What you love is bad for you here but not in another place

Today was Friday again. I listened to the speech given by the Imam during Friday prayers. He once again repeated what we have heard for decades on repeat. That we must stay away from women, drinking, and so forth because we will have all that and much more in heaven. It got me thinking. Usually, when someone is told that one must stay away from something because that something is bad for them, they are given other choices. If I were to tell you to stay away from smoking, I’d say it is bad for health and that you should eat apples instead and do exercise. I wouldn’t say smoking is bad for you but in a different life or a higher dimension life-form (the hereafter) you will smoke forever. I couldn’t shift my mind off of this one little equation: stay away from women and drinking here as those are bad morals and bad for both physical and moral health. But we can have the same bad habits if we manage to earn an immigration to heaven.

The earth and our solar system are no different. People always say mother nature protects us and everything is designed to serve us. That is perhaps one of the biggest myths the world doesn’t even want to correct. Mother nature is not our friend my friends. It is ready to kill us at every opportunity it gets. Two-thirds of the planet if you were to land in without man-made items such as food, clothing, heating supplies, weapons, and so forth, you’d die within minutes. The cold, the wild animals, the extreme heat, the oceans will kill you if you do not protect yourself with man-made tools.

We look at a delicious mango ready ourselves to praise mother nature. The hurricanes, the tsunamis, the tornadoes, the earthquakes, the asteroids, the sharks, the lions, the bears, the snakes, and so forth are mother nature too. All of them will kill you within minutes, if not seconds. The fact that almost 90% of the species that once called earth their home are now extinct is a strong testament to how mother nature is anything but mother.

But then life as we know it came from where earth came from too. Life as we know it is made up of simple elements that were formed in the solar system. They landed on earth and as seeds created life over billions of years. What was once there in the solar system is here on earth now. Life emerged from those seeds in the form of unicellular life forms. The journey of life evolved into multicellular and later other complex living organisms such as dinosaurs and chimpanzees, leading to intelligent beings who wondered about this very evolution.

Those intelligent beings realised that while the solar system created life on earth, it was also its worst enemy. If humans manage not to bring extinction upon themselves from threats such as nuclear war and climate change, then in the very distant future, about 5 billion years from today, the sun would expand in size and engulf our earth and burn to ashes everything we have known and loved. If human beings want to live in an environment where they have oxygen, food, water, and everything they love consuming here on earth, they would have to find another home in the vastness of space. Another planet in the Goldilocks zone of another star. Perhaps nature has a weird way of confirming what religion tells us: what you love is bad for you here but not in another place. If you want to enjoy women, drinking, large houses, and so forth then you’d have to manage to reach another life by crossing a certain milestone (death). If humanity wants to live forever, it would have to find another earth because this one can be hit by an asteroid or another alien civilisation might colonise it, or the very creator of the planet, the sun might just fry it before eating it up.