Dead Reckoning

There's been a lot death around here, lately. My dad, then my mom. A couple of college classmates. My aunt, last of her generation, has incurable cancer. Kids, young adults, and, always, people in the news. Looking for former patients, I read the obits. Babies and children are there, people who fought "bravely" (it's always bravely), now in the arms of their lord.

Reading such things, I wonder (I mean this seriously, not as my usual religious sarcasm): how do believers see this process playing out on the other side? When people go to their eternal reward, which version of them is it?

In her prime, my mom was a brilliant woman, active and engaged. At the end, there was little left of who she'd been, memories stripped away, cognition below even its very rudiments. It was who she was when she died, but nothing like who she'd been. So. Does life rewind on arrival in heaven? Does she get her memories back? If so, which ones, and to which point? When she was young and beautiful, a skier? But she'd lived only part of her life then, become only a suggestion of who she'd be. Maybe, then, about age forty five? Sixty? How does it work? Is it really her? Who doles out what, and why?

And what of kids? Babies. How can they grow up to be what they would have been, robbed of the experiences coming their way?

I'm serious. Do we all revert to some mean? If so, what was the point of life? If god wanted the two year old up there, will he give her memories, collect on arrival? He'd known them forever, after all. Do they get what was coming to them? Then why not let them have them on planet Earth? Or is it god's pleasure to have forever unformed souls around him? Why would that be? I have a hard time coming upon a religious philosophy that would address this satisfactorily. Maybe reincarnation works as a model; but if, as I infer Christians believe, it's somehow you that lives there, which you would it be, and how is it decided?

Surely it must have something to do with how you lived -- what are heaven and hell for, after all, if not reward for blind faith and punishment for your god-given failings? What is life, if not an incomprehensibly brief yet forever binding audition for eternity? But if the infirmities disappear, then so do the experiences that went with them; and if babies and children are plucked away before having much of a life at all, why bother with life? How does it figure in the equation? If heaven is perfection, surely I wouldn't be "living" with certain memories that I carry around with shame or sadness (Well, we know I won't be there at all, of course; the rules are pretty strict on that.) For old people, some things get erased, maybe; for kids, some are added perhaps? But then, who are these people flitting around up there? And how will you recognize them when you get there? As I'm trying to express, it doesn't make sense that they'd be the people they were when they exited the stage. I can't figure it out.

I'd love to be enlightened.

To Infinity And Beyond

It's Sunday, so why not consider the infinite, and death.

Erasing fear of death is the main reason for religious belief. Death is a fact known universally among us sentient beings, and it's disquieting. As such, and given our environmental diversity, it's unsurprising that religion has popped up everywhere, and that it varies enormously other than in the universality of some sort of concept of life after (and, sometimes, before) death. It's what we need. That billions of people believe, equally fervently, in wildly differing mythology doesn't whatsoever deter whatever belief in whomever it is whatever they use to comfort themselves. They are, after all, only human.

So, fine.

Awareness of, and concerns about death are not absent from non-believers. Speaking, at least, for myself. I'm not particularly pleased about death; on the other hand, I find myself unable to make the leap of belief, just because it might make me feel better. To me, it feels like a copout. Like cheating. I guess it's like dancing; or playing the piano. Some things come easy and some things don't. On some level I envy the certitude of believers; on another, and mostly, I see at as a surprising (if entirely understandable, given our frailties) level of self-deception. Nevertheless, it's not as if the thought of death doesn't occur to me from time to time; so I've found it comforting to consider this: it'll be just like it was before I was born, and, as far as I can tell, that wasn't so bad. In other words, I've been dead before, for as long as I will be this time around, and I seem to have survived it. As it were.

So I was intrigued, in a very abstract way, by something I read this morning on Andrew Sullivan, who got it from somewhere else:

If time is infinite on both ends, then we have infinite rolls of the dice of probability. That means, however infinitesimally small the probabilities that brought “you” into existence, with enough rolls of dice, “you” will come into existence again, and again and again forever. And if time is infinite in reverse, “now” isn’t the only time “you” existed.

Accordingly, “you” have always existed and always will.

Sophistry? Maybe. Yet it's the sort of thing one can ponder (as did commenters on the original post) without the need to make anything up. Which, to me, is worthy. I don't find it any more comforting (less, maybe) than my own previous little "infinity" thought; and, certainly, not as comforting as -- were it possible -- giving in to the displeasure of discordance and doing that throwing in of the mental towel called religious belief.

But, as Dave and Paul might say, it's something.