"What is most natural becomes the most problematic. Do I have the right to be? Is being in the world not taking the place of someone?" Emmanuel Levinas
I often ask pro life people why it is they don't have more children? How is it that this month they prevented another human from existing? Obviously I get puzzled faces and the religious person falls back on the excuse that only conception forms a human. Of course that isn't medically true as the process from conception to person is fraught with other complexities and many conceptions end naturally. You could then ask since this is fact, where do these conceptions grow up and don't they have it kinda easy if there is a personal God looking over us? Of course the conception would miss the turmoil of human existence in all it ups and downs. Each person can judge that experience, but a hard look at the world, at the news daily may lead to....
So anyway when I came upon this article in the Stone, I thought of my own piece asking a similar question and wondered again how fragile and miraculous the fact that I exist at all. Soon, though, I will cease to be.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/05/do-i-have-the-right-to-be/
My piece is here. http://www.usmessageboard.com/writing/50677-life-chance-eternity.html
"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present." Ludwig Wittgenstein
I often ask pro life people why it is they don't have more children? How is it that this month they prevented another human from existing? Obviously I get puzzled faces and the religious person falls back on the excuse that only conception forms a human. Of course that isn't medically true as the process from conception to person is fraught with other complexities and many conceptions end naturally. You could then ask since this is fact, where do these conceptions grow up and don't they have it kinda easy if there is a personal God looking over us? Of course the conception would miss the turmoil of human existence in all it ups and downs. Each person can judge that experience, but a hard look at the world, at the news daily may lead to....
So anyway when I came upon this article in the Stone, I thought of my own piece asking a similar question and wondered again how fragile and miraculous the fact that I exist at all. Soon, though, I will cease to be.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/05/do-i-have-the-right-to-be/
My piece is here. http://www.usmessageboard.com/writing/50677-life-chance-eternity.html
"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present." Ludwig Wittgenstein
