Have You A Soul?

There would be few among us who would deny the existence of a soul; specifically their soul; probably of supernatural origin; and their ticket to an eternal afterlife – somewhere. But no matter how you slice and dice the concept, you open up a can of worms at every turn. And once those worms get loose, it’s near impossible to re-can them.

The concept of a soul tends to be one of those ideas shared across each and every culture, every society, every religion, nearly every philosophy, and from each and every historical period since recorded history began right up through and including modern 21^st Century times. As such, it is a concept that one has to come to terms with as one could hardly call such a universal concept trivial.

However, it must be noted that cultures of any kind can be very, very wrong. For example, the ancient Egyptians thought that the heart was the be all and end all of what made you, you and thus was left inside their mummies. The heart was your soul. The brain (mind) on the other hand was a worthless structure regarding the afterlife and was pulled out of the deceased and discarded.

Then there are the old standbys, no longer credible, that the Sun went around the Earth, the centre of the cosmos; the Earth was flat; the Earth was created in 4004 BC; natural disasters weren’t natural but supernatural; the atomic theory was nonsense; there were only four elements (air, earth, fire & water); racial and cultural superiority are obvious (if you were of that race or culture), and there are hundreds of other examples that proved really wrong that came from all possible walks of life.

Whether or not the concept of a soul proves to be another analogy to that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow remains to be ‘seen’.

Fundamental Characteristics

The generally accepted criteria part and parcel of the soul is: Only human beings have a soul. The soul is the essence of what makes you, you. The soul is alleged to be indestructible. The soul is separate and apart from the physical body (which has mass, takes up space and uses energy). The soul is immortal (starts at conception and goes on everlasting from that point) and according to some eternal (what would become your soul pre-existed your conception). There are many variations on the theme of the soul. Some say animals, even non-living things like mountains have a soul, but the above tends to be the norm. Some say you have more than one soul, a yin soul and a yang soul for example. The nice thing is that you can claim whatever you want to about the nature of your soul, or even the soul, and odds are nobody could contradict you with solid evidence.

Can of Worms: So what happens to all those immortal souls if the cosmos has a finite lifetime or lifespan?

The Nebulous (Non-Physical) Soul

If the soul is nebulous or incorporeal, that is it has no mass and uses up no energy and takes up no space.

Can of Worms: If the soul is your ticket to the afterlife, yet your soul is a non-substantial ‘substance’, then you exist in the afterlife as a non-substantial ‘substance’ (a contradiction in terms) which would mean you would be deaf and blind since you wouldn’t have ears or eyes; not even a brain to receive or neural networks to carry sensory signals. Of course you couldn’t touch, taste or smell either. If you didn’t have a physical brain; no neural network, with no neural chemistry to support this non-existing infrastructure, could you honestly claim (not that you could of course) to be you? Where would your personality, memories, emotions, creative abilities, etc. be housed, all of which require a substantial substance. Even ghosts*, assuming such things, are corporeal since they can be seen and heard and thus must be comprised of matter and possess energy. 

The Physical Soul

Some have suggested that the soul weighs about 21 grams but such claims have never been verified to the satisfaction of the wider based biological, medical, and theological communities. But if the soul has mass, then the soul is a physical thing.

Can of worms: If the soul is physical and has structure, modern medicine would know about it. Since modern medical textbooks don’t mention and place and identify and label the soul as an anatomical structure, it isn’t.

If the soul is biochemistry that’s disbursed through X (presumably the brain) then it would be subject to being altered by other chemistries resulting from aging, injury, drug use, sleep or lack of sleep, and all of the other solid, liquid and gaseous substances you ingest and excrete. That actually makes a bit of sense since the essence of you naturally changes over time but can also be altered by you accidentally or deliberately.

Can of Worms: If the soul is just chemistry then the ‘soul’ doesn’t go anywhere when you die. But at least chemistry is immortal, or at least the basic fundamental building blocks (i.e. – electrons, quarks, etc.) that make up chemistry are.

Origins of the Soul

Presumably your father’s sperm cell didn’t house your soul (or even half of it) and neither did your mother’s egg cell, so at conception you were soulless. Presumably therefore, if one accepts that conception is the beginnings of you and that you have a soul, presumably a soul was somehow naturally or supernaturally (usually the latter) a part of the conception process. Sperm and egg meet – no soul. One nanosecond later, the newly formed zygote now has a soul. Or, perhaps the acquisition of a soul in slightly further on down the track to allow for identical twins to have non-identical souls. Regardless of exactly when in that nine month gestation, before the baby pops out of the womb, it has acquired a soul.

