The Ancient Alien’s Bible: Part Two

Since the idea of supernatural deities is nonsense IMHO, perhaps there’s another explanation behind the more likely as not reality molehill hidden inside the traditional religious mythological mountain. That explanation could revolve around an extraterrestrial flesh-and-blood alternative.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

WHERE’S WHERE

Heaven: The name of God’s spaceship, or starship if you prefer.

Hell: The brig, located off-ship, probably on Earth, where one could be exiled to if need be.

Eastern Mediterranean (Israel; Land of Canaan; the Levant; Near East; Palestine): That part of terrestrial geography assigned to the officers and crew of the Spaceship Heaven as their area of responsibility. Contrast that with Zeus and company assigned the Middle Mediterranean; Odin and company responsible for the Norse lands; and the Great Spirit who looks after the North Amerindians; and so on.

Garden of Eden: Paradise was actually a terrestrial R&R spot for officers and crew of the Spaceship Heaven. God first had to expel human trespassers after they learned or overheard too much extraterrestrial knowledge forbidden to terrestrial ears. Later on however God gave Adam an interstellar ride in his Spaceship Heaven.

Towel of Babel: To disperse in quick-smart fashion the local population to the four corners of the globe, or even within the region, would have required considerable transport infrastructure.

Sodom & Gomorrah: The twin cities were destroyed via fire and brimstone from above, leaving no trace whatever after-the-fact. The obviously high tech weaponry might have been incendiary bombs or even nuclear weapons, but it certainly wasn’t any sort of destructive weapons technology common to that era.

WHAT’S WHAT

Miracles: High technology in action. As the late Arthur C. Clarke tended to put it, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, at least to those not technologically savvy. Among the high tech examples are the medical ones – healing the seriously sick and handicapped; resurrecting the very recently deceased; enabling very elderly women – over the hill and off the pill – to become fertile and bear offspring.

Food: Speaking of high tech miracles, what does one make of manna from heaven; loaves and fishes that multiply; wine from water? This almost makes you think of the food replication device used in Star Trek.

Noah’s Flood: A whole textbook could be written about the impossibilities of the Biblical tale of the flood and Noah’s Ark. The amount of water required can’t be produced. The boat isn’t near large enough to house and feed every species that would need to be given shelter. The crew isn’t sufficient to look after their charges. But, with just a bit of high tech tweaking, what if the Ark wasn’t for an actual universal disaster but a potential one, a real possibility given those high tech star wars, or wars between the various factions of deities (think of the ten year battle between the Titans and the Olympians; or what must have raged between God and Satan or will rage as per the forecast of Revelation; or the battle between the Frost Giants and the Norse deities; or all those aerial wars depicted in those ancient Hindu texts). Now instead of having entire forest worth of plants and all those animals requiring food and waste disposal, on board, substitute a botanical seed bank and a zoological equivalent, a repository of frozen eggs and sperm or embryos or genetic materials, etc. No need for food; no waste products; not much maintenance (crew time) required, and easily room for everything in the space allowed for the Ark in the Book of Genesis. The issue of course is that all of this is high tech way beyond the capabilities of the great unwashed of that era, the locals or natives. 

Burning Bush: This is an example of extraterrestrial hologram technology in action, employed to awe the local primitives, in this case Moses.

The Ark of the Covenant: Apparently a high and rather dangerous technological device, purpose not really well explained, but obviously more than just a storage box for a couple of stone tablets.

Clouds; Pillars of Fire; Flying Rolls; Star of Bethlehem; Aerial Chariots; Whirlwinds; Ezekiel’s Wheel, etc.: A UFO by any other name is still a UFO, and in most of these depictions, the object, say a ‘cloud’, is an actual vehicle that carries a passenger, more likely as not a Spaceship Heaven shuttlecraft. 

Germ Warfare & Biological Weapons: There are numerous examples in Biblical texts where high tech biological weapons were used against populations (i.e. – the Egyptians, even God’s Chosen People) and individuals like Job.

