In case you’ve been wondering,
about your final destination

When I say, at the end of all my stories, that we are destroying ourselves with a corrupt belief system that is the engine of our demise, I am praying to the entity who conceived such a fantastic expanse as this unfathomably large universe that somehow we can awaken from our delusional dementia as we watch our world apparently being destroyed and bring ourselves back on course to the purposeful path we were originally created to pursue.

It is called destiny, and in our fear, and blinded by the giddiness caused by our own exceptional accomplishments, we have been deflected from it, wrongly aimed so profoundly that we now confront a very likely extinction as a result of our own chosen misdirection.

It turns out that our belief in eternal life is what is killing our species, threatening us with extinction for two reasons: one, because its pursuit necessitates foundational lies that obliterate empirical reality and compromise every promise that we make to ourselves to live honest and productive lives; and two, because the system of life given to us by a fortuitous amalgamation of substances and forces is already a perfect system that prevents us from becoming impossibly narcissistic nerds that eternal life would inevitably create.

Or as I’ve always liked to say, for reasons that are not completely clear to me, without death, the possibility of love does not exist.

It is the pursuit of that imaginary eternal life that not only makes us comfortable, but also makes us impossible to deal with in the conventional sense. We’ll do anything, and kill anyone, in order to survive, right?

The pursuit of this fantastic eternal life, guaranteed by God, Allah, Jesus, Krishna and all the other deities past and present, also makes our governments totally unrealistic because as priests hide the formula for surviving forever behind holy words that actually mean nothing, so our governments do the same thing with every single fake promise they make and get away with because we allow our priests to get away with these same preposterous prescriptions.

The central lie, of course, is that we tell ourselves that we do not die, when it is painfully obvious that we do (unless you pay attention to concatenated spirits in a seance who convince you they’re out there somewhere waiting to enchant you, and like some hallucinogen rip you away from reality and divert you from your own chosen path of inevitable self destruction.)

The much better and safer path is to cast our fondest concerns outwards to others, most sensibly to our children but also to everyone else, and create a harmonious world of loving siblings as opposed to the rancid rabble of competitive creeps all trying to rip each other off that we have now.

The key to understanding this is to realize the pain we feel when we admit that we know we die. Children should not be compelled to learn this at too early an age, but adults should forsake their childhood fairy tales to improve their own mental health on the subject by being realistic. It’s tough but you must handle it to be real. This would dissolve many of the world’s problems.

But the most important part to remember is that when you look at another person is to remember that they die too. That would make them a lot more difficult to kill. That would make them real, instead of silhouettes on a combat video game.

The lies told by priests that glibly guarantee eternal life simply by adhering to a predetermined prayers and adequate contributions to their parish coffers create a whole subculture of secret compromises aimed at preventing the unenlightened from seeing the fraud behind these hollow assertions of magic formulas, and the corruption of those abstractions eroding the purity of what otherwise could be a purposeful life would not be polluted by obsessive self interest that thus far has been everybody’s best friend and secret motivation.

But it is a useless friend that self-interest creates, because goodness and virtue depend, in the final analysis before God and the feather of truth, that what you do for others is the only thing that really counts, and what you do for yourself is nobody’s business but your own.

Which leads us back to prayer, which I was critiquing at the start of this Epistle to the Buffoonians. Prayers are a nice thought, muttered in the hope of something positive. But they are no substitute for action with problems that must be solved. No matter what the apostle Paul says is true, without action following, prayers are totally useless. What the point of praying for something if you’re not going to work your ass off to make it happen? Prayers are never a substitute for right action and don’t ever let anybody tell you they are.

It’s the same deal happening if you let your mind wander into that useless territory about what happens when you die. Where am I going to go? What is going to happen to me? Can I say a prayer that will increase my chances to go somewhere pleasant? Somewhere better than Downtown Detroit? Or southern Somalia.

You have absolutely nothing to worry about. No prayer will ever change your ultimate destination. Why? Because you’re going to go exactly where you deserve to go. No ifs, ands, or buts. No coupons, free passes or special discounts.

It’s OK to ask for forgiveness. We all need to do that. Nobody’s perfect.

What you have done in your life is going to determine exactly where you’re going to go, and you will have eternity to think about it. Mull that one over for awhile. Think your small town was boring? Or your seedy suburb too dangerous? You want dull and boring. Wait till you’re dead.

I want to go somewhere where something is wrong, and I can fix it and create what is right. That’s where I want to go. And as long as that’s my choice, I might as well practice doing that right here. Which also means then I can go somewhere where I can do that forever. What could be better? Or if I can go nowhere, at least I can rest satisfied that I did what I set out to do. Or died trying.

 

 

John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida, constantly trying to figure out why we are destroying ourselves, and pinpointing a corrupt belief system as the engine of our demise. Solely dependent on contributions from readers, please support his work by mail: 6871 Willow Creek Circle #103, North Port FL 34287 USA.
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