Can of Worms: Say one has a five month old foetus, who received his or her soul at conception (by whatever means, natural or supernatural), but who is spontaneously aborted (naturally) at five months. Now presumably Christian theologians will tell you that five month old foetus went to Heaven. Now I ask, what does an eternal five month old foetus do in Heaven? Of what possible use is Heaven to a five month old foetus? I mean the foetus has no command of any communications ability (i.e. – language). It cannot read or write. It has no conception of good and evil or of sin. It knows bugger-all about religion and theology and God. It could not recognise any of its relatives like its natural parents when they go to Heaven. Would you like to spend eternity as a five month old foetus? The same could be said about a five day old blastula or a five hour old baby.

Evolution of the Soul

The self-aware you that is you changes over time; over the duration of your lifetime. Therefore, your soul, assuming a soul of course, must change over time. Therefore, if you get a soul at conception – by whatever means going – it must be a book of blank pages that can be written and written over again and again as you naturally change until the definite version is completed – at the moment of your death when change is no longer possible.

Can of Worms: Again, if the soul is incorporeal, how can it change (i.e. – evolve)?

Disposition and Fate of the Soul

Okay, you’ve kicked the bucket. Now what?

Can of Worms: See conclusions directly below.

Transmigration of the Soul

The equation isn’t one soul for one individual. Souls are too valuable to waste and so it’s one soul for many bodies, each in turn. The soul travels from body to body. As one body dies, the soul migrates to a newly formed body. Some suggest this is an ever upwards process from lower life form to higher life form. Others suggest that the playing field is level or that if you haven’t performed deeds up to expectations your soul can go downhill.

Can of Worms: That would mean that the contents of one’s soul get wiped clean or deleted between the time it leaves the newly deceased body and the time it enters a new body. How that happens isn’t clear whatsoever.

Conclusions

The soul, especially in connection with an afterlife, makes little actual sense at all. How can a something soul actually be nothing physical? If your soul is incorporeal then your so-called Heavenly afterlife is akin to being eternally asleep, comatose, in a vegetative state (i.e. – a ‘dead’ afterlife, for all practical purposes).

If your something soul is something physical then it stays with the body when you die – there is no mind (i.e. – soul) body duality.

* Ghosts have nothing to do with the soul since after death the soul resides in either Heaven or Hell or Purgatory. Ghosts are terrestrial – obviously.



Life After Death For Microbes

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.



More Random Irreligious Thoughts

* Imagine the following: Destroy every religious text of any persuasion in existence; eliminate every religious institution; sack anyone involved in organised religion (or even disorganised religion); purge the name of any and every deity ever proposed, and then for good measure wipe clean the memories of every person with respect to anything and everything to do with religion in any shape, manner or form. Let’s turn the entirety of humanity into a flock of another kind, just like real sheep who presumably have no concept of all the sorts of things religions go on, and on, and on about.

Firstly, that would make for a much more peaceful planet, but that’s not my real point here. If the human race all of a sudden had no inkling of religion and associated rituals like prayer, deities, and thou shall nots, and miracles, and associated baggage - the slate wiped clean – would we invent it all over again and if so would it all be in the same old form as we know it now?

All of our religions cannot possibly be correct, but all of them could be wrong. Assuming that’s the case, could there be out there a really bona-fide god or gods – supernatural deities – with some sort of associated baggage that we have no comprehension of? Say these hypothetical supernatural entities have never made contact with Planet Earth.

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* Why is religion (and history too for that matter) so popular vis-à-vis say science or economics. Religion (and history) is told in story form and we’re natural born story tellers and recipients of say bedtime stories. Whole bookstores and libraries are filled with variations of “once upon a time” “they lived happy ever after”. There are multi-tens of thousands of movies and TV shows that play upon our need for stories. So that’s one reason. Another reason that religion is so popular is that it comes as a package deal. All the Big Questions (is there a God, your purpose, the meaning of life, free will, your soul, an afterlife, etc.) are wrapped up together in a nice box with a lovely pink ribbon. Reject religion, reject the pretty box of answers to your Big Questions, and you have to actually do some hard intellectual yakka to find out your own answers to those questions, individually, one at a time. So most take the easy road, the package deal, instead of striking out on their own, seeking their own intellectual answers come what may.

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* In May of 2013, the current Pope (as noted on the “Huffington Post”) said that atheists were okay for salvation and a place in heaven providing they had lived the sort of life that God intended. Alas, the very next day a spokesperson for the Vatican refuted that – no way can an atheist get on the good side. Well, so much for papal infallibility! It really is all so phoney – an absolute joke. 

