Thousands of faithful gathered at Calvary Hill in Mirama Village, Rwampara District, for Good Friday celebrations during the Way of the Cross, where they climbed the hill in devotion. Fr Charles Lwanga Mutabaruka, who led the faithful, urged them to pray for strong faith to overcome evil and life's hardships. PHOTO/JOVITA KYARISIIMA
The news media is filled with daily (and in today’s social media era, hourly) stories of death, accident, and destruction.
The media points out how many unnecessary deaths take place on our roads because of reckless driving or how many children die in infancy because governments neglect to equip hospitals with drugs.
We express regret at the senseless loss of life in armed conflicts, genocides, and communal violence and condemn the perpetrators. All this is treated as routine news reporting and commentary.
But how many of us ever stop to really think about the actual tragedy behind these numbers published by the media and international human rights organisations? What does it mean for hundreds of thousands of lives to be cut short by human cruelty or, in the case of air crashes, pilot error?
Life has a tragic quality about it for most people, for most of human history, if not all of human history.
We make do with the circumstances that life hands out to us, but in those rare moments of private reflection in today’s busy world, we recognise just how shortchanged we are by life. This is the theme behind this week’s Christian Holy Week, culminating in today’s Easter Sunday celebrations.
Even if one is an agnostic or atheist, the longing for eternal life runs deep in our psyche. Dictators and generals throughout history grasped after immortality by building lavish monuments and landmarks that would live after them in glory.
One culprit in this is the concept of time. Take the typical day. We rise shortly after 6:30am and start getting ready for school, work, travel, and shopping.
However, barely have we finished with breakfast and started settling down to work or study, than it’s already midday. Within what seems like a few swift hours, the sun starts setting along the horizon, and just like that, yet another day winds down, leaving us with the feeling of having accomplished little. What were babies just yesterday quickly turn eight years old, then teenagers.
There just doesn’t seem to be enough time. This has been compounded by the digital and Internet era we live in. There are too many news websites to visit, too much news to read, too many social media feeds to scroll through, too much music to listen to and too many videos to watch.
If the ordinary office or street day seems to go by fast, time on the Internet flies by at an accelerated pace. That’s why many people get puzzled by how quickly their Internet data gets used up when they had just begun to surf the Internet.
Another odd thing about time is how differently it feels as we grow older from how it felt when we were children. To children, one year drags on and on seemingly without end. When we were children and read about how Idi Amin had ruled Uganda with an iron fist for eight years from 1971 to 1979, we gasped at the many long years Uganda suffered under military rule. But to somebody older than 30, a similar eight-year period like 2017 to 2025 feels like two and a half years ago.
Even for those who live up to 90 and beyond, 90 years might seem long by the life expectancy we are used to, but it’s a blink of an eye in terms of overall time. I often feel this when I find myself frustrated with the Google search engine.
On one hand, trillions of pages of information have been indexed and are available at the click of a desktop mouse or tap of a smartphone screen. And yet there are whole regions of the world and whole topics that even a week of searching on Google does not bring up in the results.
We have come a long way from the 1970s era of scarcity in information, and yet we are still at least two decades away from full coverage and indexing of all human knowledge and geographical areas. Women, much more than men, are all too aware of the fleeting, perishable nature of time, owing to their short reproductive span.
If legally, a girl can get married and have children after the age of 18, most today get married or start to have children in their mid-20s. But within a few short years, two decades or slightly less, they are faced with the onset of menopause.
Even though a woman can still bear children into her early 40s, most medical experts advise against anything after 35. This means most women have a quite tiny window between blossom and decay from 18 to about 35.
The more we study history’s geniuses such as Einstein, Shakespeare, Beethoven, the more we are left wondering how much more they would have contributed to humanity had they lived for another 50 years of their respective lives.
We have come a long way from the 1970s era of scarcity in information, and yet we are still at least two decades away from full coverage and indexing of all human knowledge and geographical areas. Women, much more than men, are all too aware of the fleeting, perishable nature of time, owing to their short reproductive span.
If legally, a girl can get married and have children after the age of 18, most today get married or start to have children in their mid-20s. But within a few short years, two decades or slightly less, they are faced with the onset of menopause.
Even though a woman can still bear children into her early 40s, most medical experts advise against anything after 35. This means most women have a quite tiny window between blossom and decay from 18 to about 35. The more we study history’s geniuses such as Einstein, Shakespeare, Beethoven, the more we are left wondering how much more they would have contributed to humanity had they lived for another 50 years of their respective lives.
The most successful people still only get to fulfil a fraction of their full potential. The super-rich of the world who died in the late 1890s missed out on air travel, radio, TV, and refrigerators. The wealthy and successful who died before 1994 missed out on the mobile phone and Internet revolution.
The global celebrities who died 20 years ago at the turn of the century missed out on the wonders of smartphones, artificial intelligence, and self-driving cars. So, whoever we are, whatever our circumstances, rich or poor, famous or humble, educated or illiterate, none of us ever gets to live up to our full potential.
The only solution to this is another chance at life, or what Christians and Muslims term the Resurrection. There must be a way that all of humanity gets a second chance at a second life, with people living much longer than the current 80 or 90 years.
The question, then, is: Apart from the promises of the Bible and other religious scriptures of a future eternal life, is there any scientific basis to this or are we just being given false hope in what is otherwise a tragic, meaningless existence? The Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) published in 1931 what came to be termed his “incompleteness theorem”.
Using mathematics and logical reasoning, Gödel demonstrated that, contrary to most scientific thinking that states that only that which can be empirically proven by science is real, there are certain truths that exist outside the realm of the material and empirical.
To cut a long and complicated story short (one that even this writer is still struggling to grasp, such is its complexity), Gödel demonstrated that God exists of necessity, scientifically, logically, and mathematically. Gödel argued the case for eternal life or at least for a second, less limited future life: “If the world is rationally organised and has meaning, then it must be the case.
For what sort of a meaning would it have to bring about a being (the human being) with such a wide field of possibilities for personal development and relationships to others, only then to let him achieve not even 1/1,000th of it?” This statement, above, gets at the heart of what most of us ordinary people think about from time to time. We see huge potential in ourselves and in other people.
There is so much we want to do and feel we are capable of accomplishing. But we are often frustrated by the lack of opportunity, resources, the right contacts, or the lack of time. There must be a future plan or design for this sea of humanity, which at best only fulfils 1/1,000th of its potential to do so.
Mankind can’t be all this intelligent, only to never use this potential to its full. So, for the millions celebrating Easter and the thousands reading this article, this perhaps is the greatest and only hope for mankind in the face of our tragic, fleeting existence, and the numerous political, medical, and economic tragedies that afflict our lives. Fortunately, beyond religion’s claims and promises, we now have scientific and mathematical proof or logical suggestion for life after death. Happy Easter!
