Philosophy Thesis

Take the following statements as true: 1. From birth you are granted existence, in both time and space. 2. Your current existence, within your body, is temporal and will end eventually. 3. As a human, you have developed to realize your own existence. 4. It is every human’s desire to exist forever. Now, let us begin. Dig deeply into your being; dig through the materialist surface, through the emotional layers, until you reach your core, your core of ideals. Once you have reached this core, think deeply within it about the following: What do you require above all else? It surely is not a house, you can live without one. It’s not food or water or air even, you can live (for a rather short time) without them. Beyond all of these things lies an innate need, the need that spawns all other needs, the need to exist. Upon birth, you are handed existence, the ability to live. From that moment onward, you are also given limitations, becoming both a slave to Time and Space. Both place severe limits on your being. Time limits the duration of your existence; Space limits the modes of how you exist. For the intentions of this paper, the shackles of Time will be examined more closely. Existence is temporal in its current state. That is fact; people die. Death, being the cessation of current existence, is a natural phenomenon. Humanity has yet to outdo the inevitable limit that Nature has put on it. Even if a natural death is able to be circumvented by human standards, there is still a high chance you will not be eternal in your current state. The Earth is speculated to die, the Sun also, and even the Universe is speculated to collapse at some point (if it doesn’t run out of hydrogen first). These are all limits of Time and they all will affect you even if you escape a natural death. Now, two problems arise from this cage. One is the fact that you realize your own current existence and its temperance. The second is that you need and desire your existence to live forever. At first, these seem incompatible, but humans have developed a plan to avoid the discrepancy. The idea of an afterlife was created in the human conscience, eventually leading to the advent of Religion. With an intuitive leap, you are able to avoid the end of your existence, but maintain the temperance of its current state. Not only will this afterlife save yourself from anxiety, it will be much better than your current existence. Moving onward, there is yet another thing that could result from the incompatibility. Since you are a slave to Time, your personal desire must fall short to its inevitability. That is, you accept the temperance of your existence, realizing that your desire is dwarfed by Nature. We call this Atheism. There is no afterlife, no intuitive leap. An atheist simply takes what is given to them and attempts to understand it. Now the fun part. Imagine you are eternal; that is, never dying. How would existence be different? For one, you would not be in such a hurry! But even deeper, for instance, materialistic objects would lose value. Money, cars, houses, food, drink, etc. would all become relatively worthless. With an endless amount of time to exist, relatively nothing, materialistically speaking, would have value. Now back in reality, this is surely not the case. We value all these things because we need them to comfort our short lived current existence. A good analogy for this scenario is the following (in parenthesis are the analogous parts to our discussion): You are on vacation in Florida for a short amount of time (your temporal existence in the atheistic sense). Knowing you are here for a week or so and money doesn’t matter when you go back home, you decide to live it up (you surround yourself with materialistic objects during your existence because it is your only chance to exist. You don’t worry about worth because it doesn’t matter when you’re dead.) Now imagine that you live in Florida and you’re at a grocery store (Religiously speaking, you are tied into existence and merely experiencing it in one of its many modes). You don’t have the money to live it up, but don’t have the need to anyway. You could do it at any time (Again religiously speaking, you are eternal, so materialistic objects have little to no value). In context, this makes sense. However, in reality, all people surround themselves with materialistic objects. That is the reality you were born into. Both theists and atheists value materialistic goods in, on average, relatively the same fashion. In this respect, atheists and theists have become one and the same. However, there remains one major factor. The common ground is found within the traits of the atheist; a religious person contains the materialist traits of non-religious person. Thus, materialistically speaking, a theist is an atheist. But why? The answer is quite simple. All beings are innately. and likewise, along some lines always, a degree of atheist. This fact derives from a two simple facts. The first is that, if you recall, existence is

enslaved to Time and Space. This means that firstly, your existence is temporal; and secondly, that your perception of existence is limited. The second fact is that, as a human, you realize your existence and its temperance, believing it as true. Now, if these facts are true, it may be concluded that all humans are instinctively atheist; they instinctively recognize the temperance of their existence. Even Christians are atheist in this respect. But what of religion? Religion is a concept created within your mind to subvert the inevitable end of your existence. The afterlife is a mere representation of your desire to exist forever. It is a veil over reality designed to smooth the anxieties of temporal existence. For millions of years before humans developed to realize their existence, Religion was nowhere to be found. However, when this development occurred, along with it came religion. What a coincidence. This is in no way belittling Religion. It is a great tool to dilute the world into acceptable and livable terms. However, below it remains the Truth that all humans instinctively accept: the inevitable temperance of existence.