Transfiguration: Jesus led three of his followers up a mountain, and behold his face had a rather disquieting and unnatural glow about it (much like Moses after his CE3K). In fact Jesus, and/or his clothing, shone with some sort of bioluminescence. To add to this anomaly, Jesus had with him both Moses (long since considered the late Moses who had once been abducted) and Elias (otherwise known as Elijah, the abducted). Further a ‘cloud’ that hovered over this gathering ‘spoke’ to them, one and all, with words that implied that this was God himself doing the speaking. Then the ‘cloud’ vanished like a bat out of hell. Wow! There is surely something strange afoot going on here. By the way, in common with a lot of other Biblical tales, this is repeated several times, in the Books of Matthew, Mark and Luke. In fact, I’d suggest that if you eliminated all of the duplications, the Bible would be 10% thinner!

The Ascension: Jesus departs Planet Earth to take up his new job as First Officer on the Spaceship Heaven, sitting at the right hand of her captain.

Hologram Technology: A very useful ways and means of inspiring awe in the great unwashed. Examples that spring to mind include the ‘burning bush’ and Jesus ‘walking on the water’ and appearing in the ‘flesh’ post execution.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

There have been no verified and documented sightings of the main Biblical players (God, Satan, Jesus, angels, etc.) in way over 2000 years. Where are they? I suspect they have gone away. I further suspect God and crew were recalled to home base to stand trial for crimes against humanity, though many, like Jesus, were exonerated, having played no part or role at Sodom & Gomorrah or in the use of biological weapons and waging germ warfare. Satan and his fallen angels were recalled too, probably picked up from exile, to give account for their original mutiny. Perhaps as we read this Captain Jesus of the Spaceship Heaven (or some other interstellar vessel) is boldly going and finding new Garden of Eden locales to R&R in throughout the cosmos.  

CONCLUSION

It is clear that not everything in the Bible can be easily interpreted in an extraterrestrial context, probably because much of the text’s content tends to be rather mundane soap opera of a humans-only nature. That aside, after you take into consideration all the versions, all the translations and associated issues with that, translation and copying errors (deliberate and accidental), embellishments, artistic license, human imagination needed to fill in the gaps, plus the multiple authorship of all the Biblical texts itself, not to forget that the texts weren’t written down till decades, even many generations after-the-fact (it’s like nobody recorded and wrote down today’s news until the year 2112 – many an error would be made), I conclude that the Bible can largely be interpreted not in a supernatural way but rather an extraterrestrial one.

Unfortunately, if I am right, then all your theological baggage of an eternal life everlasting goes right down the drain – maybe not a bad thing if you thought you were Hell-bound, or even if Heaven-bound as the concept of eternal life is actually hellish as you would rather quickly be bored out of your afterlife skull, and you still have infinity yet to come.

My Top Religious Anomalies: A List

All of religion is anomalous, but some bits are more anomalous than others. Here are some of those bits.

GOD: This isn’t really an anomaly due to any conflict between theory and observation. There is very little of either. The anomaly here is why anyone in their right mind would believe in such a supernatural deity. The gap between observational evidence and theoretical faith is so vast that it staggers the mind – at least it boggles my mind, all the more so since the only real description of God’s bona-fides, the human penned Old Testament, exhibits Him not as a just, loving, forgiving, merciful and compassionate deity but an all-round SOB that makes Hitler look downright cuddly.

CREATION, THE CONCEPT OF: One of the biggest mysteries to me is why anyone in their stark raving right mind would assume anything and everything had been created from scratch, as in Genesis for example. You cannot make that assumption from first principles based on personal observations and human history. Knowledge that there were in fact creations therefore must be based on information passed down from those with way more insight or knowledge than you could possess. Who passed that information on down the line?

HEAVEN & HELL: If they exist, heaven and hell have to be physical places with some sort of celestial and terrestrial coordinates respectively. Despite all these millennia that have flowed under the bridge since Methuselah was in diapers, nobody has sighted heaven up there or pinpointed where hell is located down here.

BIBLICAL OLD AGE: Though Methuselah is the best known, there are a whole pot-full of Old Testament males-only who reach ripe old age way, way, way in excess of three score and ten. The anomaly here is that even with the best of diets, exercise regimes, health and medical care, and outstanding personal habits (sound sleep, no drugs, no alcohol, no smoking, etc.) no human alive today can come within a bulls roar of the longevity achieved by Methuselah, Adam, Noah, and a host of others. The anomaly is easily resolved in this case – the Bible is full of it; “it” being rather messy and smelly.

