Amerika

“You should write more about religion,” someone said one day.

“Why is that?” I inquired.

“It’s a classic profit opportunity. People love religion, but most of the people writing about it are bunglers.”

“That is very true,” I said, stroking my beard thoughtfully. “But people like what the bunglers say because it is simplistic brain candy.”

“Right, true,” he said. “But maybe they are getting tired of it. At least, the Catholic and Evangelical churches near me are closing, and the prosperity gospel megachurch had to have two fundraisers this year.”

“By the dog!” I said. “That means they are really struggling. Maybe the time has come.” Maybe.

I would like to advance here a two-headed argument, first about why the afterlife is important, and second about what I think it could be, if you do not mind a figurative, conjectural exercise. This is not intended to be literal, but metaphorical and philosophical.

1. Why the afterlife is important. For us to believe that life is good, it has to make sense, including death. Either materialists are right and death is the cessation of consciousness, or there is some kind of afterlife.

   Cessation of consciousness makes sense on one level because it is hard to imagine an eternal or infinite life remaining relevant. We are creatures of our time, of our backgrounds, and we have a few things we like doing, but could we do this for a thousand years? Ten thousand? Ten billion?

   Eternity almost makes no sense as a destination we would want, in this context. It would either be like living in a loop of the past, existing in a semi-conscious stasis, or with either reincarnation or an additional world, an ongoing time of adventure and discovery like life.

   On the other hand, if we focus on the end of consciousness, we see an immense tragedy there in missing out on what is happening around us, and of course the literal end of us. How do we have children, knowing that someday they will be destroyed forever?

   How do we live for anything or develop our minds if they are a temporary venture, destined to return to nothingness and insignificance? When people ask these questions, they are pointing out a psychological and philosophical problem with materialistic death: it shatters our faith in life.

   For this reason, most who believe in a universe that has a living tendency toward goodness instead of raw mechanical function without purpose, as the materialists do, believe that there is a position for an afterlife which must exist and must be filled.

2. What the afterlife could be. The Christian ideal of Heaven/Hell seems ridiculous since it requires conscious gods to care about us enough to sort us according to curiously anthropocentric standards.

   The notion of reincarnation makes more sense, but then all that we learn and all that has shaped us is lost, which makes us souls so generic that our technical survival in a new form is more like being destroyed than recreated.

   Maybe there is something deep in our souls, a type of metaphysical personality, that carries with us as we are reincarnated, but at that point, we are forever rediscovering ourselves until boredom and fear make us want to exit life entirely.

   Ancient Greco-Roman-Nordic ideals of the afterlife combined Heaven and Hell into a neutral type of place where everything was simply grey and boring, and souls were sucked out of there when they needed to be incarnated as avatars. “Hey, we need a eugenicist! Incarnate that guy.”

   I posit something entirely different: after you die, you wake up in the life where you were most content. And you keep doing it. Every day, you do the same types of things you were doing then. Maybe you do not have to have a job or school, since they would obstruct you.

   But the point is that whatever made you happy you keep doing, and doing, and doing… years, centuries, aeons, go by. You are still made irrelevant to whatever is happening on Earth because you are a product of your age, but you live on in your own time period, doing what you enjoy.

   For people with purpose, this seems closer to Heaven. You find fulfillment in what you do, so you keep doing it, and over time, you transcend even fulfillment to simply find rightness in that role. You and your joy become one.

   Those without a sense of purpose would find this existence to be more like Hell. The first dozen years of smoking weed, drinking beer, banging chicks, and racing muscle cars might seem exciting, but as the centuries roll by, the emptiness would become crushing.

   Even more, you come to know your fascination with things entirely; you reach the end of your obsessions and desires, figure out your traumas, explore ideas half-remembered, discover yourself. You are sentenced to yourself for eternity.

   Those who developed full souls would find this interesting, pleasant even. The meat-suit people would experience something like Leftism: a brief period of intense excitement followed by a slowly grinding descent into heat-death.

If you have ever had a child ask you what happens when they die, or witnessed someone you love, you understand the importance of the afterlife question: you do not want to see the beauty of consciousness destroyed forever.

Consequently, human visions of the afterlife tend to involve eternal consciousness or at least eternal presence, where you are semi-conscious and acting out the things you did in life. Without this sense of an afterlife, the fear that life is bad accumulates.

Us primitive hippie hillbillies can offer only common sense: life is good, so whatever comes after life is good, too, and we may not understand it. It might even be nothing, if the option is to hate ourselves over eternity. But it will be logical and the best that can be.

Tags: afterlife, death, metaphysics, religion