Hope vs. Nihilism\

I don't really understand the purpose of life. I find it interesting that I continually oscillate between two very different thoughts regarding the purpose of life, and our reasons for being here. The thought which I most often embrace, and the one that I truly, dearly hope is the right one, is that God put us here for a probationary period in which we can prove our worthiness to come and live with Him in the next life. Most of the time, I accept this thought without question, feeling it reinforced by a feeling deep within my soul. A "burning in my bosom" if we're going to be using hackneyed cliches. I love this particular thought because it ascribes some higher purpose and meaning to my own existence. This leads me to my other thought. The other thought that I have is that we delude ourselves into the existence of a higher being and life after death because we are afraid to accept our existence as finite. We are self aware, so how could we possibly lose this awareness after death? Maybe the whole existence of religion is just a thought that we have had in order to lend more importance to our lives. I mean, without something higher, a greater purpose to provide meaning, there is very little meaning in life. We're one small speck of dust on a slightly larger speck of dust rotating around a ball of gas in the middle of an inconceivably vast vacuum. Nothing that we do in life can affect the universe in a measurable way. Even the climate change which we are inflicting on our planet through indiscriminate use of resources won't much outlast us as a species. We haven't been on earth very long. If earth's history were a clock, running from midnight to midnight, human beings would have existed for the last half of the last second before midnight. Without God, there isn't really anything significant about us. The planet would easily forget about us within a few thousand years. And within a few hundred thousand even our mighty stone monuments would be unrecognizable. We might not even be the first intelligent beings to have inhabited this planet, given the inconsistency of fossilization and the readiness with which the Earth can hide her secrets with regards to the artificial monoliths of civilization. To put it bluntly, without God, we're nothing. Just dust floating in a vacuum. Something interesting to think about next time you pick up the vacuum to clean your living room. To quote one of my favorite lines from the movie Collateral:

I could have done anything i wanted to... but you know what? New news. It doesn't matter anyway, if we're all insignificant in this big ass nowhere... says the bad-ass sociopath in my back seat. But you know what? That's one thing I gotta thank you for, bro, because until now I hadn't looked at it that way. What does it matter... what do we got to lose anyway?

This quote pretty much epitomizes my second thought. It's the essence of nihilism. If there's not a plan, an overarching purpose for our existence, why do we even exist at all? If there's not a reason, then we're just here, and that seems like a cruel joke to me. If we're just here, if we're just floating on a rock in the middle of a cold, dark emptiness, then is there really an objective meaning and purpose to what we do? Honestly, if this is the case, why should someone bother adhering to any code of mores and values. Integrity gets you nothing if nothing exists after you're dead. If it stops with your final breath, what purpose does living for others server other than making you feel better about this existence which we all have the misfortune of inhabiting. It's something that I don't think my mind can truly process. That way lies madness. I wonder, if when we die, our conscious will continue to exist, and we'll return to God; or if we return to the void from which our consciousness sprang? The universe is vast, cold, and dangerous. It's uncaring, unending, but constantly changing. There's an underlying order in what appears to be chaos. This order is what gives me hope. I believe that the order we see both in our world and the larger universe comes from God. If morals and values serve no purpose without a higher power or a reward or punishment in a subsequent existence, then why do we have morals and values? Did these things come from God? I would like to think so. Of course, I won't truly know the answer until I die. So, until then, I'll try to have faith, and ignore the darker paths of my thoughts.