Counting On An Afterlife, Are You?
Or how to offend the largest number of Newsbreak readers with one article
Who doesn’t want more ice cream? Sure, I get it. No one wants to die. I don’t want to die. Big deal. I’m going to die. So are you. So is everyone you care about including that adorable kitten who just shredded your favorite chair.
Ah, but there’s always a work-around.
And one of the great workarounds in all of recorded history is the notion of an afterlife. If you think about it you have to agree that whoever came up with it was some kind of evil genius. Yep, so what if this go-round is filled with drudgery, pain, unfair labor practices, and lousy health care insurance? You get to go on to eternal life after this one, so no problem.
And, boy, has nearly all of humanity eaten that one up.
To be clear, those old Jewish mystics stumbling in from forty years in the desert weren’t inventing anything completely new. The Babylonians had been telling everyone since 1750 BC that we continue “to exist as (we) did in human life, but in a much less energized form”. As shades of our former selves we could meddle in the affairs of the living and even have some limited communication with them, but mostly the dead lived in the earth in a “some dark, cavernous world”.
Clearly, however, the idea of an afterlife of blissed out floating among the clouds with angels and saints for company would be far more attractive (for some people anyway). Add to that the spice of getting to send all those nasty people to hell — you know, the ones who park illegally in handicapped parking spaces — and you’ve got a winning system.
While history nerds are still arguing about why the Emperor Constantine chose Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire in 380 AD but let’s admit that the offer of a cushy afterlife had to have been a major selling point. With an average life expectancy of roughly forty years — and those forty years were no picnic, let me tell you — the whole heaven/hell set up was bound to be popular. So your parents sold you and your siblings into slavery to avoid starvation? You could suck it up and endure knowing that your Eternal Reward was promised as long as you did what the fella in the funny hat told you to do.
While that made sense in a world where an abscessed tooth or difficult pregnancy could take you out, it’s a profound mystery that so many otherwise seemingly intelligent people now seem so incredibly attached to the notion that they’re going to some eternal bliss out after they die.
True, life isn’t exactly a bed of thornless roses now either. So, sure, we can live to be 70 or 80 or 116.
But we’ve got neo-liberalism keeping an eternal war machine fueled and gobbling up resources and the lives of other people’s kids while millions of acres of forest across Canada are burning out of control. Our “leaders” are clearly far more invested in keeping the billionaires happy than in ensuring We The People get to sleep indoors or have access to decent health care. Even the orcas have had enough (and they probably aren’t too worried about going to hell).
We might consider setting aside our rose-colored glasses and admit that there’s never been a time when it was life was easy. For any of us, human and otherwise.
As mammals hemmed in by biology and time we are doomed.
None of us will escape pain, loss, sadness, and death. The fix is in. And, sure, whatever distractions we can create for ourselves to keep from jumping out windows are valid coping mechanisms. On that level, hey, if the idea works that you just have to endure this Christ-awful mess we’ve made of the world until you die and get admitted to the Pearly Gates, go for it. Let’s take a moment, however to also note that that kind of thinking hasn’t done much for the kids we keep having who will have to deal with the messes we keep making, but hey, you do you.
Regardless of our reasons for holding onto this notion that there’s more we get to do after we die let’s admit that it’s simply human greed.
The success of the species as well as it’s apparent downfall is the reptilian-brain determination to grab all the cookies and keep them. Sure, sure, there continue to be attempts to share and share alike. Those attempts get demonized pretty quickly. It doesn’t help that even the most well-intentioned of these schemes wind up victim to yet more cookie-grabbers.
What’s so awful about having one life to live?
Why does anyone need eternal bliss? Have they taken a moment to savor the small blisses around them every day? The way their kid looks with her face smeared with jelly, there’s a shot of bliss. Don’t miss it. Let’s not be so focused on the hereafter that we miss the bliss that is right in front of us. Want what you have and realize how incredibly blessed you are to have this much.
It’s just greedy to want more.
None of this seems all that controversial to me but when I published this story on Newsbreak, holy moly! I never get this level of inane responses when I publish work anywhere else. 113 comments so far and a (to me) shocking number of them seem to be from some very worked up religious types.
Not sure what got them so bent out of shape. It’s not as if I said that their heaven didn’t exist or that God is just a scary bedtime story to keep unruly children in line. I thought it, didn’t say it in this piece.
But I stand by my statement.
If you can’t be happy with this life, you probably won’t be happy anywhere.
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