Adieu, the final farewell, an exploration of death!
Quick links:
Religious significance in the Universe
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| How to finish this? My long-time business partner recently advised that a mutual colleague and friend had just died. I commented ‘I most recall Terry in Marbella. We played golf (some 40 years earlier!) and Terry a left-hander had brought no clubs with him. He looked through our bags and found a 3-iron that had some loft on the rear edge. He played the round driving, approaching and putting with this 3-iron – and beat all of us! Richard said, ‘I most remember his wobbly tennis serve.’ I commented ‘I wonder what will they remember about us.’ |
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Significance
We all have fears for there to have been some sort of significance to our life.
Surely all those ambitions and achievements, our many trials and tribulations, the host of desires and doubts must have had some purpose? We all want to be remembered (preferably favourably) – but you do need to keep at the very front of your mind, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet, Ozymandias.
Of course, you have to reach your own conclusions. But here are mine.
I am bemused by the statistic that 70% of the world’s population believe there is some form of life after death.
It requires us to believe that we are significant within the vastness of the Universe.
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Life out there?
SETI‘s Project Phoenix developed the HabCat (or Catalogue of Habitable Stellar Systems) back in 2002, and listed a core group of 17,000 potentially habitable stars. On Nov-4 2013, astronomers used Kepler space mission data, to declare there were as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars and red dwarfs within the Milky Way. SETI has been looking for life out there for almost fifty years with no progress.
We are located on the small ‘third rock’ from a rather ordinary sun (of which there are 100 bn in the Milky Way), and it is sat out on a minor arm of the galaxy some 28,000 light years from the galaxy’s centre.The Sun wil run out of hydrogen in 5 mn years.
We don’t appear to be particularly significant when viewed in terms of the Universe.
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Religious significance in the Universe
The Universe is 13,700,000,000 years old (give or take 200,000,000), the Sun is 4,600,000,000 years old, the Earth a little younger at 4.5 bn.
Hominids first appeared some 7,000,000 years ago, archaic homo sapiens arrived about 300,000 years ago, modern homo sapiens about 160,000 years ago. They became agricultural 12,000 years ago, and urban civilisations emerged some 6,000 years ago. Religions first emerged 4,300 years ago (Hinduism).
So religions have been present for less than one three-billionth of the age of the Universe.
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Churches
We humans have evolved a set of complex rituals and beliefs around our 4,200 religions.
We accept that our priesthoods wear archaic outfits in leading our veneration and prayer. They operating from places that we have historically completely overspent in terms of resources and labour. This has created ornate (often draughty) locations for worship.
We, my wife Jane and I, do appreciate that an Indian temple is such an inviting and joyous an experience.
Anglican edifices tend to expect you to fall to your knees, cowed by its magnificance.
I recognise that many find it expedient to appear to believe in a faith, as for example politicians. Still others see it as a meeting place to form and maintain a social life.
I do not see any religion as particularly useful for my social or cultural purposes.
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Genes
I do believe that our primary physiological purpose is to reproduce and to safeguard the survival of our genes. Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene discussed this sort of gene-centric view of evolution, and illustrates DNA’s role in evolution, which in his view behaves selfishly and to a large extent covertly – I concur.
Therefore that means I do believe that I will live on – but only via the genes I have donated to my two children and that they have passed on to, so far, five grandchildren…
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Funerals
Jane, my wife, has long made clear that she does not want a funeral. She wants a wickerwork or cardboard coffin and wishes to be quietly cremated. She has also made clear that she wants her ashes spread within an avenue of trees (probably Aston Hill that leads from Aston Rowant up to Stokenchurch).
I have no firm views but would probably go along with Jane’s idea too – not that I will know!
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Death
Given these statements my centrally abiding interest in death has to be the concern, not quite an anxiety, about how death will actually come. Of course, no one wishes it to be painful or through seome extended illness or an accident that debilitates so that life is less pleasant.
I came across a marketing philosophy that talked of life stages in economic activity. It suggested that it was not enough to consider the absolute age of an individual. It proposed that it was a combination of age, the state of their health and whether they were economically engaged.
An unwell, unemployed 40-year-old and a fit, economically active 80-year-old are challenges to normal marketing categories objectives.
This approach focuses the mind particularly for the so post retirement years:
- the ‘third age’ – you want to retire and have thirty years of active life, both physically and economically
- the ‘fourth age’ when you are dependent, a time when you lose cognitive, physical, and social capacities – this you want to last no more than thirty seconds!
That’s certainly my goal!
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Famous last words:
I’ll leave these to Isaac Asimov, one of my heroes –
‘Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.’
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Back to:
Introduction – Death – Beliefs – Famous cemeteries –
Famous Burials – Soul and Afterlife – Anomalous beliefs and rituals
–Back to Bob Denton home page
