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Will Momma be Blonde in Heaven?
Nobody can ever be sure that there is no afterlife. It is impossible to imagine not existing from the inside. We can easily imagine a universe without us in it, life insurance salesmen rely on this, but it is impossible to imagine being dead from a first person perspective. That’s for a very good reason, being dead means you have nothing with which to think in any way at all. But, well, I could be wrong, I suppose.
The idea of an afterlife does not exist in the early part of the Bible. The reason all those Old Testament blokes lived to such a ripe or over-ripe old age was to demonstrate how good they were and how much God blessed them. But they died eventually and that was it. The only exception being Elijah, who didn’t die at all but was taken bodily into heaven, at least he was according to the only witness (old baldy) who retained his mantle and inherited his job. To the ancient Hebrews death being the end was self-evident. Until somebody has told you anything different it is self-evident. We can see the difference between dead and alive and we instinctively grasp that we are like other people and they are like us, it takes training in philosophy (or autism) to come up with solipsism. Nobody instinctively believes in heaven, it is a notion that requires cultivating.
I imagine that ideas of heaven emerged from people using euphemisms for death such as sleeping with the ancestors. This raises questions about where the sleeping is to be done, what stops them waking up and coming back and what they do while they are there. It is easy to imagine people thinking the ancestors would be having a good time, which felt better than imagining them suffering and also explains why they don’t come back. The ancestors are happy to be dead. Why people still fear death despite reassuring one another with tales of heaven is clear, death is still the end and your body knows that and won’t let your mind think anything so stupid unless it’s really not working properly. The other reason to fear death is that once somebody has started the idea of surviving death it is crying out to be abused as a means to control people. If you can be tortured after death and once dead you can’t escape hell becomes a real prospect. Hell is slavery to an evil master you can’t escape from even by killing yourself or dying of the abuse. Of course if you think about it heaven is not that different.
Heaven is a place you can’t escape from and it is a sentence of eternal servitude. The Christian Heaven is decidedly not about you; it is not so much a reward as an extra opportunity to praise God. You can’t get promoted to the top job in heaven no matter what happens. All higher posts are already filled and nobody is going to vacate them or even let you fight them for the posts. You don’t get to decide what happens in heaven, it is all decided for you and you just have to make out that you like it because the only alternative is much worse. It really is a horrific nightmare prospect and the worst thing about it is that you are supposed to believe it is good and you want to be there and you have to be excited by the prospect and show everybody else that nobody wants to be there more than you. It’s like scout camp without end.
Heaven is:
all the time in the world and not a moment to call your own
no pain and no gain
no point to the day and nothing different tomorrow
an eternity of gratitude and nothing to live for
never having to say you’d rather be somewhere else
all you will ever know again
pointless and endless
never over no matter how many fat ladies sing
an offer you can’t refuse
something you have to show that you want, to show you’re not evil
the endless futility at the end of your pointless life
the meaningless reason for your existence
an eternal karaoke in which you never choose the songs
the playground of those devoid of imagination
the place the pious go
full of all those people you were delighted to think you would never see again
obligatory, interminable and insufferable
Picture some scenes from your childhood in which you had to meet elderly aunts you didn’t know or want to know. Multiply by the biggest number your imagination will allow. Remove all hope of it ever ending. Remove the privacy screen that protects your thoughts ... and hold that rictus grin. For ever.
There is all the time in the world and nothing to do except praise God.
The purpose for your mortal life is to get to an eternal life in which there is not and could never be a point, and certainly not a point that has anything to do with you. You exist to give up your existence and to continue it indefinitely in a form that cannot possibly give you any pleasure unless you have hollowed out your ego and rented the space out to belief in superstition and myth.
Alternatively there is Paradise, a halal pie in the sky, the life of a sheikh indulging pleasures of a renewed flesh in an equally pointless eternal existence devoid of challenges. It sounds a wonderful place to take a holiday but surely it would drive any man insane after a few months let alone a few millennia. The human psyche is designed to solve problems, designed by its designer, the blind watchmaker of evolution. Without challenges the human mind would go insane just like those zoo animals which rock and sway and pace up and down. Any form of heaven cannot be heaven, except for the purest and highest form, which for the Buddhist or Hindu takes many rebirths, the perfect state of nirvana. The extinction of individuality. Or to put it another way when you’re dead, you’re dead.
So, as an atheist I am already looking forward to the ideal heaven, the highest form of perfection: peaceful non-existence. The karmic wheel has turned full circle, perfection is in simplicity. In death we cease to be. Obviously, we have known it deep down all along.