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* Miracles (if they exist) are God’s correction fluid (whiteout) – assuming God exists. If existence is affirmed on both counts that actually makes a mockery of an all-knowing, all-powerful supernatural deity since it would have been logical and preferable to have set in train the necessary conditions that would have negated the need for a later miracle. For example, don’t bother to raise the dead; rather ensure they don’t snuff it in the first place!

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* Despite many references in the Bible of God talking to someone, Adam and Eve, Cain, Jacob, Jonah, Moses, etc. we never get an actual description of what God looks like. He speaks in a cloud or as a burning bush. All images of God, artworks, are of the human imagination. So, what did God really look like and why was He ashamed to actually show His face (something true unto this very day). Perhaps God doesn’t want to be seen because He was starkers – absolutely naked – and perhaps, assuming some mortal actually saw God, well no one dares mention the ‘emperor’ who has no clothes. If humans were made in God’s image, and God was ashamed of His nudity (as Adam and Eve were ashamed of there lack of clothing post their nibbling on a forbidden snack), then perhaps that accounts for our reluctance in most public environments to show off our birthday suits.

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* If you’re really honest about things, what’s THE most important wish list part or objective or goal or aspect of your life? Is it money? Is it power? Is it reputation? Is it winning the Nobel Prize? Is it success? Is it having the most perfect family? Is it pitching a perfect major league ballgame? Is it becoming POTUS, or perhaps Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Is it (fill in the blank)? No! More likely as not, your number one priority it is NOT DIEING! Well good luck with that ‘cause it ain’t gonna happen.

So, what’s the next best objective? An afterlife! Why? What’s really annoying about snuffing it is lose of consciousness. The idea that your consciousness that you spent a lifetime building up from scratch will just dissolve into grey goo to be consumed by bacteria is pretty abhorrent. If you have an afterlife, the minimum you must retain is consciousness or self-awareness. You may still be old and grey and can’t get it up; you may not have access to alcohol and tobacco and other similar addictions; you may only get TV reruns and old magazine issues to read; you favourite pizza may not be on the menu; you may even have to share your afterlife with your ex-boss, or your ex or your in-laws, others you’d rather not share anything with or be within ten miles (or kilometres) of; in short not everything will be just hunky-dory, but at least you’ll retain your consciousness for all eternity (and be bored witless even before the first several thousand years or so passes by). Is that a price you are willing to pay?

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* There are many, probably a majority of the population, who will claim to have had some sort of up close and personal experience with God, or Jesus, or angels, or some sort of supernatural entity. They will of course use that very personal experience as not only evidence, but proof that God, etc. exists. And it is extremely difficult to counter argue their conviction based on their experience. However, I too have had an intense up close and personal experience too, but one which I’m sure shows that these sort of profound spiritual experiences are some combination of wishful thinking (a desire to believe) and mental hallucinations. 

Now like many hundreds of thousands, even millions of people, I like to put out food for wild birds, especially in environmentally stressful times like winter or during a drought. Over the course of many years, I’ve had thousands of visitations – what bird is going to turn down an easy free feed? At the end of the day, there’s usually some cleanup to be done like sweeping up all the leftover birdseed husks, etc. And so it came to pass one early evening, I was waiting for two birds to finish up before I did the daily cleanup. And in due course they flew off, up over my roof. And so I went outside to start the cleanup, but there sitting on the apex of the roof were the two birds. As I looked up at them, they looked back at me, and for some inexplicable reason, I received a telepathic message from the two birds: “thanks for all the food; we’ll be back tomorrow”. And then they flew off. It was so real an experience that I just stood there stunned, in fact so moving was that experience, so bonding was that human-animal encounter that tears immediately started welling up in me.   

This was the first and only time I ever had such a vivid even spiritual feeling that remains as vivid and as spiritual now as it did seconds after the fact. But clearly I was imagining the whole thing. Birds cannot speak the human language. Telepathy doesn’t exist far less exist between birds and humans. Birds probably have no concept of being given a gift and thus no mental concept of giving thanks.

So yes, when someone says they had an up close and personal encounter with God (or equivalent), I’m sure that they are 100% sincere and a believer. But I’m equally convinced it’s a case, as was mine with the two birds, of self-deception.