NOAH’S FLOOD: A whole textbook could be written about the impossibilities, not just the anomalies, of the Biblical tale of the flood and Noah’s Ark. The amount of water required can’t be produced. The boat isn’t near large enough to house and feed every species that would need to be given shelter. The crew isn’t sufficient to look after their charges. That doesn’t seem to discourage those from spending vast sums of money not to mention time and energy boldly gong where others have gone before and like those who went before, returning empty-handed!

EXODUS, BOOK OF: There are multi-dozens of anomalies, things that just can’t be, reported in the Bible. Of all of these, the most anomalous is the Book of Exodus, because some of the events recorded there can be checked against another independent historical source. If the history in the Book of Exodus is found wanting, and it is, then if one holy book goes down the gurgler, then all the rest of the books are suspect too.

The anomaly here is that the Book of Exodus features the land and peoples of ancient Egypt fairly prominently. A couple of key Biblical characters play leading roles there – Moses and Joseph – not to mention thousands of alleged Hebrew slaves. Nasty things happen to that land and those peoples like the ten plagues and the drowning of pharaoh’s army. The anomaly here is that you’d expect ancient Egyptian records to verify and collaborate and substantiate the Book of Exodus, but you don’t find anything of the sort. It’s as if the Biblical version took place in a parallel universe – or in the imagination of the all too human author.

BIBLICAL MIRACLES: Then there’s this Biblical bit about Joshua commanding the sun to stand still (at least that’s the way I recall it). That’s a tall tale or myth but whatever, it can’t be a physical reality. But wait, there’s more! There’s Jonah and the whale; Eve’s creation from a rib; walking on the waters; the walls of Jericho tumbling down at the sound of no doubt out of tune trumpets or rams horns. In the Bible we have this tale of the multiplying of loaves and fishes out of virtually nothing.

Miracles are part and parcel of any and all supernaturally based religions. Miracles of the supernatural kind (and that’s the only kind of miracle that counts here) violate one or more laws, principles or relationships established by science. There can be no such thing as a supernatural miracle in theory. However, there have been numerous reports of supernatural miracles.

Reported events cannot violate the natural state of things. If they do violate that natural state of things, then they must be supernatural. There’s no known theory that can accommodate supernatural events. That’s part of the conflict between science and religion. The conflict is an anomaly.  

THE AFTERLIFE: A concept that closest to the hearts and minds of nearly all humans and human cultures past and present is what happens to us after we kick the bucket. The answer is we transcend into another life – an afterlife. Every culture, past and present, has an afterlife concept, a life after death concept, or some sort of an eternity or immortality worldview. However, the concept of eternal life is actually hellish as you would rather quickly be bored out of your afterlife skull, and you still have infinity yet to come.

Not all of the versions of the theoretical afterlife can be correct however. Idealistic theoretical expectations that when you die you won’t stay dead, versus practical reality that observations show that dead things stay dead, are indeed conflicting, therefore anomalous. However, nobody has ever come back from the dead to prove the reality of an afterlife to the satisfaction of any unbiased referee.

Your Soul, Your Free Will and Your Afterlife: Part Two

The soul, free will, and the afterlife consisting of Heaven or Hell are among the central tenets of the Christian religion. All have philosophical baggage attached. In two cases, the soul and the afterlife, that baggage is a rather excessive amount.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

The Concept of an Afterlife: Heaven, Hell or Other:  It should come as no surprise that we have some sort of internally hard-wired need to believe in an afterlife, especially one which is pleasant (like Heaven - that of course doesn’t make it of necessity a given). The only experience we’ve ever had has been as a living being. Since we haven’t yet experienced death, it’s in the realm of the totally unknown, and unknowable (until we cross that boundary). At best we are nervous about the unknown, even scared, perhaps terrified – even more so when the unknown is also unknowable. No one has yet be proved beyond reasonable doubt to have come back from the grave and tell us about death, which, is the biggest, most important unknowable of the lot. So, it’s no wonder that believing in an afterlife (or Heaven) helps us overcome our unease.  Despite that, we still fight like the dickens to postpone death, no matter how convinced we are that Heaven awaits! Anyway, let’s look at some specific questions that suggest that the concept of Heaven is, as Star Trek’s Mr. Spock would say, ‘Illogical’.

