Articles
Dying Under Delusion
An actress I had never heard of before, Mira Furlan, recently died. Here is a cryptic excerpt from her twitter feed as she contemplated death: “I look at the stars. It's a clear night and the Milky Way seems so near. That's where I'll be going soon. ‘We're all star stuff’ … (a) line from Joe's script. Not a bad prospect. I am not afraid. In the meantime, let me close my eyes and sense the beauty around me. And take that breath under the dark sky full of stars. Breathe in. Breathe out. That's all.”
“We’re all star stuff.” This is the notion, popularized by atheists such as Carl Sagan, that distant stars are actually the source of life on earth. From an article entitled, Humans Really Are Made of Stardust, and a New Study Proves It: “For decades, science popularizers have said humans are made of stardust, and now a new survey of 150,000 stars shows just how true the old cliché is: Humans and their galaxy have about 97 percent of the same kind of atoms, and the elements of life appear to be more prevalent toward the galaxy’s center … ‘It’s a great human-interest story that we are now able to map the abundance of all the major elements found in the human body across hundreds of thousands of stars in our Milky Way … This allows us to place constraints on when and where in our galaxy life had the required elements to evolve …’” (Jennifer Johnson, science team chair of SDSS-III APOGEE survey, professor at OSU, quoted in Space.com, 1/10/2017).
Scientifically, the study is wholly without merit. But spiritually, the effect of such fantasy is tragic. Ms. Furlan believed she came from the stars and, in death, was returning to them. Rather than take comfort at her death in Jesus as her Savior, in the grace of God as her hope, and in heaven as her eternal home, she fell prey to a total delusion. The theories concocted by humans to circumvent what God actually says about death and destiny are endless. The truth is, “Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it” (Ecc 12:7). Let us all prepare for this inevitable destiny.
