I watched a nature show recently that showed how a pod of killer whales team up to catch a seal. It was a juvenile seal. After catching it, the whales spend 40 minutes tossing it around, while whale after whale took turns catching it and tossing it. It remained alive throughout all this, desperately looking for a route of escape. Whales have to eat seals to survive. But what purpose was served by torturing the young seal? Well it might have been just for sport. Then one theory says it is to "debilitate" the seal, so the seal will be unable to bite and claw at the whale who attempts to eat it. It seems everything in nature serves a purpose.

It was heart wrenching to watch - the young seal swimming around within the small area encircled by whales, only to be recaught over and over and over, and tossed into the air over and over. This is the world we live in. This is what the mind of the creator hath wrought. Or this is what a mindless universe has evolved into.

This world is a brutal, merciless place. We are trapped here to soak up a great deal of pain. And we meet our needs by causing a great deal of pain. The plight of animals being raised to provide us with food is pretty horrifying. (Google: "industrial farming." That glass of creamy milk I so enjoy comes from a cow whose calf was wrenched away from her. She mourns for her calf, who mourns for its mother.)

Apparently, life cannot exist without all this suffering. Or, at least, it couldn't be so beautiful. The lion is magnificently powerful, so that it can kill. The gazelle is beautiful in the fleetness of its running and leaping, and that speed and agility is only there so that it can escape predators. Having to elude the claws and teeth of what chases it is why a herd animal is so pretty. Without "the hunt," all bloody and gruesome, there'ld be less beauty on the savannah. Without the efficiency of modern animal husbandry producing our meat and milk, we'ld still be living like Neanderthals.

So misery is hard-wired into the general scheme of life. We endure suffering, and we cause suffering. We're born; we die. Maybe, part of the time, we are happy. A lot of the time we're not. Dying is usually an unpleasant ordeal. Eventually, each of us will go through that. We have the option of bringing it about sooner. Thirty to forty thousand Americans will arrange that annually. Some of them are deeply mourned by family and friends. Some of them are not. Either way, life goes on.