Has Mystery Disappeared?

In response to my own question, I don't think that mystery has completely disappeared.  However, that being said, I feel that mystery or anything that can be labeled as a mystery or mysterious has greatly declined.  Mystery is defined as something that baffles understanding and cannot be explained.  One of the last remaining vestiges of mystery as I see it is the birth of a human being.  Out of all the people I have talked to who have children, none have said that witnessing the birth of baby was boring or routine.  Every single person has described it as amazing, miraculous, or indescribable.  I am sure that most of us by this time know the science behind how a child is created, grows, and is born.  Sperm meets egg, attaches, shares DNA, mulitplies exponentially and 9 months later a small human being comes out.  Despite any scientific explanation however, there is still something about how it all happens that remains a mystery to almost every person.  To see a human being emerge from a woman's womb bearing the likeness of his/her parents and being capable of life is an amazing experience, and at least to me, defies explanation.  What else besides the birth of human child can be labeled as a mystery?  There is not much left unfortunately that can be labeled as such and there are some out there who will claim that birth is not a mystery because it can be specifically defined and explained by science.  A few things in my mind that can be quanitifed as mysterious are ghosts, UFO's, how life started (debatable by some), religion, and love.  Love?  How can I place love under the veil of mystery?  Quite easily in my mind. 

If you look to define love, half of the definitions you will receive indicate that sex must be love.  Is that it?  Hardly.  You will also find definitions that vaguely describe what love might be to some people, being deeply enamored with another, having strong feelings for another, etc.  But if I asked every person reading this right now to specifically define love to me without looking at a dictionary and fully encompassing every aspect of love, I would get as many different answers as there are people reading this.  Why can't everyone simply agree on what love is?  Everyone who is in a close relationship with another has potentially felt love or been privy to love.  I feel that love remains a mystery because no matter how we might try to explain it, scientifically, intellectually, however; that there are aspects of love that remain a mystery.  There are certain indescribable movements within a person that contribute to what love is and no matter how we may try to define it or explain it away through chemical equations, we will never reach an answer that fully explains what love is.  As such, love will always remain a mystery.  Love is not simply having a sexual encounter with another (although love has been perverted through society to explicitly mean a sexual encounter).  Love is also not simply feeling an attraction to another person.  It goes deeper than that, encompassing attraction and sex, but at the same time moving beyond them.  It seems that too many people, wary of that deeper sense of love, stay only with the surface definition of what love is and never move beyond.  If only people could treat love with the same wonder and amazement as they treated the birth of a human being, perhaps there would be less infidelity, less divorce, less dissatisfaction with others. 

So why is mystery so important?  In a day and age when almost everything has been explained away by science and given explicit definitions as to what things are, society is in need of more mystery.  Mystery necessitates, on our part, a complete acceptance of events without understanding.  Everyone accepts that a child is born after 9 months in the womb despite the fact that we normally fail to explain how it all happens or fail to explain the wonder behind it.  Similarly, everyone has the capacity to love, and most people love someone in their life despite the fact that no matter how hard we try, defining our feelings of love and what it entails often fall short of the mark.  The same can be said about religion, although there are many more intangibles in regards to religion.  Maybe it is because with birth and love, mysterious as they are, we can still label them scientifically and explain them away to a certain extent, whereas with religion, we can't explain the mystery of it or label it with chemical equations, theoretical hypotheses, or some other description of what occurs.  Perhaps that is one of the reasons why religion is on the decline world wide, because we can't explain it and therefore can't understand it.  In general, I feel, society has lost its longing for the mysterious.  Whether religion, UFO's, or ghosts, if people can't explain it, people can't acknowledge its existence and therefore want no part of it.  Its too bad that so many people shy away from the indescribable, the vague, the mysterious.  So I would say that while mystery has not completely disappeared, it has diminished to a point where it almost holds no value.  That being said, perhaps we should all strive to accept the mysterious on faith, not seek to define or describe it, and simply enjoy it for what it is.