Stephen Colbert Wheel-O-Religion

This is all in good fun. I got a kick out of some of his little side comments.

Behind the silliness are some potentially more serious and thought-provoking questions:

Is chance really the driving mechanism behind our lives? Is the family, location, and religion of our birth simply chance? Is all of life an accident? That is the answer of science. I’m in the middle of reading E.O. Wilson’s The Diversity of Life and in a section I recently read he makes the point that everything, the diversity of life, all of it, is an accident, “beauty arises from error.” Life is a statistical anomaly. There is no plan, there is no meaning.

The question of placement at birth in such vastly different conditions makes absolutely no sense without a before. There must be a story before. Reincarnation is probably the most easily recognized example of an attempt to explain the issue. Most do not want to touch the issue with a ten foot pole or have so very little to go on to even be able to speak about it. How can a God of justice and mercy be maintained in the face of so much inequality from birth? Such a God falls apart.

So the question is about a before. What’s the story? What happened? Why did it happen? Most of the world’s religions begin with this life as Act I and the afterlife as Act II. The whole story changes if this life is Act II? I think it is interesting that it is relatively easy to conceive of living indefinitely yet it is absolutely mindboggling to think of an endless before.