Our Mortal Lives

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” - Martin Luther King Jnr

No doubt Mr King had a different topic in mind to me when he said these words, but I agree with his sentiments completely. I am weary right to the bone of hearing nice, sincere people, conscientious even, neglect the most important thing in life. When they speak they complain about their salary and the price of petrol. They moan about their boss and about how long they had to sit in traffic. They are so preoccupied with all their day to day concerns that they don’t ever seem to consider their lives and take cognisance of this curious natural phenomenon - that everything in life has a beginning and an end, including us. Our lives have an expiry date.

The advent of that thing which we call “Religion” makes perfect sense to me. I cannot imagine a society on this temperamental earth which did not have some belief system which attempted to explain our existence. To loosely quote another very quotable personality – C.S Lewis, Christianity as a religion is either completely irrelevant or of utmost importance. What it can never be is mildly important. Yet people that I know and love do this every day. They love the solemnity of church, weddings and funerals and they will even quote a pithy saying from the Bible now and again but they completely disregard the rest of what God says. If what Jesus says is true, and the world was indeed created by him, and he will be waiting to receive us on Judgement day at the end of all things, and ALL people must meet this maker at the end of their days, then surely EVERYTHING that he said must be of VITAL importance!

People refuse to talk about God anymore because “so many wars have been fought over religion” and “we must respect each others beliefs”. So we sit around and sip our coffee and talk about silly things like how hot this summer is and how much we’d much rather be sitting in the pool at home. The elephant in the room which never gets discussed is the fact that we are all slowly dying and very few of us know why we were ever born in the first place. I reckon that elephant has been ignored for so long that it has finally given up and wandered off from sheer boredom, so we needn’t even worry about him anymore. I have the greatest respect for people’s beliefs, but at least do yourself the courtesy of taking your mortality seriously. You are not getting any younger!