This Life Versus The Next
You often hear the complaint that people of various religious stripes forsake this life because they are so focused on a life that supposedly comes after this one. They don't make the most of their time on earth because they feel that they'll enter the life that truly matters after they die. This is usually attributed to weakness; people who are incapable of handling the sorrows or pain of this world can easily escape it by setting their sights on life after death.
Can't hack it in this world? Start living for the next one! In a world of televangelists, it's wholly appropriate to summarize this characteristic of the religious in the language of an infomercial.
While I study religious scripture, I haven't yet found a reason to eschew living life in this world to its fullest in the hopes that it will afford me a better life after I die. There are plenty of good reasons for self-negation, but hoping that you'll be rewarded for it post-mortem isn't one I subscribe to. Perhaps the religious critics are correct...people who are religious are merely spiteful, and looking for a justification for despising this world and the people in it.
Yet, after all my experience with people around this country, I keep wondering: religious people are so often resigned to helplessness, since they've come to despise human nature. The non-religious or anti-religious are not only free of this sense of helplessness, but they also adamantly believe that our time in this life is the only time we get; why, then, do they seem to do so little with it?
Can't hack it in this world? Start living for the next one! In a world of televangelists, it's wholly appropriate to summarize this characteristic of the religious in the language of an infomercial.
While I study religious scripture, I haven't yet found a reason to eschew living life in this world to its fullest in the hopes that it will afford me a better life after I die. There are plenty of good reasons for self-negation, but hoping that you'll be rewarded for it post-mortem isn't one I subscribe to. Perhaps the religious critics are correct...people who are religious are merely spiteful, and looking for a justification for despising this world and the people in it.
Yet, after all my experience with people around this country, I keep wondering: religious people are so often resigned to helplessness, since they've come to despise human nature. The non-religious or anti-religious are not only free of this sense of helplessness, but they also adamantly believe that our time in this life is the only time we get; why, then, do they seem to do so little with it?