swilow
Bluelight Crew
I think the use of the Word Hell in the Christian sense evokes a state of absolute suffering, endless. The concept can exist with or without Christianity, it's just a borrowed word that has Christian roots.
From a certain perspective, absolute (but not endless) suffering is the lot of animals on earth. Most of the ways we suffer are evolved traits to ensure our survival. Think about physical pain; this is not so much a real, absolute thing, its a series of sensations that our nervous systems and brains evolved to experience, to enable our avoidance of stimuli that would harm/kill us. It makes sense, and yet as an inevitable function of a reality we do not choose (i.e. it is imposed upon us through the sheer fact that we exist) it entails a truly pointless sufferring, unless you believe that we exist for a reason. I happen to think this is random and meaningless and ends when we die and there is no other place or time for our personalised existence. In that sense, life is pointless, we are existing and compelled to escape pain and suffering through the very experience of these states. There is no greater reason for this. You suffer so you can learn to avoid suffering and live a longer life of procreation, and for no greater purpose.
Much of the macro life we see dies by being eaten, usually when still alive. If this doesn't happen, you get a long slow death due to starvation, though for some animals this may compell them to eat their young. Old animal are usually alone when they die, too. But, they have served their purpose if they procreated, and if they are eaten they have served a purpose too. The suffering along the way is utterly meaningless.
The worst thing IMO is, as a human, you understand that there is a way out, that all of us will inevitably take without fail. We have to live with an instinct that forces us, through pain, fear and suffering, to continue living at all costs but we know that at the end of the day, we will lose this fight. At least most of us won't experience our last few minutes in the jaws of a predator, we just experience an entire lifetime knowing that one day, we will not exist.
I love the natural world, but the more I observe it, the more I see it as a place of hellish, brutal suffering. There's no enlightenment amongst the likes of wild animals, there is just kill or be killed. I watched a David Attenborough show; they had filmed a snow leopard in the Himalaya's who needed to feed her three young. She was getting desperate, and sought out a larger prey to the normally juvenile animals she would kill and eat, and after killing this animal, had to drag a corpse the size of her body up a fucking mountain in a blizzard to prevent her and her young from starving. Her struggle was incredible- this act would probably be the hardest thing a human could imagine, and she had to be constantly worried about other predators attacking her and taking her food, or death by falling off the mountain, or freezing in the blizzard, all the while hoping her young hadn't been killed rendering her great battle even more futile. I felt like watching this was just watching a summary of the suffering replete in life on earth. It felt wrong to watch.
She got it back to her cubs, so they lived on to kill other young animals too.
I just cannot avoid holding this idea, that life is optional and that this suffering and our struggle does not have a conclusion that we will ever be able to experience. Our struggle ceases when we die. It is the definition of pointlessness.
This is a very pessimistic post and I hope no-one finds it distressing. I know that I wish I did not believe this stuff, it feels almost cruel to spread this very dark perspective. I hope someone rebutts the fuck out of it! I really do.
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