Paradise Lost? yep!

This thought is not my own but a friends, And it merits posting.

I think there is something profoundly cynical, my friends, in the notion of paradise after death. The lure is evasion. The promise is excusative. One need not accept responsibility for the world as it is, and by extension, one need do nothing about it. To strive for change, for true goodness in this mortal world, one must acknowledge and accept, within one's own soul, that this mortal reality has purpose in itself, that its greatest value is not for us, but for our children and there children and all children of the world. To view life as but a quick passage along a foul, tortured path - made foul and tortured by our own indifference - is to excuse all manner of misery and depravity, and to exact cruel punishment upon the innocent lives to come.
I defy this notion of paradise beyond any gates of gold or pillars of stone. If the soul truly survives the passage, then it behooves us - each of us, my friends - to nurture a faith in similitude: what awaits us is a reflection of what we leave behind, and in the squandering of our mortal existence, we surrender the opportunity to learn the ways of goodness, the practice of sympathy, empathy, compassion and healing - all passed by in our rush to arrive at a place of glory and beauty, a place we did not earn, and most certainly do not deserve.
This notion of a procured residence in paradise after our mortal demise is coming to an ending. These principles were born in the desert, now we must let there death throws end there. In the never ending struggle of ideas to take root in human existence there is born a precedent. With the ending of an idea, a thought, a way of life, there is inevitably a blossoming of aggression. The more rooted an idea is in our daily lives the grater its capacity for aggression. When a facet of a people’s philosophy is challenged they vehemently debate, but when a way of life is threatened there will be war. Ether way when the ideas are done battling there is typically but one left the victor.
The most successful ideas revere knowledge, reproduce quickly, embrace a doctrine of attack through subtlety and secrecy, and otherwise allow the host to prosper by spending less time surviving and more time spreading and defending the idea. There are many successful ideas out in the world today, Christianity, Islam, democracy, Buddhism, totalitarianism, the spreading of information without cost, nationalism, capitalism, democracy, there are more successful ideas out in the world then what I could think of in a day (I am not saying I agree with any of these ideas). Many of them are parallel in the fact that they affect or try to affect the same area of our lives. Parallel ideas will aggressively attack each other until only one is left. With globalization in progress we can look forward to a very interesting future as more and more parallel ideas come into conflict.