Created in Man’s Image: God’s Virtual Reality: Part Three

Reality isn’t all that complicated. It resides 100% within that brain-thingy of yours. The Big Question is, is that (your brain) the sum total of reality or are their other realities outside of your own that reside as both an outside reality and in other brain-thingies? And where does the reality of a god (or any supernatural deity) fit into that Big Mental Picture? Perhaps God was created in man’s image.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

NO TWO GODS ARE THE SAME BECAUSE NO TWO BRAINS ARE IDENTICAL

I read recently that “… nothing precise can be said about God, because God is that which is beyond the scope of human thought or experience”. That’s wrong. At least I was under the impression that a whole potful of Biblical characters experienced God, like Moses. Anyway, God is totally within the scope of human thought since God’s our mental creation (recall all those human traits God has), and even if by chance God has some sort of independent existence, as per all else in life, the universe and everything, that existence is shovelled into and contemplated within something that’s human, the human mind. The human mind absorbs and reduces God down to understandably human terms. How many zillions upon zillions of words have been written and spoken about the concept of God (or Allah or whoever). 100% of those words have been generated via the human mind, so we’ve certainly spared no mental expense in dealing with the Almighty! Even if God is the sound of one hand clapping, well we can contemplate that. That contemplation might be wrong, and again every person will have his or her own personal contemplations that will all be different, but everyone comes to terms with the concept, so God (or the lack of a god if you’re an atheist) is not beyond the scope of the human mind.

Even if there is an external reality (your brain isn’t the sum total of all things), no two individuals, or rather their brains, will perceive that external reality down to the last and infinite decimal place. I believe in a god; you believe in a god, but when we compare notes, subtle shades of grey appear. How can there be such a thing as absolute reality when no two people will ever agree on what that reality is, even if it takes going down to the quantum level to find the split in the perception of that reality.

So there are as many versions of God’s (or equivalent) existence and nature as there are human minds. Quite apart from the formal definitions and distinctions between the thousands of formal religions that have been in the past and that are now in the present as to ‘who and what is god’ (all formally presented by the human mind), or even restricting things to God-of-the-Bible (the Bible by the way is the product of the human mind, as is the Koran, as are all religious texts), each individual human member of each religious sect or cult (like Christianity) has his or her own variation on the God theme, courtesy of their unique brain chemistry. So considering God apart from the thousands upon thousands of polytheistic deities (and who’s to deny their validity), there isn’t one God, but billions of Gods, each a unique God in the mind of that beholder. No two insides (minds) are identical.

GOD ON THE BRAIN

To illustrate all of the above with a specific concept near and dear to the hearts and minds of many a human, we shall further consider the lone ranger we call “God” or in more general terms the concept of a supernatural god or deity.

That God exists in one form or another is in no dispute since there are zillions of references to Him in all manner of formats, from the printed word like the Bible to what resides inside your wetware. That existence however can be akin to that of say Allan Quatermain, the creation of H. Rider Haggard. That Allan Quatermain exists is in no dispute either since there are millions of references to his existence too. But, Allan Quatermain is virtual reality – perhaps God is too.

That God is near and dear to the hearts and minds of humans is also because that’s probably what’s been taught or otherwise rammed down our collective throats by parents, teachers, church and sometimes state. Or, perhaps you have self learned about this godly concept off your own bat. Or you may have had what you perceive as having had a direct experience – a eureka moment – when God talked to you, or the angels paid you a visit, or you had some sort of defining rapturous moment that you identified with the supernatural, like your prayers were answered or you experienced a miracle.

Why would the human mind, the human imagination invent a god, or the human mind accept as given the concept of a god? Well probably because the human mind, of all the animal kingdom’s minds, is the one unique mind to have foreknowledge about personal death. Humans, like all animals who battle for survival, don’t want to die. Humans know that they will die and that they are powerless to prevent their death. But what if (a variation of the phrase let’s ‘make believe’), there was someone or something that could rescue one from this pending unfortunate state of affairs of kicking the bucket and give one a second (after) life? To do so, the imagination has to go beyond the natural to the supernatural (why not) and to a local inhabitant of that supernatural world, a god or a deity, who can make it so. 

The key word here seems to me to be ‘supernatural’ not God, since God is a small subset of alleged deities inhabiting the realm of the supernatural. It doesn’t really matter if you substitute Odin or Zeus or even the Rainbow Serpent for God – same general concept.

