Allow Me To Be Perfectly Frank...

I do not understand the motivation behind most spiritual inquiry.

Countless theologians, philosophers, and lay thinkers have been and continue to be obsessed with what is often considered the ultimate question: "Why are we here?"
Alternate forms of the question include, "What is our purpose?", "Why are things the way they are?", and "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

I admit that I spend a great deal of time reading about and trying to understand the nature of religion and belief (which are not the same thing, and I would highly recommend The Religious Case Against Belief by James P. Carse to anyone who wants to know what the hell I mean by that), but the nature of that question eludes me. In my mind, the ultimate question is not "Why are we here?", instead it's "What the hell kind of a question is that?"

What do people mean when they ask this question? From my perspective, it has no relevance or bearing on anything; it is inanity at it's highest. Yet many people will spend their lives looking for the "answer" to this meaningless question, and many will spend their lives touting that they have found it. However, the answers that people come up with are so many and varied that it becomes readily apparent that the original question is flawed.

Seriously, did no one but me get the joke about "The Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything" in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? They built the most advanced supercomputer ever to give them the answer to this question, and the supposed "true" answer was 42. Then they had to build another, bigger supercomputer to give them the actual question, so that the answer would make sense. Get it? It's funny because the people looking for the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything didn't know what the hell they were actually asking for! Just like in real life!

People often talk about "purpose" and "meaning." They talk about needing a purpose, or that life would be meaningless without God or whatever spiritual entity they are concerned with. I don't get it. If there ever was a "fall from grace," it was the loss of our ability to have the nerve to face life with some sense of personal dignity and authority over ourselves. Why do people need to have a purpose assigned to them, and how can one be so asinine as to think that a dream, an epiphany, or simply a moment of mania is a message from a Greater Power™ telling them what to do with their lives? That kind of thinking is for people who took The Alchemist seriously.

If you can't assign a purpose to yourself, or just LIVE and be happy doing whatever the fuck you feel like at any given time, then you are dragging your knuckles. Walk upright and be a human being, damn it all. Have enough self-respect and courage to face life and say "Whatever I do in life, I do under my own will and by my own authority."

Please. You people are so terribly confounding and annoying when you blather on about "purpose" and "meaning" and "Why," and then look down on people like me who, quite frankly, don't see why those things are of such concern to you. Maybe you'd start being more satisfied with yourself if you started asking different questions, rather than beating your head against the imaginary brick wall that is "Why are we here?"

The Lost & Found of Your Life

Behind the oaken door lay a hallway lined with small, intricate wooden cabinets. I checked the piece of paper in my hand: underneath my name was written the number of my cabinet, J-2312. I walked down the hall to the little door with a brass plaque that bore the same number. As I raised my hand to the handle of this little door that supposedly held everything I had ever lost in my life, I wondered foolishly to myself if I would find in there the ball cap I had lost when I was thirteen that I had liked so much. I opened the cabinet door.

Not quite what I had expected. The single largest item in there was a thick, plain, leatherbound book. I took hold of it, noting the lack of a title or any markings whatsoever. I was bemused; when had I lost such a thing? I could not remember, and I cracked open the fresh cover.

Inside were dated entries, scores and scores of them starting from the time I was about threee years old. Each entry was a lost thought, a moment of inspiration, or epiphany that I had forgotten. Pages upon pages of ideas I had meant to act on, both good and bad.

Stuck In A Thick Plot

"No. This is too stupid."

Richard tossed the door key onto the ground and stormed away, stopping at the sidewalk corner to stare up into the street light and sigh.

"Richard, come on. I know this shit is dumb, but if we don't do it something else will just come up. Every time we give up, we get sucked into something else. Let's try and see this one through." Erin picked up the key and put it in her pocket.

"No, Erin. I'm sick of this crap. I don't think it's ever supposed to stop. I think that this stupid... whatever the hell it is... will just keep going on forever, and then when we finally give up on it something new will start. At least these moronic little plots are interesting at first glance; why bother running them into the ground? It's like a cheesy fiction series that goes on for twenty novels that started out okay but got run into the ground by greed and a childish enthusiasm for hearing the same story repeated over and over again, only with minor variations so the reader can pretend they're getting something new."

There was a sick, unhappy little pause. Richard's description was all too apt. For almost a year now, their lives had followed a bizarre and only barely coherent path that no one could take seriously, not even they who were living it. A year of meaningless adventures and pointless escapades had worn them down into rather bitter and cynical characters who went into every new venture fully expecting it to be nowhere near as exciting, important, or serious as it first appeared. Worse still, they no longer knew who to trust in the world, besides each other. People came into their lives all of a sudden and disappeared just as fast, seeming only to exist for as long as they had anything to do with them. Recently, a certain Gerald Mannington had remained fairly consistent, and appeared to be experiencing the same weirdness they were. Still, they kept him at arm's length, half-expecting him to disappear and never pick up his phone again if they should choose to drop out of the chain of events they were currently engaged in.