Born to Die, part five

I love life! At the existential level, it is all I know and I have no desire for it to end. To no longer know and experience the love of my wife, my daughters, my family and friends, is literally impossible for me to comprehend. And yet, I know that my ultimate destiny is death and I have no objective evidence to refute that it will be the end of my existence. Voltaire postulated that “if there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.” His position seems perfectly reasonable in the face of a common destiny about which absolutely nothing is known. Having the sentient ability to know this inevitable future almost requires the construction—or invention—of some sort of “answer” that will keep the human mind from almost surely going insane without it. It seems to me that this also serves to explain why, from the dawn of human consciousness some notion of an afterlife has been and continues to be almost universal. I, with my limited understanding, think that this might serve to a greater or lesser degree to illustrate the psychological concept of projection. Our human mind doesn’t well tolerate the ambiguity of not knowing, and so its natural tendency is to create answers to fill the void where none exist. I am finding it difficult to develop a rational explanation of death other than that it is genuinely the end.