Wednesday, October 17, 2012

     What if you, like Berenger in Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros, found yourself the only human being left on earth?  Or what if you, like Denali, a character in a short story I wrote many years ago, awoke one morning to realize that he was, after a series of nuclear conflagrations had decimated the planet, were the last person standing?
     If you were the only person left on earth, would you still know who you were?  And after you, too, were gone, would anyone know it?
     Of course not.  No one would be there to know it, much less care about it.  The earth would sit, alone and unloved, a lifeless globe circling and rotating through an empty universe.
     And what would anything mean then?  Would anything have mattered at all?
     Not unless we had a reason to be here in the first place.
     And the only way that we would have had a reason to be here would be if our origins had been grounded in purpose.  And purpose is only possible with personality.
     And personality, yours, mine, and everyone else's, is only possible if there is a God.  Can chemicals really speak?
     Unless there is a God, it would not matter one whit whether you were the first person here or the last person left:  nothing would matter, anyway.  Yes, Nietzsche's "Last Man" observes in Beyond Good and Evil that he was indeed happy and free, but what, we may ask, in a world stripped of God and meaning, will he in fact ever be?
     Do you really think you're an accident?

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