Perhaps because of that concept of impending finality, death, our brains seem to be hardwired or conditioned to accept the general nature of the supernatural – things which are ‘above and beyond’ the natural or normal bits and pieces we associate with the concept of a Mother Nature. For comparison, it would be interesting to have conservations with, or read the mind of, your cat or dog or an elephant or chimpanzee (our ultimate primate ancestral species) and find out what beliefs or worldviews they have in all things supernatural, like in a deity or life after death. My guess is that only humans ponder over the possibilities of deities which maybe extra evidence that someone or something impersonating a deity (i.e. - ‘ancient astronauts’) has mucked about with our wetware to ensure this.

So somehow or other, the human mind, brain, and all associated electromagnetic energy and biochemical bits that collective make up our brain’s neural networks, are quasi-hardwired to invent and contemplate and in general put faith in the reality of the supernatural and a supernatural deity, albeit, if I’m right, it’s really just virtual reality since it all stems from within the mind contemplated by the mind and not from an external outside to the mind via the five senses.  

THE END

When your wetware dries out; when your neurons cease firing; when the microbes attack and the rot sets in and the chemistry stops, then your inner reality ceases too. Whether you take life, the universe and everything with you or not is irrelevant. Your reality is just as kaput as kaput can be. 

CONCLUSION

Assuming a really real reality, an external reality (and that’s probably the way to bet) coming to terms with life, the universe and everything is a job performed by your brain chemistry. The concept of God (or equivalent) is part of life, the universe and everything, so coming to terms with the nature of God is also a function of and a task performed by your wetware. I suggest that ‘coming to terms’ with God is entirely an internal mental affair; God was created in our image.

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!

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

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.

The Concept of a Soul: The trouble here is that ‘the soul’ has so many diverse definitions that it can mean just about anything you want it to mean. Probably no two people would describe the concept in the exact same way. However, I think we can agree that an egg cell has no soul – however you define it. A sperm cell has no soul – however you define it. Therefore, at conception, you have no soul. No cell has a soul, therefore no tissue (a group of common cells) has a soul, therefore no body organ has a soul (an organ being composed of various tissues), therefore you, as a collection of various organs and organ systems must have no soul!

So when did you get a soul (assuming there is such a thing and that it has some degree of tangibility)? Did you get your soul at birth? Perhaps it was on your first birthday? Perhaps you received you soul when you became of age, say 21. Perhaps it’s just as likely that you don’t receive a soul at all – there is no such separate and apart physical thing you get from any higher authority. Perhaps your soul just develops or evolves naturally as part and parcel of your growing maturity over the years, in which case it can’t be totally separate and apart from the body. In other words, if you develop a soul akin to your developing a sense of morality or spirituality, then it can not ‘leave’ the body after death. Translated, your soul (however you define it) isn’t your ticket to an afterlife. It resides somewhere in that brain-thingy of yours, locked somewhere within that maze of biochemistry that collectively makes up your grey matter. As an aside, if you were to clone yourself, would your clone have a soul?

The Concept of Free Will:  To start will let’s examine the paradox of free will. Here’s one of many contradictions. You insist that you have free will. Therefore, God has no control over your actions. Therefore, God is not an all-powerful being. A God who isn’t all-powerful isn’t the most perfect being that can be conceived of. God has to be the most perfect being anyone can imagine. Therefore, there is no God. Now if God is all-powerful, even though God has granted you free will, your free will is ultimately an illusion living on somewhat borrowed time in that God can revoke that free will gift at any time He choses and thus have His wicked way with you!

Another take is that if God exists, all His attributes must be compatible. If all God’s attributes are not compatible, God must not exist. For example, God can not have His own personal free will and be all-knowing. If God is all knowing, then God knows in advance what He will and will not do. If God knows in advance that He will not do something, then He has no free will of His own. He has no options available to Him but to not do what He knows he won’t do.

Anyway, God has apparently granted humanity, including you, a concept called ‘free will’. That is, you are free to pick and choose between various alternatives, including making choices or decisions that can be described as good, or as evil; moral or immoral; ethical or otherwise. However, regarding such a free will, I would argue that you can never be 100% sure that any choice or decision that you make wasn’t due to the universal laws, principles and relations part and parcel of physical causality that started operating from Day One (the Big Bang event) and thus forever and ever predetermined. You might be 99.999% sure you have free will, and that it was God given, but I can’t figure out any way you could absolutely prove it to any outsider, or to yourself for that matter if you are honest with yourself..

If you accept free will, then you must of necessity admit that causality does not always operate. Just as you, dear reader might refuse to believe in pre-determinism, I absolutely refuse to abandon 100% causality, an absolute cause-and-affect principle, which then forces me to reject free will, even though I do so reluctantly. It gives me no joy to think that what I’m doing right now is the ultimate outcome of the set of conditions that existed at the time of the Big Bang event and that I therefore have no choice since that’s the nature of a clockwork Universe, but it’s the lesser of two philosophical evils for me!

