Thursday, June 5, 2008

suicide, inventing gods

Once there was a man who had good reason to want to kill himself. The good solid physical reason of agony which stretched off in to the future as far as he could see. But he struggled for years contemplating. "Perhaps he'd some day find a way to heal this chronic ailment and so killing himself would have been a mistake?" Finally, finally he did something very creative, that at least partially eased his mind. He decided that an evil "god" had done this to him. That he was that special, that some god had singled him out as someone that it must be made sure was killed. Certainly this was a dangerous thing to convince one's self of; it opens the door to a number of mental illnesses.

But he thought of this evil god, and it gave him such strength. It became a game to simply survive as long as possible despite his agony. And he did just this for years. And finally he healed his body.

The need for the god was now gone. But he hadn't quite so coherently understood what he was doing. And now when other relatively trivial bad things happened in his life, there again was the spectre of that "god". His anger against this "god" was both impressive and barbaric.

So he realized what was going on and got rid of the god.

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