by: Andre Suprapto
“To die, to sleep; To sleep! Perchance to
dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come…
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that dread of something after death,-
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn No traveler
returns-puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly
to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.”
-William
Shakespeare, Hamlet; Act III Scene I
“…the conduct of God is hidden under nature,
as in all His other works.”
-Blaise
Pascal, Pensees, Section XIV
Death is the ultimate question that we mortals prefer
to avoid for the longest time. Given the fact that this existence is all that
we know of, there is nothing enchanting about meeting the ‘sickle-carrying faceless
man in a black cape’ any time soon.
As we are already aware, death and the question of the
existence of God are two sides of a coin. If that single syllable that gives
chill to most of us -namely ‘God’- does exist, it would be strange (not to
mention cowardly) for Him not to show Himself and open the Q & A session at
the time we conclude our odyssey in the world. However, if he does not exist,
we don’t even have the slightest ability to form the words ‘Ah, we are mere
evolving mammals after all’. Because at that moment, we are not; we have
returned to that dark, thoughtless nothingness. That nothingness that we now can
recall as the moment before we were born, of which no thoughts were framed in
our minds. But even this acknowledgement of pre-birth nothingness itself we owe
to existence.
The intriguing thing in the mystery of death and the
existence of God is this, because the dead is stubbornly silent whenever we ask
them is there another show in the back of the curtain or have they now met the
reclusive Old Man (God)? we must place our bets on His existence now, while we
know we still exist. Before the dice is thrown to our death, we must place our
wager with the information that we manage to gather in life, quickly. The stake
is breathtaking, literally.