what does it all mean Mr Natural?

This question from Beagles has piqued my interest.

 are human beings born insane, and the belief in imaginary things makes us sane enough to function

Since insane is the opposite of same, surely we are not born that way.  And I think the insane we are talking about here is not the kind that sends you into the rubber room, but rather the belief in things that don't make sense if you explore them logically, rather than an inability to think straight at all.  Well we're not here to discuss insanity today.

What I have wondered though is that for a long time our forebears were just scrambling for existence, and like my cats (I assume) wouldn't even be able to formulate the question of whether life has any meaning.  Eventually we got language, and somewhere after that, but before we got agriculture, our ancestors must have begun thinking, what does it all mean.  I believe, as Mr Natural sez, that it don't mean shit.  I wonder if at that point there were some who couldn't take the fact that it didn't mean shit, and they just wandered off into the night and never had kids and so their genes were lost and only those of us who had the genetic make up to survive a meaningless world survived.  I don't guess I really believe this, but I think it makes a good discussion point.

Of course even today we have those disturbed by a meaningless life.  I believe it was that cool but wacky philosopher Camus, who claimed that the first question of philosophy was why not commit suicide.  After a bit of thinking I believe he decided that he shouldn't commit suicide and then he drove his sports car off a cliff.  I suppose Mr Natural was chuckling. 



It so happens that I am reading a book about early Christianity, and there did indeed come a point where it was declared that the age of prophecy was over.  Well you have to do that or else how can you have any belief system if something new comes up every weekend?  Especially if that revelation, as I suspect it almost always did, reflected badly on the current administration.  The Mormons, as you recall, started off with a revelation, but they too had to cap the age of revelation.

And you know the church, it always wants to project this idea that it is eternal and has been so forever, but it has gone through many changes over the years.

One of the problems with the Mormons was their way of taking over.  You're sitting in the town square whittling to beat the band and here come the Mormons ('Mons!, oh nevermind.  And you're thinking well an odd looking lot, kind of a disturbing glint in their eyes, a somewhat sinister curl in their smug smiles, but this old town has been going down the hills and we could use some more new people, people to shop in our stores and maybe give us jobs in their stores. 

But it never worked out that way.  The Mormons opened their own stores and only shopped in them and only hired other Mormons to work in their stores, and then they started running their people for city offices and of course those people got one hundred percent of the Mormon vote, and sooner or later that led to pitchfork and torch time.



It's getting a little more difficult to comment with three people, now i have to not just reply to Beagles but to what Old Dog said about Beagles and vice versa.  I wonder if we should have some structure like closing comments, but I'll just leave that for contemplation for the nonce.