I assume that anytime you, dear reader, make a voluntary choice, that there must have been some causality chain of cause-and-effect happenings that led to that choice vis-a-vis some other choice. Your decision didn’t happen for lack of any reason at all. Put another way, your choice has a foundation. Now I just extend that foundation, that causality chain, back to the initial set of conditions present at the origin of the Universe in much the same way as you can trace your (extremely improbable) existence via the chain of existences of (extremely improbable) ancestors, going right back through the unbroken chain to the first proto-cell some four billions years ago, (a proto-cell which in turn may have come from the depths of space and has an ancestry (your ancestry) extending back untold billions of years before Planet Earth ever formed).  You certainly can’t deny that ancestral causality chain, so why deny a causality chain that ultimately extends back to the Big Bang event and the pre-determined chain of happenings and which leads you to whatever choices you are currently contemplating?

And so ‘yes’, using that logic, you aren’t responsible for your decisions and resulting actions (though I’ll bet legal eagles everywhere would have something to say about that, for that undercuts our entire legal system). But from the point of view of the Universe, it might ask, ‘so what?’ It matters not at all to the cosmos (and to 99.9999% of all life forms, including humanity – past, present and future) whether you deposit money in a bank, or rob that bank!

Just as we have computer simulations (such as ‘Life’, a computer software package) that allow for no free will, that is, everything is pre-determined given the initial set of programmed conditions, could we in turn be part of a simulated ‘Planet Earth’ computer ‘game’ or simulation of someone (something) somewhere out there? Do the characters in a typical video game have free will, or do they dance to the tune of their programmer and player? Can you, dear reader, prove to me (or anyone) by some chain of logic that you or we are not the product of or existing in a simulated and therefore no free will, computer generated, virtual universe?  If not, then you have to admit, however remote the odds, that that possibility exists.

If the ‘many worlds’ interpretation of reality is correct, free will is an academic or moot point since all choices or decisions are enabled. To explain the ‘many worlds’ concept, it boils down to the interpretation that whenever you (or anything else – animate or inanimate) are forced to choose, to make a decision, all possibilities are entered into. So, you have this free will decision to do X or to do Y or to do Z. You actually end up doing all three, and thus there’s a new universe Y, and a new universe Z, which splits and branches off from universe X because you choose via your free will (or so you think) to choice X. In reality, you also choose Y and Z. Therefore, no free will was ultimately exhibited.

However, if I were a betting man, I’d bet that humanity does have free will, although that in no way actually proves the existence of God. Ultimately however, does it make any real difference whether you, dear reader, have free will, or the illusion of free will, as long as you actually believe you’re your own boss? 

By the way, can you have free will in Heaven? I mean can you, of your own free will, commit a sin in Heaven? If you can, well you shouldn’t be in Heaven at all and God has stuffed up, being all-knowing, in letting you in, in the first place. If you can’t commit a sin in Heaven, then God has revoked your free will!

To be continued…

If God Isn’t God, Then Who or What Is God? Part Two

In my opinion, all this Biblical nonsense boils down to a collection of myths and fairy tales for grownups. For those who really have the faith, I’m easy. But I think the concept of the Biblical God (and associated baggage) is the greatest con job ever fostered on the great unwashed. Unless, assuming that God or the gods (i.e. – Zeus, etc.) weren’t totally fabricated out of whole cloth, then maybe, just maybe, the gods, including God, are extraterrestrials.

There are two variations to that possibility.

Here’s one of those variations. What if God were in reality a very ‘flesh-and-blood’ extraterrestrial computer programmer, a computer programmer who has written a software package called, say “Planet Earth”? Maybe it’s a computer or interactive video game – maybe a homework assignment for a smart extraterrestrial student. Here’s some more evidence in support of our virtual reality.

Biblical One: Explain the parting of the Red Sea in the Bible! It’s easy to do in the movies, on a computer, or in your head.

Biblical Two: 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 either a tall tale or a myth or the result of a simulation. Whatever, it can’t be a physical reality. 

Biblical Three: In the Bible we have this tale of the multiplying of loaves and fishes out of virtually nothing. Again, you can imagine it, but that’s about it. Likewise with any sort of miracle it’s easy to visualize the event, but infinitely harder to explain it. But, as in the case of loaves and fishes, it’s easy to write a software package that can do this multiplication feat as a simulation exercise.

