Fresh Voices-On-Air commentator Caroline Puckett seeks to understand the universe, our beliefs and our existence.
Caroline Puckett is a junior at Hoggard High School. She’s an active member of the Science Olympiad team, the girls cross country team, Beta club, and tutoring program. She aspires to have a career in international business.
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Exploring the Unknown
There is a certain mystery about life that makes people wonder, “Why am I here?”, “What is the reason for human existence?” and “What happens after life, when I dies?” Many of these questions are answered through either a scientific or religious belief; both involving the mind needing an answer to satisfy these troubling questions. However, there are people who have yet to find what it is that they believe in because they are searching for an answer that feels right to them. Once this answer is found, most people attach themselves to a certain belief and invent all of their morals and goals around this belief.
What’s interesting is that as a person grows older they are forever inclined to believe in something, but never nothing; nobody believes in nothing after they have found their so called “calling”. In retrospect, there is always a reason why people believe in what they do, whether it is because that is how they were brought up, if they read a particularly influential book, or even if a motivational speaker enlightened them in a well known belief. With the hundreds of different beliefs in the world, the choice could either be difficult in finding the right one, or as easy as disagreeing with all known religions and creating a new one. But the question is not what we believe in, but why? Why does it seem that everybody believes in a profound reason for existence? What makes people see that life and death lead to an afterlife, or maybe even nothingness?
I believe that the human mind has advanced to the point where our mind knows that there is a reason for us to be here. That there is an instinct inside all of us that makes us need an answer for everything, including why we exist, and once we are old enough to understand this
concept, choosing our reasoning comes with a feeling of self-satisfaction. And not just satisfaction for that single moment, but for a lifetime, however long that may be.
The fact that we must know, and the fact that our brains are designed to want to find out what we do not know makes the human race one of a kind. What we believe makes us do what we do; what we believe gives reason to life. Without out a reason to why we are on earth, life would be non-existent. Our minds would be making activities, and events for us to do for no reason at all, and we would be doing things as if we were all wild animals just trying to survive. There would be no “moral compass” to follow, no conscience to say if what we did was wrong or right, and no one to protect the less fortunate. Needless to say that if no one believed in anything our lives would be chaotic and thoroughly deranged.
My whole point is that I don’t know if my Catholicism is correct, if his Judaism is right, or if anybody’s beliefs are correct, but I do know that we all believe, and right now believing is the most important action we can take, and really the only deed we can all do to understand the unknown and keep to our sanity.