The Fool and the Great Equalizer

Death is a serious issue -- but only if you value life as the precious possession that it is.

Ask yourself, "How precious is my life?"

For some, it is so precious that they spend many thousands of dollars on Insurance, Doctors, prescription drugs, and on many other objects categorized as "Health Care".


For others, life is so precious to them that they thoughtfully exercise, eat "healthy" diets, avoid bad habits like smoking, excessive drinking, and risky behaviors like base jumping or sky diving.

Some don't care about their life and simply go along with their passions - whether it be motorcycle racing, junk food, all-night drinking benders, or unprotected sex with as many willing participants as possible. Life is full of risks and they know that they're going to die anyway, so why not enjoy it to the fullest?

Why not indeed?

Last week, the world's oldest woman, Mrs. Edna Parker of Indiana, died in a nursing home at the ripe old age of 115 years - making room for another person to assume the title of the "world's oldest woman" -- who will likely die soon too.

-- Pause for thought --

Some would say that she lived a long, fulfilling, and satisfying life. Some might comment that she rusted out and that's not for them - they would rather burn out. Still others insist (in their currently healthy state) that they will not experience death at all (Ted Nugent comes to mind) against all that we have experienced and seen - what a puzzling attitude considering that all of us are made of the same thing, "flesh", and flesh always dies.

One thing is clear no matter who you are or what you think about life and death -- life "in the flesh" is intimately tied to this "world", this "plane of existence", and it will end. Mark it down - YOU WILL DIE. Period.

-- Pause for thought --

As a man who has spent my entire 32+ year career in the Data Processing industry, I have often thought about how similar our minds and thoughts are to software - the programs and data that run on computers. (Representing the "state" of the machine.)

Think about it - our bodies represent the hardware upon which the device called our brain is "fed" nutrients and oxygen-rich blood, along with sensory information, allowing our "thoughts" to proceed in an orderly and systematic way through time. The "state" of our being changing moment by moment with the inputs from sensory organs (eyes, ears, etc. everywhere that a nerve cell connects to and passes signals back "up" the line) as well as the "feedback" from internal processes such as our short and long term memories, as well as programs that we rely on so much in order to accomplish this "thing" that we call "living" - those programs are known as "habits".

I wrote a program 22 years ago on an IBM PC AT computer that is so useful that I still use it today to manage my diary. It was "born" running on a relatively primitive 80286 processor with 64 kilobytes of memory and a hard disk of 20 megabytes running on a primitive operating system called "MS-DOS".

Today, I run the same program on a Hewlett-Packard multimedia PC with a dual-core AMD Athlon processor, 2 gigabytes of memory, and more than a TERABYTE of hard disk space!

It was a very simple task for me to copy the program from one computer to another ... and another ... and another ... and another for 22 subsequent years. Good software is like that - if it works and it works well, why not keep using it?

Then, the thought occurred to me -- IF our minds are simply "software" running on the "hardware" that we know of as "flesh", then isn't it at least remotely conceivable that it too can be literally "copied" to newer, better hardware?

The Bible speaks of people dying in the flesh and then being raised into "glorified bodies" that are "incorruptible" - that is, they don't age, die, and rot like "flesh" does.

Is it so inconceivable that the creator of our minds and bodies, our "software and hardware" if you will, cannot create new "glorified and incorruptible" bodies -- and then simply copy or transfer the software to the new machines?

-- Pause for thought --

I return now to the original question I asked in this posting, "How precious is my life?"

Is it precious enough to even devote a tiny bit of effort into investigating whether or not this "Bible" is on to something?

Some people have a conscience that is so "seared" that even giving a moment's thought to the idea of the Bible being true would cause them to run away holding their metaphorical ears shut against the possibility -- yelling such things such as, "right-wing fundamentalist garbage!!!!!!" as they run from the idea.

Such is not the behavior of someone who is "open minded".

"What does all of this have to do with Mr. Romney Wordsworth?", you might ask. Well, it has a lot to do with him, for you see, he considered his Bible to be his only possession to have greater value than his own life (in the flesh) and that he looked forward to a better life in a glorified body -- something that his God, the God of the Bible, had promised to him in no uncertain terms. (See I Corinthians 15 for but one example.)

Was he a fool for believing such a thing? Believing in it so much so that he was willing to allow "The State" to kill him rather than recant such an idea?