What Am I Doing Here?

Every so often in life, I humor­ously ask myself, “What am I doing here?” It is the sort of thing you ask your­self while you are fix­ing a flat beside the road at night, in the South, dur­ing snake sea­son. I have asked myself that same ques­tion in some of the jobs I have had too — espe­cially the jobs I did get­ting through col­lege. I have been in many social gath­er­ings that have stim­u­lated that ques­tion as the press­ing and con­stant thought dur­ing the whole event.
That same ques­tion has a pro­found exis­ten­tial ele­ment too. You see, by all rea­son, we are not sup­posed to be here. We are not sup­posed to be any­where. We are not sup­posed to be at all. As one Ori­en­tal sage remarked, “It is not a mir­a­cle that men walk on the moon, but that they walk on the earth.”
Try as we may, we can­not fig­ure out how we got here — or why we are here (if there is a “why” at all). All we know is that when we get up in the morn­ing and look in the mir­ror, there we are. In the uni­verse, our lit­tle spot is so incred­i­bly small, but big enough for oceans, bil­lions of peo­ple, and zil­lions of life forms.
There are many the­o­ries about how the great machine got here (the stars and plan­ets), but find­ing a ratio­nale for it evades any­thing in physics. So, we resort to meta­physics — things that can­not be seen but that we some­how believe are there. From these spec­u­la­tions all kinds or reli­gions have sprung. They range from the absurd to the sub­lime. Some are his­toric, some are merely the­o­retic.
Pick one and work it through your head, and see if it matches your expe­ri­ences. Do we come back? Is there any evi­dence for rein­car­na­tion? How is it some reli­gions fos­ter war and some make peace? Most impor­tant of all, which one seems most in har­mony with the whole big show (every­thing from galax­ies to human nature)?
This is not an easy task. Doing it jus­tice would take a life­time in a major uni­ver­sity library. You do not have time for that. You are going to have to shoot from the hip. It has been pos­tu­lated that Chris­tian­ity is not the pret­ti­est pic­ture of human­ity, just the most likely. For now, that has been the shot I have taken. If I miss, I hope I have time to reload.