Poket Sepi: Superior

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The Belief in A Superior Power

Aka God. I feel lucky being born into a family whose religion holds the believe in a God. And not just one God; the one and only God. No other. And that religion is Islam. I'm not gonna talk about theology in this post. Rather, my opinion on the meaning of life (although this is coming from a mere kid who has not enough experience on what life has to offer).

I sometimes ponder what it feels like to have no belief in a superior power - any power, that is - who is the Creator of the world and everything in it. How people strive so hard to look for answers about the origin of life through what they call scientific research, when the answers are crystal clear to a believer of God. God created life. Period.

But some people claim that that cannot be tested scientifically, thus ignoring that God created life altogether. But isn't it more illogical to say that the world 'accidentally' happened on its own? That some genes in a single cell 'randomly' mutated thus giving rise to the life species as we can see today? Isn't that explanation way more preposterous than simply believing that God created us all? (If you want to read more about molecular evolution stuff, continue reading. If not, skip the next paragraph)

Based on what I've learned in an introductory biology course in college, we all come from one unicellular organism. The cell replicates itself over and over and over until a DNA mutation occurs. And contrary to popular belief, mutation occurs at random, not because the organism wants it or needs it to happen. Once a mutation occurs, the cell changes. The replication and mutation keeps going on until more and more species starts to appear. The following simplified tree of life explains this process. Some of the evidences of evolution includes the fact that all species share the same molecular code which is ATCG for DNA and AUGC for RNA. You can read more about this online. Or you can ask me, of course

Credits

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon this show called Ancient Aliens on History Channel. Apparently it's about some scientists investigating the possibility that events in the past are caused by aliens. That day, the topic was about Noah's Ark. They were proposing that instead of being caused by God, the huge flood was caused by aliens. And they started doing some thorough investigation. I didn't finish the episode because it got pretty boring.

Don't get me wrong though. I'm not saying that science is wrong. Scientific research is essential to understanding things going on around us. In fact, science is what helps us understand what God has created for us.

Sometimes, people look everywhere to find the reason to live; the meaning of life. Some look for it in fame and fortune. Some look for it in wealth and health. Some look for it in friends and family. But that's the problem about this world. It's full of temporary things and it itself is temporary. As a result, we constantly crave for more as we lose those worldly things. For me, my answer is that I live to be the servant of God. At least, that's what I set my goal to be, and everything else comes after that.

Death is Like Sleep

During my first semester in college, I was in this class called Quran Exegesis which talks about the Quran (duh). So one of our discussions was about the verse that relates death with sleep:

"God takes the souls (al-anfus) at the time of their death, and those that die not during their sleep; then He withholds those on whom He has passed the decree of death and sends the others back till an appointed term; most surely there are signs in this for a people who reflect." (Qur'an 39:42)

The question is, is death really like sleep? Are we in a dream-like state after we die? When we 'wake up' from the dream like state (aka Judgement day), do we remember the dream? How long will the dream-like state last? As we know from experience, dreams can be very vivid and very convincing that we might confuse a dream with reality. Also, we lose the sense of time when we sleep, meaning that an 8-hour sleep just flew by like a breeze. Is that what death feels like? Obviously none of us have the exact answer, but you can read more about it online.