Reply #50: But ALL biological life is fleeting.

[stopbush]

Humans are better off than any other life form on this planet. We dominate them, in fact.

Consider the birds. 75% of them die a horrible death within a few months of their birth due to predators and starvation (you've got to ignore the NT when it says Jesus takes care of the sparrows. He doesn't). Most of us do better than that. Yet with all of the wonders of modern medicine, fully 25% of pregnancies in the Western world do not come to term and are lost as miscarriages.

As far as extinction, 99% of all life forms that have ever graced this planet are NOW extinct. Those of us here now - including plants - are the 1% who happen to be living now. Simply as a numbers game, extinction is in the cards for humans as well. THAT is the nature of things.

The difference that we have as rational beings is that we - unlike every other life form on this planet now and those long gone - can to some extent influence our own destiny. We no longer need to wait for evolution to grind out some 20,000-year process to get us from Step A to Step B. We can literally go from Step A to Step T in a handful of years.

If you REALLY want to think about it, human beings have evolved to produce a much BETTER world for humans than we should have any right to expect. Consider that for the first 500-million years of its existence, the Earth was spinning so fast and was so hot that NO life could take hold. Consider what our lives are compared to the mindless creatures who existed for billions of years before us. Consider how much better human life is now compared to even 500 years ago in terms of life expectancy alone. How is that not a better world?

And still - we're here but for a flicker of time in the great scheme of things. That has a beauty of its own, don'tcha think?