Firstly, I have to assume that Heaven is an actual physical place with a defined location. That is, if it’s to accommodate humans (and animals?), and presumably the humans are physical (in order to see, hear, touch, etc.), then you need a physical location – the exact place and size are immaterial. So, we have a third dimensional Heaven, that experiences the passage of time (not everyone arrives at Heaven’s Gate at the exact same moment), and allows an existence of physical objects that can be touched, seen, heard, tasted and smelled. Translated, Heaven has a physical location within our Universe and has the properties central to mass, energy, space and time. That said, the ultimate fate of Heaven, and therefore ultimately your ultimate fate, rests with whatever the ultimate fate of the Universe will be. Either prospect is bleak. If our Universe, of which Heaven is but one suburb, ceases its expansion and begins to contract, then it ultimately comes together in a Big Crunch, the mother of all Black Holes and presumably goes ‘poof’. On the other hand, if it continues to expand for all eternity, then ultimately the suburb of Heaven will be totally isolated from the rest of the diluted Universe; dark, freezing cold, and absolutely boring! The idea of spending eternity – absolute infinity - in one place, no matter how heavenly, must ultimately prove to be depressing. In fact, such an existence one could argue would be pure Hell! Lastly, there’s this scenario that as space ever expands, more and more ‘dark energy’ is created (because ‘dark energy’ is a property of space itself), and ‘dark energy’ is a repulsing push-apart force. It is postulated that there will be ultimately enough ‘dark energy’ in the Universe to firstly rip apart clusters of galaxies, then individual galaxies, then their stars, right down to the level of molecules and atoms. This Big Rip (obviously) scenario ultimately has the fate of the cosmos having a Universe composed of nothing but the absolute un-rip-able elementary particles. Presumably, Heaven and all it contains will be ripped to shreds as well.

Anyway, before the end of the Universe as we know it, okay, so you arrive in Heaven. What do you do? Apart from the wings and the haloes and harps bit that is, I would assume that Heaven would be a pretty boring with eternity stretching out in front of you. If they don’t have your favourite beer on tap in Heaven, are you really in Paradise? What do you do in that great cosmic eternal waiting (for Armageddon presumably) room after you’ve read all the National Geographic’s or Woman’s Weekly or Reader’s Digests from cover-to-cover for dozens of times? Do you have hobbies in Heaven? Do you have some kind of nine-to-five job? Are there cultural events and libraries and dining out available? Do you form new relationships, or are you stuck with the old ones? What about shopping – supermarkets presumably are necessary to feed a body that still has a physical essence. Presumably you also need water and air. If so, where do they come from?

Let’s start with one obvious question, what do you look like in Heaven? Presumably you must have some sort of appearance so that others can recognize you (I can’t imagine you go around wearing a nametag). Do you look the same as that you that died? That could be tricky if you died all mangled up in a car/plane/train wreck, or had your atoms scattered to the four winds at ground zero at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. What if you died as a six month old foetus? What if you died with some body parts of someone else or had plastic surgery – is your appearance that of before or after? We could assume that everybody in Heaven is given their appearance that reflects what they did, or would have, looked like at age (pick a number, say) 21. But how would Mum recognize her six month old foetus, or a child recognize their father when the child wasn’t born say until daddy was already 55 years old?

Let’s say you died with essential artificial body parts. What’s the status of your health in Heaven? Presumably you are restored to perfect health, so if you have an artificial heart I gather you get your old organic heart back, even if it ‘died’ decades before you and had long since decayed away. If you were mute, or deaf, or blind all your life, can you now speak, hear or see? If you were old and senile, presumably you’ll have your memory fully restored and razor sharp in Heaven.

How do you communicate? Is there one universal language in Heaven which you instantly master the moment you get there, no matter what your previous languages or language skills or in fact if you died before ever learning a language?

