'The Lord Answering Job Out of the Whirlwind' (If I have a face transplant, am I still me?)
All we can ever know for certain about death is that a living person grows strangely still. We each have a fantasy about what happens after death and this fantasy determines how we see the purpose of life. If we see death as the end of our identity, the purpose of our life becomes making this life satisfactory. There is an infinite number of ways in which we might choose to define "satisfactory", but whichever we choose becomes our purpose. If we see death as the doorway to another life, we have to decide whether this next life will be better than this one. To give us hope, we decide that the next life will be better. This raises the question of justice. Do all people go on to this better life, or are there standards that have to be met? A sense of justice leads us to choose standards, and in doing so we condemn ourselves to living this life in terms of the next. If you set standards which you can easily reach, you limit the amount of self-inflicted pain you will suffer, but