Entertaining Thoughts

It’s freaking hot here.

The other day I was confronted with an idea. What if everything that I have accomplished in life was due to one single event over which I had absolutely no control? There is an absolutely hilarious video on the onion.com website called "Pre-Game cointoss makes Jacksonville Jaguars realize the randomness of life." This is one of those videos that I will not describe because everyone should see it at least once if not for the interesting philosophical undertones, for the sheer fact that it can make even the scroogiest of people laugh their socks off.

Coming back to reality, I entertained the thought of an existential revelation dealing with eternal salvation and the beginning of life. In short I have based a majority of my faith on doing good works as opposed to sitting in church. For better or worse, that’s who I am and its nothing new. With that said, there is a choice when it comes to doing anything – do or do not, act or react. And with those there are countless other possibilities, but that delves further into the mind than I want to go at this point in time. At the very least there is a choice. But what if there wasn’t? What if I am nothing more than the some of my actions which all stem from some random meeting of two cells of which I had no control over. The entire idea behind free will and having a choice is defunct before it can even be given a chance. That is to say, I was blessed to be born into the family that I have, which as it turns out is deeply routed in the Catholic faith. Had I been born into an Islamic, Jewish, or even Atheist family yet still made the same decisions that I have made; where does that put me? What am I? Where does that put me in terms of eternal salvation, as we Christians believe it to be? Am I to be demoted to the lower reaches of hell because I would not have been a believer or baptized in the right religious beliefs? Or if everyone is saved eventually, in this case everyone worthy of eternal salvation, what's the point of it, to make it to heaven a few millenia before someone else (which can be reduced to almost nothing when it comes to eternity)?

I will now reference the movie A Beautiful Mind (genius turns out to have a skitzotypal personality disorder and becomes a paranoid schizophrenic, manages to get a hold on it and goes on to win the Nobel Peace Prize). At the commencement of the electroshock therapy (about halfway through the movie), the doctor’s voice goes into a monologue and asks “What would you do if you woke up one day and realized that the things you knew or thought you knew and the people you cared about were not just dead, but never existed?” To pull it all together, what would happen to a guy like me who has based most of his life on the idea of Free Will and experiential learning if he woke up one day and realized that the freeness to act comes second to a random act of biological evolution?

In other news, I have officially decided to rejoin the ‘procrastinators unite! tomorrow’ club and put off thinking about it until a future date, which will be determined the day after the procrastinators unite.