How do you get on with people in Heaven who you didn’t get along with when living, like maybe your neighbour, or boss, or ex-spouse, or that bully who pushed you around in school? Is everybody lovey-dovey with everyone else?

Do you have any natural sexual desires in Heaven? What about sex? I take it as given that you’re not allowed to, or can’t, reproduce (despite the edict to ‘be fruitful and multiply’). But is a Heaven without heavenly pleasures really Heaven?

So, a physical Heaven appears to be a somewhat difficult can-of-worms to deal with.

On the other hand, maybe Heaven doesn’t have any actual physical reality (there’s no matter, no energy, no time, and no space) and it just houses nebulous non-physical souls that exist in total isolation. That’s a rather depressing concept.

Either way, Heaven is illogical. Oh, the same sorts of arguments apply equally to Hell.

Forgetting Heaven for a moment, could there be an afterlife but no God? Yes, of course, but (there’s always got to be a ‘but’).  The ‘but’ in this case is that it’s possible, providing that you can provide a natural, as opposed to a supernatural ways and means of transcending life to life-after-death, and that I doubt you can do. Since I reject a supernatural explanation, and since you can’t come up with a plausible natural one, then I conclude that there is as likely as not, no supernatural God (or gods) that can provide this afterlife service. A natural afterlife would be akin to being a citizen of a country that has no government; an afterlife without any infrastructure. But (there’s that ‘but’ again), maybe there is a natural, well naturally artificial anyway, explanation for an afterlife after all.

I refer to the idea noted above that we might exist in a computer software simulated cosmos. If our life is simulated, so too may we, after being deleted from the alive-and-well, full-of-life software, reappear in another software program called Heaven or Hell (or maybe Spirit World). Now I know nearly all of you gentle readers will reject the idea that you are just a simulated being in a computer generated universe. However, I conclude that you take the idea seriously, since it just may well prove to be your one and only ticket to an afterlife!

Captain Yahweh and the Starship Heaven: Part Two

We’ve all heard of Heaven, but beyond that the concept is pretty fuzzy depending on your culture, your religion, your upbringing, and your personal interpretation(s). There are probably as many worldviews of Heaven as there are people who think about it. My own unique spin on the concept not only envisions Heaven as a physical place, but a high-tech one as well – not the home of Yahweh (God) the deity (who doesn’t exist) but Yahweh the extraterrestrial – once Captain, now ex-Captain of the Starship Heaven. That is, Heaven is a spaceship (or was – it’s gone away now).

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

3) Enoch Visits the Starship Heaven

Now apparently some flesh-and-blood human mortals have visited Heaven and returned in the flesh-and-blood - Enoch is an example.

Enoch apparently authored a trilogy of books, titled the “Book of Enoch” or “1 Enoch”; then there’s the “Second Book of Enoch” and finally “3 Enoch”.

While the first chapter of the “Book of Enoch” describes the fall of the Watchers, the angels who fathered the Nephilim, the remainder of “1 Enoch” describes Enoch's visits to Heaven in the form of travels, as well as visions and dreams, and his collective revelations about what he saw and learned.

In that first “Book of Enoch” there’s a chapter called “The Astronomical Book” (1 Enoch 72 – 82) which is also called the “Book of the Heavenly Luminaries” or “Book of Luminaries”. 

This chapter or book contains descriptions of the movement of heavenly bodies and of the firmament, as knowledge revealed to Enoch in his trips to Heaven guided by Uriel. Uriel acts firstly as a guide for Enoch in chapter one of the “Book of Enoch”, titled the “Book of Watchers” and he (Uriel) fulfils this capacity in many of the other chapters or books that make up “1 Enoch” like the chapter comprising his astronomical thesis. Now Uriel is one of them there archangels (or senior crewmembers of the Starship Heaven, IMHO) and therefore pretty qualified to act as host and probably chauffeur (shuttlecraft pilot?).

The upshot is that one can visit Heaven up close and personally while in a very much alive physical body and return safely to Earth. Sort of sounds like a Biblical version of Shuttle astronauts visiting the International Space Station!

