Saturday, February 16, 2008

Love is a losing game

The real winners in life, says Oliver James, "are those people who don't worry about winning and losing."

My own view is that sooner or later we are all losers. We are all going to lose everything that we have and we are forever. So better accept it.

Among the groups of people least willing to come to terms with this unavoidable truth are the religious. They are mostly hooked on the idea of some kind of afterlife in which they can go on going on, so that they don't have to lose everything, at least not forever.

But they do. And this craving for something they can't have prevents them developing a real spitituality - a spiritualty with guts.

Or so it seems to me.

3 comments:

Sue said...

I'm hooked on the idea of an afterlife where i have lost everything except that which matters. But maybe my afterlife looks a bit different to the one where you get to sit on clouds and stuff. For me, the afterlife starts now, and the afterlife will be here.

So what *do* you think about the afterlife?

goodfornowt said...

Sue, my problem is that every belief in survival after death I've come across is either the product of confused thinking, or subverts my understanding of morality, which is about doing something for nothing, and generally gets in the way of appreciating and loving the world we live in as it is.
I want to argue that life after death makes Christianity (the religion I know best) and morality (as I understand it) impossible. I'll try to do this on my blog. More later.

Anonymous said...

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