After the End of the World

Let us be serious, for a moment, about the end of the world.

Someday all life on earth will end, of course, because if for no other reason, the sun will collapse and become a red giant, and earth will fry like forgotten bacon. That will be four or five billion years from now. I will be about 4,500,000,079 years old by then. I won't care, or understand.

The people who do care--now--the people who genuinely believe, and hope, and fear that the world might end last Saturday, or next year, or whenever, are people who hurt. They despair, they want a better world than they have, they believe that, somehow, everything might be put right. They are the believers.

Maybe god will create a new heaven and a new earth. Surely the evildoers will suffer, finally! There must be justice, finally! There has to be justice. If there is a god, at all, there must be justice! There will be a new heaven and a new earth!

But there isn't. There never has been. There is this earth, and our own wishes for justice, and our own stupidity and cruelty and bad decisions and injustice.

When it gets really bad, if there is a shred of hope in us, we say--even if people think we are stupid--that there will be a new heaven and a new earth. There must be! If there is a god, at all, this cannot go on!

If there is a god. . . .

No one else planned it this way. It is up to us.

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