4) The Afterlife Carrot-and-Stick

So why is there an entire deception over this ultimate Retirement Home in the Sky (Heaven as paradise) concept? Well, it’s a version of the old carrot-and-stick approach. Captain God has got to keep the primitives under his jurisdiction on his straight-and-narrow; keep them in line, off the streets and out of trouble. It’s like being under the thumb of your parents – if you’re good, you get dessert; if not, you get no supper at all. If you’re good, an afterlife of paradise awaits; if you’re bad, an afterlife of hell awaits. That there is no actual afterlife paradise, or afterlife hell, is beside the point. As long as you think there is, you’re under Captain God’s thumb and under control.

Now “life wasn’t meant to be easy” according to the wisdom of a former Australian Prime Minister, and no doubt in 4004 BC it wasn’t for most of the great unwashed. But an afterlife in paradise made all the hardships easier to bear. You were less likely to go out on strike and earn an afterlife down below instead.

5) Resurrection

Now I really have to clear up one very popular conception, or rather a total misconception, and that is, when you die you get resurrected, you go into Heaven, body and all. Consider how many people have died. That would make for one very crowded spaceship! The proof of that ‘no body’ pudding is that archaeologists, anthropologists, forensic professionals, the police, the medical profession, undertakers, etc. deal with dead bodies all the time. If you dig up your great grandfather’s grave you’ll find a body in it – a skeleton at least and skeletons qualify as a body or at least a vital part of what makes a body, a body. If somebody dies in a car accident their body doesn’t suddenly do a vanishing act Heavenly bound.

Some bodies don’t even survive death intact to get transported to Heaven. If you get eaten by a shark, you get converted into fish flesh and fish poo. If you were at ground zero at Hiroshima or Nagasaki your body got vaporised. Many people post death opt to have their bodily remains cremated; ashes either stored in a jar by loved ones or scattered to the four winds eventually to be incorporated into the environment. Your ashes aren’t whisked away to Heaven and reassembled into a resurrected you.

Even if the body remains intact post death, it’s not going to remain that way for very long. The zombies may not get you; the vampires may be denied; but the itty-bitty germs won’t be. A frequent phrase is “what is my purpose in life?” Well, your ultimate purpose for existing is to die and be a food source for bacteria. Your brain, that which contains all of what makes you, you – the ‘inner you’ rots away consumed as food by various microbes. Whatever remains of the ‘inner you’ (memories, personality, etc.) is now housed in millions of microbes. You become microbe flesh.

So, scratch out any immediate thought of resurrection and a quick trip to paradise within seconds of your demise.  

As to a much later, future, resurrection of the body, forget-about-it! Once dead, you’re like that fallen Humpty Dumpty. Once you’re fish poo; vaporised; cremated; your brain scrambled and digested and turned into microbe flesh, no jigsaw puzzle or Rubik’s Cube enthusiast can put you back together again – now or ever. In a nutshell, neither you nor God (supernatural or extraterrestrial) can unscramble a scrambled egg.

Now there will be multi-millions of people who will vehemently disagree with this. Why? People have a vested interest in God being able to unscramble eggs. People desperately want to and need to believe in an afterlife especially one that dangles paradise in front of you. It’s understandable but that doesn’t make it so. 

6) Is There A Starship Hell?

Now I’m sure the question on everybody’s lips is that if there is a Starship Heaven, does this mean there’s also a Starship Hell? No!

Nearly all people, therefore nearly all societies and cultures believe in an afterlife – those multi-millions referenced immediately above. Very few of us want to die even though we have no choice in the matter, so it’s not surprising that we have opted for the next best thing and invented that security blanket – the afterlife – and we would have done so irrespective of any deities be they supernatural or just plain old extraterrestrials.

Another trait universally shared by humans is the concept and application of symmetry. For every concept there is an equal and opposite one, an anti-concept. If you have goodness you have evil; truth vs. lies; beauty vs. ugly; the yin and the yang. So if you conceive of a paradise afterlife in the above direction, there will need to be an anti-paradise afterlife in the downwards direction. And thus nearly all societies have the underworld, or Hades or Hell or whatever you wish to name it.

