It is an unspecified situation coming from today's zeitgeist that constitutes the grounds for the creation of this article. The title itself is attributed to my neural maneuver towards the sensational book Why Dinosaurs Matter by Kenneth Lacovara, my honest review of which can be read here. The content of this post is, I believe, of utmost importance, and I do hope my readers will feel enlightened by the time they finish perusing this piece of text. Let's get started!
It was a dreary, cold night last November. I was tossing and turning on my bed, perspiring all over my body and constantly gritting my teeth. The culprit turned out to be a nightmare which I would never forget afterwards.
The disturbing dream began with me seeing flashing scenes of countless diabolical acts committed by humans – those included atrocious and brutish crimes such as genocides and rapes. All of a sudden, what I could see turned black and I found myself in complete silence. Then, a very old man with a grizzled beard appeared from afar. He introduced himself as Karz (I hope I spelled it correctly) and addressed me by my nickname "Q-Man". I was certainly flabbergasted and thought to myself, "How does he know my nickname? I've never met him before... Who is this old man?" I instantly got goosebumps, but it seems that he fully understood how anxious I was. He told me, "Don't be afraid. I know everything about you." As a reaction, I gaped and thought, "What does that mean? I don't get it..." The old man carried on talking about me, trying to prove the statement that he had just made. Eerily, every single thing he mentioned about me was correct – my family, my career, my hobbies, my love life, what I did the day before, my deepest secrets. Every. Single. Thing. My jaw automatically dropped as I couldn't make head or tail of what was going on.
What happened next was shocking. He claimed that he had come to tell me that I had one task to accomplish. "You have just seen how humanity can be so cruel that the world now is so wretched. All the potential for evil in the future will be completely erased if you succeed in doing this task," he explained. "Wha-what is it?" I asked nervously. He replied, "Kill yourself." I was directly stunned and didn't know what to say. The old man grinned and continued, "Don't worry. As soon as you do that, you will live forever in everlasting bliss. I guarantee that." I was still processing what he had just said when he continued, "But if you do not do that, maledictions will befall your descendants, forevermore. They will get acutely sick, die in horrific accidents, or otherwise dreadfully suffer from misfortunes." Before I could say anything, he vanished into thin air and suddenly I woke up with a distressed face, panting heavily on my flooded bed.
After thinking about it over and over for more than a month, I finally made up my mind: I will take my own life. Dear reader, could you please suggest the best way to do so? You can write it in the comment section below. Thank you very much in advance. :-)
You may realize that the whole story was completely made up and none of it happened to me. However, there might be people who have experienced this kind of thing and did what sane people would think is fatuous and irrational. And this brings us to my point in this article: evidence matters.
The events unfolding in my hypothetical dream should not, in any way, lead me to do what Karz said. That is simply because there is no evidence whatsoever that those things he said would really happen. It is pathetic that people can do such loco acts in real life and I suspect this has to do with our survival instinct. Imagination is our forte as a species and it certainly helps us in our survival. However, this "superpower" is a double-edged sword. The biggest problem occurs when, fueled by the "wrong" imagination, our push to survive overrides our rationality and takes a harmful route. Our species has now invented science and it indeed works for the success of our survival. And to do good science, what we need is evidence. Without evidence, people can do crazy things with devastating or grave consequences (such as what I would do if I believed what Karz had said). It is no wonder that British scientist Richard Dawkins writes the following in his book which I am currently reading, The Magic of Reality: "We should be open-minded, but the only good reason to believe that something exists is if there is real evidence that it does."
Through this article, I would like to invite my readers (including you) to adopt, foster, and champion scientific thinking & skepticism, without which our world would be in absolute chaos. I hope I got the message across to you and since we are at the outset of 2021, I wish you a Happy New Year! Let's beat this insufferable pandemic together by means of, again, science. ;-)
Related article: My Thoughts on Religious Terrorist Bombings
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