Death

I found out today through reddit (a website that is finally starting to wane in my attention space, but is still very strong), that Yale has posted many of its classes online. In particular, the reddit link pointed to the philosophy course on Death.

"With so much death" around me, I've been thinking more than I ought to I suspect about the topic of my death. I want to believe there's more than just this world, that there might actually be a purpose to all of this, but I can't. I can't believe, nor pretend to believe, there exists a life force out there that gives one flying whit about the outcome of my life. Yes, there may be a life force, I'm not convinced of an absence of such, but I'm pretty sure if it does exist, it doesn't care.

And it certainly is not the vengeful god of those who wrote that big tome of historical fairy tale fiction and conveniently left out the parts that disagreed with what the people with arbitrary power wanted the peons to believe. You know, the ones who killed other people who disagreed with the line that the world is flat.

Yeah. My "god." Not so vengeful.

Yet, I'm convinced there is somewhat of an end. Whether it's the complete cessation of this universe as far as I'm concerned, or merely the waking up to a sterile lab and realizing it was all a dream and I'm not done yet, I have no idea.

But I'd like to have some idea. Some inkling that, while it may not give me comfort at night, will give enough peace of mind to actually finish what I came here to do.

Not too much for a philosophy class on death, eh?

I wonder if I can get a friend or two in on this.

P.S. That book had good parts. In particular the ones that mention guidelines on how to behave in a society where no one actually needed to be told how to behave properly, because they were already behaving properly without all the coveting and the killing and such. But that's a different class, to be sure.