But since there is no such thing as an afterlife the application of symmetry in this case is totally irrelevant. So just because you have a Starship Heaven (which has nothing to do with your nonexistent afterlife – those concepts of Heaven/paradise and the afterlife being just God’s carrot-and-stick strategy) doesn’t mean you have a Starship Hell – an afterlife in Hell also a part of God’s carrot-and-stick mind control. 

Fortunately, God, his Starship and those carrots-and-sticks have gone away.

Author’s note: All Biblical quotations taken from the King James Version.

The Afterlife

“Nothing is certain but death and taxes”, so the saying goes, and while much has been written about taxes, death is my topic under consideration, or at least your survival after death. The concept or subject of death (and closely related subjects) has (much like taxes) spawned billions of words (and conversations), millions of documents, multi-thousands of texts – and for all of that, we’re still none the wiser when it comes to death, or at least post-death! [Taxes we understand!]

Of all the Big Questions, one of the biggest of all is of course, is there any sort of life after death? Is there perhaps a heaven or a hell?  Or perhaps a life after death is as having an existence solely as some sort of spirit or ghost. The afterlife is akin to exobiology (otherwise known as astrobiology) in one sense – both are ‘sciences’ in search of their subjects!

Actually, quite apart from the fact that all major religions preach the existence of an afterlife, there are quite a few ‘religions’ where the death of an individual is actually celebrated (in song and dance, etc.) because they firmly believe that that person has now gone from ‘rags to riches’, the ‘riches’ part being the afterlife where all is peaches and cream and you get three square meals a day (including seconds!).

Now either there is some sort of on-going perception of the Universe after you are deemed medically dead (an afterlife), or there is not.

If there is not, then death is akin to the existence you had prior to your conception! You have no recall or perception of the Universe prior to your conception – it was peaceful; a stress-free, tax-free, memory-free, perception-free existence – if you could call it an ‘existence’. Translated, without an afterlife, post-death is akin to pre-life. It is a blissful state of nothingness.

Of course if there is no afterlife, if you only get one short bite of the cherry, or grab at the merry-go-round rings, because for 99.999999999+% of the Universe’s existence (assuming the Universe has as well a finite lifespan), you were a non-event. [Of course for most people, the great unwashed, even while alive you’re pretty much a non-event in the grand cosmic scheme of things!]

Even if you have an afterlife, and assuming there’s no such animal as reincarnation, 13.7 billion years of history have passed you by. You were a universal non-event from the Big Bang (and before, if there was a before the Big Bang event) through the date of your conception. That’s still a long time to be of no consequence to the cosmos!

Questions, questions, lots and lots of questions arise. Is it logical to have a finite beginning but an infinitely long (afterlife) ending? And what happens to you if there is an afterlife but the Universe hits a Big Crunch? If there’s a Big Crunch – the reverse of the Big Bang, then even your afterlife presumably is kaput!

If, on the other hand the Universe expands forever and forever (infinitely), and ‘dies’ an eventual Heat Death, albeit still existing as cold (as near to absolute zero as you can get) dark (no energy, no light) elementary particles, atoms, molecules, and larger bodies such as white dwarfs, neutron stars, etc., then your infinite afterlife is going to be a rather dull one – eternity spent contemplating for all practical purposes an ever expanding Universe tending towards a state of pure vacuum!

Then too is the theory that the relatively newly discovered ‘dark energy’ content of the cosmos increases in strength over time, ultimately not only accelerating the expansion rate of the Universe, but ultimately tearing apart clusters of galaxies, galaxies, stars and solar systems, molecules, atoms, right down to the most fundamental of particles – it’s termed ‘The Big Rip’. Presumably, the realm of the afterlife is still a part of the Universe, so if there is a Big Rip, well the afterlife you gets ripped apart as well!

Perhaps it’s better to go out with a Big Crunch bang than with an eternal cold dark whimper or being ripped apart! Or, perhaps there is another dimension or plane or parallel/alternative universe/existence where you will spend an eternal afterlife (complete with harp and wings and halo) where there is no Big Crunch or Heat Death or Big Rip – but I wouldn’t bet on it!

