TOWARDS THE END OF DEATH
WHY WERE WE BORN?
How would you feel if tomorrow, it's announced that death is no longer a necessity for humans?
How would you take in the news that humans can now live forever if they choose to and die only when they want and the way they want? Impossible right?It would change everything about the world.
As a Christian, I was taught that death was never the initial plan of God.
The Biblical God made man to live forever and dominate the world. The Catholic Catechism said that it was through one man, Adam that sin entered the world and death followed sin to enter. Hence, the wages of sin is death.
Across all cultures and religions in the world, death was not natural from the onset. It was the consequence of doing one thing or the other wrongly or a very bad decision made by someone that eventually brought in death.
In Igbo Land, several folktales abound, one of which was how the dog and tortoise were sent to meet God over the debate on whether there should be death or there shouldn't be death. The humans in their wisdom and self preservation, gave the dog the message to tell God that there should be no death, while the tortoise was given the message that there should be death.
The tortoise being too slow and the dog being too fast, it was agreed that whichever got to God first would be taken as the true wish of humans, but the dog ran for a while in his overconfidence, stopped along the way to eat and after eating, dozed off. He slept until the tortoise passed him and delivered his message first, thus bringing death upon humanity.
When humans found out what happened, they tried to appeal to God but God said that the truth has come first. Hence the saying in Igbo, "Eziokwu buru ụzọ ruo bé Chukwu".
Similar stories abound across the world, indicating that first, death was never a natural occurrence and secondly, that death wasn't the ultimate Destiny of man.
It's for this sole purpose that every religion promises everlasting life. The Biblical God promised us (His worshippers) that we will have life and have it in abundance.
In Igbo Land, the ancestors live forever. They sometimes reincarnate and still go back. However, the bottom line is that at the real purpose of humans is to live forever.
If this is the case, why then does the idea of ending death sound impossible to people?
Why does everyone speak about death with a tone of finality? Even Christians who believe that their saviour conquered death and has been alive for 2,023 years? They also believe that Elijah never died as he went to heaven alive and also Enoch who walked with God and never saw death?
What is responsible for the belief that death is impossible to stop is the defeatist mindset that creeps in after millennials of trying to escape death without success, so humans decided to quit trying and accept death as their fate, their necessary end and a natural thing.
It's what they figured out to be the easiest way to endure the cruelty of death, the pain and agony of losing people you love, the hurts that comes with knowing that someday, you will die and all your efforts will go to waste.
It's a coping mechanism. More like trying to accept that you shouldn't have fought in the first place simply because you lost the battle.
It's this coping mechanism that made us to forget that we were born to dominate the world and the universe. We forgot that we were created to have life and have it in abundance, to dominate, explore and rule over all the things in the universe, but so far, the introduction of mortality has ruined that purpose, and so we live in endless meaningless cycle wondering what is the meaning of life, wondering why we were created only to suffer and die.
The question of why we were created, why we were born and what is the meaning of life is one that every human being who lived long enough to be an adult must ask himself at least once and no one ever got the answer because the answer lies in immortality.
The natural thing is for humans to live forever. The unnatural thing is death, it's a disease that needs to be cured.
Mortality is unnatural.
Immortality is natural.
And the question remains, can humans finally succeed in finding the cure for death?
Join me on this journey as we move Towards the End of Death.
Ugwuagbo Emmanuel Chizoba (Zoba De Great) is a Journalist and Writer who is enthusiastic about finding the cure for death.
