IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

Without Religious Beliefs

EVERYTHING and everyone is disappearing—Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin. What an amazing happening, and well worth recording in my diary. But that will also suddenly disappear.

So wrote Beatrice Webb in her diary, one of the outstanding leaders of the Fabian society, in 1943, half way through the Second World War. The diary was published after her death.

Even in times of peace, outstanding people appear on the world’s stage, show what brilliant stuff they are made of, then quickly disappear, not apparently by their own choice, but like so many puppets on a string. Some, like George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell, manage to last the course much longer than others, but, sooner or later, everyone has to succumb to the inevitable. No matter how brilliant one’s career, one has ultimately to die and pass into oblivion.

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It is only after we accept that there is a life after death, an eternal existence, that we see some meaning in life.

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The fact that human beings are continually leaving this life, when there is still so much to be achieved, still so many heights to be reached, seems to make no sense. It all appears pointless and unjust. Life’s very ephemerality and its apparently utter futility present a grave question. In despair, we wonder why we have to be born at all, if after such a brief spell in this world, we are all to be snuffed out, like so many candles.

It is only after we accept that there is a life after death, an eternal existence, that we see some meaning in life. It is only after we give credence to what the prophets have told us of the Hereafter that we see everything fall into place, and have no further regrets about how transient life on Earth is. Then, and only then does life seem to be well worth living, and not just a meaningless, mechanical series of events.