Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.
– Carl Sagan
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In Letters from the Earth, Mark Twain’s Satan tells his angel pals,
…the human being, like the immortals, natually places sexual intercourse far and away above all other joys–yet he has left it out of his heaven! The very thought of it excites him; opportunity sets him wild; in this state he will risk life, reputation, everything–even his queer heaven itself–to make good that opportunity and ride it to the overwhelming climax. From youth to middle age all men and all women prize copulation above all other pleasures combined, yet it actually as I have said: it is not in their heaven; prayer takes its place.
There are, I think, two sides to my feelings, as an atheist, to the idea of an afterlife. One is contained in that quote, and in the Carl Sagan quote above. Remember, those of you have been following me on this journey, what I said about Jesus? Yeah. Heaven, too. The usual explanations of Heaven, well, they leave a lot to be desired, and serve to highlight the saddest, sorriest aspect of far too much religious thought — the desire for staticness, unchangingness. Life in the universe is founded on change. That is all it is. Time’s arrrow moves onward, and things change and grow and evolve. Death is the cornerstone of that principle. But the religious imagination balks at that, sees corruption, a fallen world. It dreams of something unchanging and perfect.
That is the desire of a dead, withered imagination. That’s what Twain was getting at — you leave out the best things of life! That’s what Sagan was getting at — the joy of life is in questing, learning, in change and growth! A Heaven worthy of the name would have to be THAT.
Kafirgirl has, in her journey through the Quran (here, and here), dealt with the subject of the Islamic conception of Heaven a couple of times now, and it’s the same, dreary garbage as the Christian Heaven of popular imagination. Granted, Twain might be happy to note that sex has a place; he’d probably notice, irrascible commentator that he was, that the privilege is extended to only a few. But even there, sweet Jeebus, how dreary! Sex, food, rivers. For eternity. Unchanging, neverending, eternity. And don’t waste time with claims of allegory and symbolism and poetics. It doesn’t wash here. Because even the lofty, poetic interpretation brings one to the idea of some unchanging, perfect state. Static. Total union with God? The Eternal, Unchanging God outside of Time and Space? Static, static, static.
Among world religions, I have a lot of respect and love for Buddhism (well, for some of its forms). But the idea of Nirvana always brings me up short. The whole idea of a Wheel of Life, and the point of practice being to get off it — no. We’re just looking for another perfect, unchanging, static reality, then. We’re denying Life.
If there’s an afterlife, I hope it’s Sagan’s vision, coupled (coupled. get it? GET IT?!) with Twain’s implied Heaven. Something alive and questing and full of chances to strive and understand and grow. Because that’s what life is, and it seems down right sacriligeous to pin one’s hopes on the antithesis of life.
In the next post (coming later today!), I’ll deal with the second part of the equation. Because atheists are people just like everyone else, with the same fears and worries and hurts.