Biblical Four: Heaven and Hell can be created as easily as any other sort of place, complete with either fluffy white clouds and pearly white gates; harps and haloes, or devils and pitchforks; fire and brimstone!

Biblical Five: If someone (or something) is calling the simulation shots, you could obviously and easily be resurrected or reincarnated or just allowed to cease to be (that is, deleted from the program).

Paranormal One: How can reports of a Bigfoot or a Loch Ness Monster continue for decades without physical verification as if these creatures were but phantoms? Again, it’s easy to visualize such creatures, but far harder to explain how a rather largish lake monster can elude detection in a confined lake seemingly indefinitely. All these observers can’t be totally mistaken. But what if the ‘monsters’ AND their observers are both simulations, where the ‘monsters’ are simulated to be a quasi-phantom – a sort of game to play with your simulated observers?

Paranormal Two: What about ghosts and fairies and all of their various relations? You can create them on film, in your mind, or on a computer screen, so, if you can, so could another – and create you as well in the process.

Paranormal Three: How can aliens abduct humans or mutilate cattle, decade after decade, without ever being seen? It’s easy to do in a computer simulation; difficult in reality.

Paranormal Four: That goes ditto for the English crop circles. The crop circle phenomena is totally unexplainable, but it doesn’t have to be explainable in a physical sense if it’s all a virtual reality created by an extraterrestrial intelligence including the observers who see the circles and wonder how on earth it was done.

From the examples above, I conclude that it almost seems as if someone (something) is ultimately responsible for aspects of the Universe, but he / she / it / they didn’t quite think things through sufficiently. Methinks an all knowing, all powerful supernatural God type being wouldn’t have stuffed things up. The Universe is certainly stuffed up and if the Bible isn’t a stuffed up piece of literary work, I don’t know what is! So both the Bible and our Universe are either naturally stuffed up (The Bible because it was authored by flawed human beings and thus has nothing to do with the infallible word of God), or it was created stuffed up! If it was created stuffed up, well again, it’s because the creator was flawed flesh-and-blood, and hardly an all-knowing and all-powerful God. Our flawed creator created a simulated Universe, including all the Biblical baggage we have to try to reconcile with a perfect creator God (who, in my version, doesn’t exist).

Could there be an afterlife without a God? I suggest that if there is an afterlife, there has to be a natural as opposed to a supernatural mechanism, and that we’d be hard pressed to come up with one. While I can’t think of a completely natural explanation to account for any plausible transition from life to afterlife, I can think of a non-supernatural one, albeit it’s not totally natural. Just as it’s within the realm of possibility that we exist as software in a computer program called “Planet Earth”, so too might there be another computer program with associated software called “The Spirit World” or “The Abode of the Afterlife”. When you reach your termination as a simulated living being in “Planet Earth”, you get resurrected in “The Spirit World”. Of course in that sense there’s still a god, but a ‘god’ who just happens to be an extraterrestrial computer programmer, who could be flesh and blood, or maybe an artificial intelligence in its own right. Either way, it’s not 100% natural, but it’s certainly not supernatural. Of course for all I know there maybe other software programs with names such as “Hell” and “Heaven” or “Valhalla” or maybe dozens, hundreds even thousands of others we’ve never even conceived or heard of. I mean the virtual beings in one of our terrestrial computer or video games wouldn’t be aware that there was thousands of other computer or video games in existence with dozens more being produced and brought out each and every month.

It all makes a sort of sense albeit in a weird or strange sort of sci-fi way. I mean, to paraphrase a rather famous observation, “the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we can imagine”.  If there’s anyone who can give a definitive proof that we’re not a creation of someone’s (something’s) virtual reality (computer simulation) then I’d like to hear it so I can cross the scenario off my list of things to have to worry about!

That specific aside, if there is any historical evidence for a god, gods or The God, then that evidence could just as easily be equally interpreted as evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence(s), whose purpose(s) or objective(s) may not be all that benign.

So my second and more likely possible answers to ‘if God isn’t God, then who is God?’ are summed up by the well known phrase ‘ancient astronauts’. God is, or was, an extraterrestrial, but not in this case the creator of a simulated universe. Rather, a being within a really real universe. Recall (the late) Arthur C. Clarke’s third law, “any sufficiently advance technology is indistinguishable from magic”, or in this context, an advanced extraterrestrial technology and alien being welding same is indistinguishable from the supernatural or a supernatural God.

