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A boy raised on a farm by good, Christian parents who always meant well, whether or not they always did the right thing or not. In rural America, life is as simple as working hard on the weekends, fishing Saturdays and always making it to Church on time Sunday morning. For most people who grow up in that environment, emulating your parents is a good enough path in life, and asking questions is only a hassle. Why question what works? That’s the only question you need, and it’s rhetorical as all hell.

But that good Christian farm boy became an inquisitive teenager battling with the justice of humanity: why were some kids so cruel to others, what good was war and will I really have to spend the rest of my life on this farm? Once an intelligent young man begins to question things, his religion is certain to come under fire, and unfortunately, there are just some questions religion can’t answer, at least not definitively.

On one hand, preachers will tell you that God always was and always will be, and it’s not something humans can understand but it’s true. I understood it, there’s nothing impossible to grasp about the idea of something being infinite in every direction. It’s as simple as a circle. At the same time, answers such as “it is God’s will” just wouldn’t do. If God is all knowing, then he already knows who will betray him, because he has set everything in motion in the first place, and so therefore your actions, your “free will”, is irrelevant. Investigate the term “predetermination” for a solid idea behind what first pulled me away from religion.

Time proceeded, life proceeded. It was unfair, sometimes blissful. I made horrible decisions that hurt people, and I made heroic decisions that saved people. I drifted from religion to magic, that the world was not run by capital “G”od, but that there was some type of spirituality, some type of superhuman force out there governing things. I could believe in evolution, gravity, the Big Bang, and photosynthesis as all being simple acts of nature, but surely this power we have, the ability to think, even life itself, surely that was created by something other than random firings of chemical reactions.

I slowly moved more and more toward science, even leaving that magical aspect of my beliefs behind. Science is superior in comforting me simply because science leaves room for a lack of knowledge, it leaves space for being wrong. Religion, particularly to the extremes of Catholicism but mostly all Western religions (specifically Christianity, Islam and Judaism, of course), do not allow for error: the Bible is right and what the Bible does not say the Church has devised. When Galileo finally got to the bottom of the fact that Earth isn’t the center of the universe, he was a scientist saying “wow, we were wrong, here is what I can actually see happening” and the Church was there to destroy him, so pompous in the idea that physical proof was not as strong as what they’d written and discussed over the centuries. Religion relies on traditions of man, science relies on man analyzing his traditions and not being afraid to change them.

But as one moves more and more toward science there is the very real and disconcerting truth that in all likelihood human consciousness is not special, is not a piece of the divine. We’re merely another animal with a talent others don’t have. We don’t consider birds to be holier than snails because one is beautiful in flight and the other leaves a sticky trail of goo behind. But flight is magically impressive, nonetheless. Just as consciousness, the ability to think and affect our realities is magically impressive, a wholehearted belief in science nearly forces you to accept that it’s just another talent, another evolutionary rung on a ladder. Mortality is finite, and one day we’ll be gone.

I take solace in the idea that I will live forever, simply because for all of my talents I am merely a collection of atoms, and when I die those atoms won’t be destroyed, but I’ll simply become worm food and recycled back into the universe. Still, for the first time perhaps in my life I’m beginning to fear death, beginning to realize that one day I will have an end. I think that is the saddest moment in anyone’s life, when they go from the youthful disdain of smoking, drinking and reckless living that comes along with the presumption of eternal life that accompanies youth only to move onto the more cautious realization that things will be over, and so we should attempt to prolong them.

I don’t believe that prolonging life is a good way to spend your years on this Earth, because for every moment you spend trying to get another moment, you’re simply wasting twice as much time.