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Ethical and Moral Issues 3. To Live or Not to Live A friend of mine thinks the populace may divide into two camps when confronted with Apocalypse: Leavers and Stayers. Well obviously, you say: some people will make it and others won't. But that's not what he means; he's talking not about fate but about will: do you want to try to survive into and through the Apocalypse? If you do, and it gets tough, you're probably going to spend increasing amounts of time asking yourself, "Why am I bothering?" And if you don't come up with a pretty good answer or two, you may turn into a Leaver. I suspect that quite a few people who don't think they'd want to go through the muss and fuss of Apocalypse, will change their minds when they're really up against it and find that their families and friends are depending on them. I see it like this: Life on Earth has been evolving for billions of years, and humankind has been carrying the ball for the last few million. It would be a terrible shame, a waste of a good planet, if all that surviving and suffering by our forbears went for nought. We stand now at a great cusp. If even just a few of us — a small fraction of the world population — can pass through it, then the grand experiment can continue, and at least some of today's dreams for social and spiritual renewal can become tomorrow's realities … sooner or later. On a practical level, what that means to me is attempting to ensure that a few people I care about will survive, and their children will survive, and have children (and so on). I want to do everything I can to help that happen, even if it means giving up my own life. Of course, to live or not isn't quite the right question, since we do survive: each and every one of us lives forever. More on that in "Spiritual Possibilities." |