I should stress that it’s the fate of the Universe that’s important here vis-à-vis ‘living’ an afterlife. The demise of Planet Earth is of no consequence. If an afterlife is somehow on a different plane or in a different dimension, then what happens to Earth – existing in yet another plane or dimension - is of no matter.  I assume however that the Universe, containing all that there is, contains your afterlife plane or dimension and therefore its fate is your fate. So when the entire cosmos goes kaput (in either direction – Heat Death or Big Crunch), then it’s curtains for you too! 

Another point, if people really believed in an afterlife – in a life after death paradise – then they wouldn’t go to such lengths, expend so much time, effort and expenses to avoid or delay their own death, would they?. If you’re aged, suffering the disabilities of same, in pain, say due to cancer, why not give in immediately and go to paradise? No, people tend to fight the prospect of death with all the resources they can muster, even though it’s ultimately a hopeless battle. They might state they believe in an afterlife, but they fight tooth and nail to avoid it! 

Should one be afraid of death? Only if one firmly believes that there is a nasty afterlife (Hell?) to which they are likely bound for. But, there’s no evidence anywhere, at anytime, that such a ‘Hell’ exists; has existed or even can exist. The proof of that afterlife pudding lies with those claiming that there is such a thing. 

Somewhat akin to the Christian concepts of Heaven and Hell afterlives, is the concept of the ‘spirit world’ or moving on to a ‘higher plane of existence’ after your physical death. I’m actually not really sure what a ‘higher plane of existence’ actually means in any sort of physical sense. Presumably it has to be physical since there are those who claim that when you die, some part of you, when it departs the physical body and heads for the ‘spirit world’ or a ‘higher plane of existence’, actually has weight or mass, and thus your afterlife essence is a physical thing and thus must reside in a physical medium. Methinks that such phrases as ‘spirit world’ or ‘higher plane of existence’ sound a lot like parapsychology, paranormal or psychic mumbo jumbo.

However, let’s assume the ‘spirit world’ or ‘higher plane of existence’ is a physical place, for sake of argument. The only thing that makes any sense is to employ these six or seven hidden dimensions that string theorists postulate (string theory only works in ten or eleven dimensions, four of which we are intimately familiar with – front/back; left/right; up/down; and time). But, the consensus is, that these dimensions, if they exist at all, are ultramicroscopic, curled up in a volume less than typical atomic sizes. So, maybe you spend your post-death eternity in a space that occupies less volume than that of an electron! This kind of recalls the worlds within worlds within worlds within worlds philosophy (it’s hardly science, albeit a frequent topic for sci-fi authors), akin to the series of Russian dolls all nested inside one another and each getting progressively smaller and smaller as you go along. Regardless, such an afterlife doesn’t sound very appealing, but what do I know!

Actually there’s a reason rooted in physics that suggests that you can’t have an eternal afterlife – unless you’ve had an eternal pre-life. If you just have an afterlife, then something has been created from nothing since 100% of your mortal remains, remains stuck in our physical world, and yet presumably your afterlife existence must somehow be connected with some matter/energy that had bugger-all to do with your physical life. Of course if you had a pre-life, then that matter/energy went into short-term storage, awaiting your return to Never-Never Land, the spirit world, whatever you wish to call it, after some short metamorphous into a flesh-and-blood existence. The fly in the ointment is, I don’t recall any eternal pre-life, do you?

If by chance some part of the matter/energy that made up your flesh-and-blood-ness travels with you to, and become you, in the afterlife, then, when that amount or bit of matter/energy is multiplied by all humans who have ever lived, live now, and will live, and presumably ditto all animals too, that’s going to add up to quite a net loss of matter/energy to Planet Earth. I’m unaware of any net loss of matter/energy from our abode that would suggest transference from same, to Never-Never Land (or whatever, wherever).

There’s one other option. If our Universe is a simulated Universe; if you are just part of a virtual reality, say a character in an extremely realistic video game, then it’s possible that that simulation contains an afterlife software program, perhaps called ‘heaven’, perhaps ‘hell’, perhaps ‘spirit world’. Being nothing but a simulated being, software computer code, might be the price you pay to get a software computer coded afterlife!