The Sum of Awe
Brought to you by the moment that spacetime began.
Children being born with diseases, or disfigurements.
Good people dying, bad people getting far in life.
You could be on your way to beating depression, becoming religious, and trusting God, and then one day before you achieve all your goals, you're out hiking and you're attacked by a bear. Killed.
You could have gone to school, became a great genius, but never getting into a career long enough to make a breakthrough.
Any of this can happen. Assume, now, there is a God and the universe is going exactly they way God planned it. This is His design, everything that happens is exactly as it's meant to be.
What do you think the message is here? What do you interpret the meaning of our chaotic universe to be based on everything we know?
If you were to ask me, I sometimes feel like life is much like Albert Camus's view on Sisyphus. From this wikipedia article:
I feel like what God is telling me is to follow through with my duties, goals, my individual meanings of life even when there's no light at the end of the tunnel. To not fully give up on myself to fall victim of hedonism or nihilism, but to aim for my goals while being happy doing so.
Kind of like optimism, but accepting that things won't necessarily turn out as you expect them to, so therefore instead of hope for the future it's more like acceptance of the future while also trying to mold it. The two are not contradictory.
Good people dying, bad people getting far in life.
You could be on your way to beating depression, becoming religious, and trusting God, and then one day before you achieve all your goals, you're out hiking and you're attacked by a bear. Killed.
You could have gone to school, became a great genius, but never getting into a career long enough to make a breakthrough.
Any of this can happen. Assume, now, there is a God and the universe is going exactly they way God planned it. This is His design, everything that happens is exactly as it's meant to be.
What do you think the message is here? What do you interpret the meaning of our chaotic universe to be based on everything we know?
If you were to ask me, I sometimes feel like life is much like Albert Camus's view on Sisyphus. From this wikipedia article:
Camus is interested in Sisyphus's thoughts when marching down the mountain, to start anew. After the stone falls back down the mountain Camus states that "It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end." This is the truly tragic moment when the hero becomes conscious of his wretched condition. He does not have hope, but "there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn." Acknowledging the truth will conquer it; Sisyphus, just like the absurd man, continues pushing. Camus claims that when Sisyphus acknowledges the futility of his task and the certainty of his fate, he is freed to realize the absurdity of his situation and to reach a state of contented acceptance. With a nod to the similarly cursed Greek hero Oedipus, Camus concludes that "all is well," indeed, that "one must imagine Sisyphus happy."
I feel like what God is telling me is to follow through with my duties, goals, my individual meanings of life even when there's no light at the end of the tunnel. To not fully give up on myself to fall victim of hedonism or nihilism, but to aim for my goals while being happy doing so.
Kind of like optimism, but accepting that things won't necessarily turn out as you expect them to, so therefore instead of hope for the future it's more like acceptance of the future while also trying to mold it. The two are not contradictory.