Man and his dissonance with immortality

I may be touching on a rather sensitive topic here, and I probably sound like a hypocrite by writing about my thoughts regarding this topic, but then again, these are just my thoughts and observations. So read on, but don’t judge me for it, for we are after all, only human. ;)

I sometimes wonder why people feel sad or grief at the death of someone they are close to or somebody they know. Well, granted that I haven’t had someone I know well or am close to die yet, but I still wonder. Is it because being alive is much better than being dead? If it is so, then why are there more complaints in life than there are thanksgivings? All around us in nature, death is but a normal and, to a lot of organisms, an essential part of life. Bacteria, fungi, viruses, parasites and all carnivores, humans included, (The only exclusion being plants and certain chloroparasites) require the death of a life form to continue their own. In a sense, we “kill” to eat.

If one believes in an eternal God, an eternal life and a perfect resurrection (These are just some central beliefs in Christianity), then why should there mourning in death? Is it because we’ll miss the person? Or is it more likely we harbour a selfish emotion within us that still want that person in our lives, for our own fulfillment, whether we truly appreciate and love the person when he/she is living or not. But then again, this emotion is redundant. For if we truly believe in an eternal life after resurrection, we’ll have forever, an unlimited amount of time to spend with that individual. So in theory, an eternal life after one die is all nice and dandy, barring the circumstances surrounding the death of that individual.

Perhaps there is another reason why we’re all so sad; that man is essentially an immortal soul trapped within an all so mortal body. We feel disunited from death because our imperishable souls cannot fully comprehend or grasp the concept of a permanent death. To man (Who are essentially immortal souls combined with a body), we cannot reconcile death as part of a supposed eternal life. Perhaps that is why death is such a sad thing, for we think then that a person is forever gone; but at a spiritual level, it clashes (Subconsciously we just feel sad when somebody we know passes away) because we are just not meant to die.

Here, I would like end with a quote from Philip Yancey in his book “I was just Wondering”: “According to the biblical view of humanity, it is natural that we blush at excretion or draw back from death. Such actions seem odd because they are odd. In all of earth, there are no exact parallels of spirit and immortality housed in matter. The discomfiture we feel may be our most accurate human sensation, reminding us that we are not quite ‘at home’ here.”

(This article is written based on the assumption that all man has a soul, and that soul is imperishable. It is also based on the assumption that there is another, better life after death, and the author personally thinks that if there is no life after his physical death, then there is no point in living)