
All the finest of human achievements were done for the glory of some god. In the western world (the world I know best, unfortunately), art was religious all the way up to the Enlightenment. During the Englightenment they kinda stopped making art all together (except for some forgettable stuff), and it wasn't until Romanticism that people tried to find a new purpose: the universality of personal experience. That is, they tried to find to beauty of interpersonal connections as a way of replacing the beauty of a connection to God. Then they realized that it didn't quite work the way the old system did, that it still left one with a sense of purposelessness and loss, and hence came Modernism, the articulation of isolation, despair, and nothingness. Since then we (or at least I) have accepted these as synonymous with the human condition.
A teleological story of western art (and society) in a nutshell. All/vain/glory/God.
posted by Rex at 4:07 PM
2 Comments:
finish your sentence! -hdg
;-p
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