When you kick-the-bucket in this terrestrial abode and head off into that great eternal afterlife located in an even greater heavenly abode somewhere beyond the Pillars of Hercules (or equivalent), no doubt you expect an everlasting existence interacting with deities and of course your fellow, albeit also deceased, humans. But what about all the other terrestrial life forms (animals and plants). Don’t they too deserve their slice of the afterlife pie? No fear. You’ll find them too out back of beyond, or wherever ‘heaven’ resides.
According to most religions, after your demise, you enter into the afterlife phase of your ‘life’. And apparently you will be sharing that afterlife with some rather exclusive company, just your fellow human beings*. There will be no other life forms present in Heaven, Hell or Hades, be they companion animals (pets), butterflies or vermin**. But if you stop and think about it, that’s nonsense. If you have an afterlife, all living things have an afterlife.
Okay boys and girls, run this bit of wisdom past your local clergy.
Let’s be clear from the outset, you are not an organism. You are a colony of organisms. You call these individual colony members or organisms, cells***. Your body’s cells are living things in their own right.
Now chances are, you believe in an afterlife when you die, an afterlife that’s still within the physical realm of matter and energy. A non-physical afterlife would be hell indeed, since you couldn’t see, hear, touch, taste or smell, and all your lifetime memories, your personality, your creativeness, all encoded in your neurochemistry, your neurons, your brain cells, would go poof. Thus: that physical you, that’s now in a physical afterlife, is still a colony of unicellular living things or organisms. If you head to the afterlife, so do all the individual living cells that made you up, including sperm cells, eggs cells, blood cells and those all essential neurons.
The logical upshot of that is that each and every single-celled micro-organism, microbe, bacteria, etc. when it dies, goes to ‘heaven’, or whatever realm(s) you think houses the afterlife. For lack of something more suitable to label this location, let’s just equate afterlife with ‘heaven’.
Thus, every multi-cellular organism, in reality also a colony of single-celled organisms, goes to an afterlife upon their demise. Jellyfish, sponges, clams and oysters, snails and slugs, ants, newts, frogs, mackerel and minnows, ravens and robins, pussy cats and puppy dogs, whales and dolphins, apes and monkeys, even plants go to a ‘life’ after death. So presumably, when you mow the lawn, all those soon to be dead grass cells will go to ‘heaven’. But at least when you get to ‘heaven’ any lawns there won’t need mowing – you couldn’t kill off anything that was having an eternal afterlife now could you? So, how cows and goats and horses get nourishment in ‘heaven’ would be a mystery.
Of course maybe you don’t need nourishment in the afterlife (so much for beer and pizza nights). That would solve a lot of problems, like the need for lions in their afterlife to kill lambs in their afterlife, but why then drag all of your digestive systems including blood circulation, liver functions, kidney functions, etc. along for the afterlife ride?
But then you can’t discriminate. Digestive cells are just as deserving of an afterlife as your (required) brain cells and neurons and nerve cells and sensory organs like eyes and ears. So in your afterlife you carry a lot of now useless baggage along, like your lungs. You no longer need to breathe in order to provide oxygen to your now immortal cells.
Further, any cell that’s part of a multi-cellular organism that expires before the rest of the colony of cells goes to ‘heaven’ or whatever (or should that be wherever?). Anything defined as alive, when it dies (as all things must even if it’s a bacteria that reproduces asexually generation upon generation), has an afterlife. That’s the logical upshot of believing that you have an afterlife. It makes no sense that your brain cells should accompany you to a ‘life’ eternal, yet a chimpanzee’s brain cells don’t because a chimpanzee doesn’t.
The proof of that pudding is that some animal cells, in the form of organs and tissues, can get transplanted into humans. Some body parts from pigs I believe are compatible for human transplantation, like heart valves. Now when the human who received that animal transplant dies and goes to ‘heaven’, isn’t it logical that the donated animal body bits go along for the afterlife ride?
As another little titbit offered up, consider the fact that 90% of you is not you at all. There’s all those trillions of bacteria and worms and mites and other hangers-on that live in your mouth and nose and guts and blood stream; those that are in your hair and on your skin thriving as parasites or even as symbiotic organisms. Most of these critters will die with you and go with you to ‘heaven’.
Besides, you wouldn’t want to go to your afterlife without having all of your previously departed companion animals present to greet you at the Pearly Gates, now would you? And of course ditto for all those pets you now have whose demise will follow yours. You’ll want to be reunited with them too.
On the other hand, if pets ‘survive’ into the afterlife, and ditto microbes, then so will black plague bacteria, sharks, scorpions, man-eating tigers, icky spiders, cockroaches, rats, cobras, and any and every other nasty you can conjure up. Your own afterlife might not be so heavenly after all!
Now I keep talking about ‘heaven’ and not ‘hell’. Why? Because it would be difficult to argue that any biological cell can be or is sinful or evil. Therefore, all cells go to ‘heaven’ and by implication you must go to ‘heaven’ since none of your body cells deserve to go to ‘hell’!
On the other hand, maybe there’s no such thing as an afterlife, a ‘heaven’ or a ‘hell’ to spend eternity in, for anything from humble bacteria to the decidedly un-humble human.
The absurdity of it all! Not that the concepts that microbes have an afterlife, rather the concept that there even is an afterlife.
*That’s good to be with your friends and loved ones forever. That’s bad if it’s your ex, your mother-in-law, and your old supervisors that would just as soon fire you as look at you.
**That’s good – no pesky flies, mosquitos, cockroaches and rats. That’s bad – no pretty flowers, no good fishing (catch and release only of course) and no songbirds.
***Thus, when you die (i.e. – declared medically dead), you don’t really die in absolute totality in the interval from one heartbeat/breath to the lack of what would have been your next heartbeat/breath; you aren’t completely dead, since not all of those cells that make up you die at the exact same time that medical science says you have kicked-the-bucket. Of course all those not quite yet dead cells will shortly follow suit, but all up, unless you were at ground zero at Hiroshima or Nagasaki (or equivalent), the snuffing of all of your cells is a drawn out process, not something that’s instantaneous.
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