Listen To Your Elders

I have observed that there are two ways of living life, one is positive and the other is negative.

Positive people are resilient and bounce back whereas the negative people never win.

To be positive one has to have a few essential characteristics, one is to have hope, the other is to not expect too much from life and be pleased when things go well.

Negative people seem to have no hope, and even if things go well they tend to think that it is no more than they deserve and don’t appreciate their good fortune.

I’m aware that it is easy to say be hopeful but it seems that some are and some aren’t, for example, in situations of great stress such as concentration camps or sickness and the like, even though there may be many that are in similar conditions, some will be hopeful and look forward relief and others will give up almost immediately and go into depression. If relief comes, the positive ones will be grateful and the negative ones will think that it is as it should be.

I wonder if it is the case that positive people enjoy life more whereas negative people believe that they are entitled to things regardless of effort. Negative people also seem to be often picked on and bullied.

I also wonder if these characteristics are genetic or acquired through environmental events?

These subjects interest me in that they seem to me to be all so far fetched as to be beyond belief.

Firstly, if one accepts that the latest astrological observations are factual and that the theory of evolution is the only theory, which stands up to any sort of scrutiny, then it is impossible to believe in divine creation and the interference in life of a divine entity.

I can understand why so many people like to believe that they will have a life after death, especially when they often have such a rough trot in this life. However; life for all creatures is a matter of reacting to the various stimuli that we are faced with from day to day, these experiences make us what we are and are really the very essence of life. We are faced with such things as love, hate, ambition, satisfaction, happiness and sadness and all these things are part of living, and they are what make those that believe wish to live after death in the hope that the second time around they will get only the good things that they missed out on the first time around. One can’t imagine there being procreation in the after life so what the hell are all these second rounders going to do, to live again they will have to go through all the experiences of their first innings without the consolation of eventually dying. Doesn’t sound such an attractive outlook to me and I’m old enough to be approaching the time for this ultimate event.

Finally, the matter of eternal life, this is a horrific thought, eternity is forever, such a state is impossible to imagine. If one has eternal life then it means that one can’t die so we don’t need to breath, eat, sleep, exercise, and copulate. Taking it to its extreme we wouldn’t need a body so we would really be extinct which is dead!

Some talk of inheriting the earth but the life of the earth is finite as we know so, what happens when the earth is destroyed and taking it further, what happens when the solar system is destroyed, as we are informed it will be.

Some talk of going to heaven but where is that? We have looked some 2 billion light years into space and found only more rocks and space, so heaven must be further away than 2 billion light years. If this is the case and people saw their favourite prophet rising into heaven, it means that the prophet would have been rising at well below the speed of light so he wouldn’t probably be outside the influence of our solar system yet. As to getting to the ultimate heaven and back, the earth wouldn’t be around by the time of the return.

To me it is so stupid to worry so much about an after life when there is so much that we can do to make the life for future inhabitants of the earth so much better and all we do is waste the time we have available to us trying to amass fortunes and possessions which when we die will be squandered away by after generations.

Why can’t we try to forget all the evils of the religions and concentrate on trying to give a good life to as many peoples of the world as possible? I’m sure that if the prophets could see the outcomes of the preachings, they would regret having ever preached. They mainly preached love and co-existence yet the heads of the various religions can justify murder, suppression, torture etc., all in the name of some man made god, we have progressed but have failed to overcome our basic fears and instincts.