If the above argument is valid, then I conclude that it’s easy to explore the nooks and crannies of our galaxy, and seeing that we have no place to run and hide, that then we indeed have been discovered by extraterrestrials. Since one or more extraterrestrial technological civilizations have already done their boldly going exploring thing, it stands to reason that at various times in our geological and historical past we would have received visitors from the stars. If one or more such occurrences happened in our historical past, there might be some suggestive evidence of same; and thus the concept of the ‘ancient astronaut’ has come to pass.

Erich Von Daniken, including those of a similar point of view who came before and after him, collectively had the germ of a good idea, but he, and they, IMHO got rather carried away with the concept and started seeing ancient extraterrestrial astronauts behind every pyramid and megalith in existence. Now I don’t believe for a moment that aliens, or humans assisted by aliens, built the pyramids or the statues at Easter Island or any other type of archaeological monument. Evidence suggestive of ancient astronauts will probably best be found in myths and legends, including the myths and legends central to our major religions, perhaps in advanced human knowledge of scientific concepts out of sync with that particular culture so hosting that knowledge, or in art works, or other archaeological works that are suggestive of an awareness of sky beings.

Firstly, nearly all cultures have stories and pictograms about or of sky beings, including the Australian aboriginals and American Indians. Myths and legends surrounding, say, the Greek / Roman / Norse gods can be interpreted in an ancient astronaut context (ditto for other religious beings or gods), or perhaps the Biblical ‘Wheel of Ezekiel’ is suggestive. While the etchings on the Plain of Nazca were certainly not runways, for flying saucers, they can easily be interpreted as mammoth human constructions designed to be viewed by sky beings. Why go to the trouble if sky beings weren’t really around to appreciate your efforts?

Then there’s a whole pot-full of mythological creatures – the Centaur, unicorns, the Sphinx, the Griffin, Pegasus, the Minotaur, mermaids, dragons, etc. which might be non-humanoid extraterrestrial life forms. Or, more realistically, perhaps in light of the UFO abduction and Roswell greys, are the myths and legends shared by many cultures dealing with elves, dwarfs, gnomes, the fairy-folk, the wee-people, and other smallish beings that aren’t quite human. It strikes me as more logical that these ‘wee folk’ actually exist, and that’s why all the references to, and belief in, them, exist. That is, they are really real vis-à-vis references to, and belief in them, because there is some psychological, sociological or cultural necessity to invent imaginary beings, calling it mythology (as opposed to literary fiction), or perhaps calling it religion.

In conclusion, the ‘ancient astronaut’ field is a subject ripe for detailed academic study, and the concept of the ‘ancient astronaut’ shouldn’t be dismissed by scholars are readily as it has been. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely any academic would put his or her career on the line by pursuing such a controversial, ‘pseudo-scientific, topic because of the ‘giggle’ factor – Pity that.

Further recommended ‘ancient astronaut’ readings:

Blumrich, Josef F.; The Spaceships of Ezekiel; Bantam Books, New York; 1974: 

Castle, Edgar W. & Thiering, Barry B. (Joint Editors); Some Trust in Chariots!!; Westbooks, Perth, W.A.; 1972:

Daniken, Erich von; Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past; G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York; 1969:

Daniken, Erich von; Gods from Outer Space: Return to the Stars or Evidence for the Impossible; G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York; 1971:

Downing, Barry H.; The Bible & Flying Saucers; Avon Books, New York; 1968:

Drake, W. Raymond; Gods and Spacemen in the Ancient East; Sphere Books, London; 1974:

Drake, W. Raymond; Gods and Spacemen in the Ancient West; Sphere Books, London; 1974:

Norman, Eric; Gods Demons and UFOs; Lancer Books, New York; 1970:

Story, Ronald; Guardians of the Universe?; New English Library, London; 1980: 

Story, Ronald; The Space-Gods Revealed: A Close Look at the Theories of Erich von Daniken; Harper & Row, New York; 1976: 

Temple, Robert K.G.; The Sirius Mystery; Sidgwick & Jackson, London; 1976:

Wilson, Clifford; Crash Go the Chariots; Lancer Books, New York; 1972:

Wilson, Clifford; The Chariots Still Crash; Signet, New York; 1975:

Wilson, Clifford; The War of the Chariots; S. John Bacon, Melbourne, Victoria; 1978:

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.

Reincarnation: Hatched Again or Forever Dead and Buried?

“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 here, well a variation on the theme anyway. Reincarnation doesn’t of course cheat death, but it certainly circumnavigates or negates the finality of it. However, reincarnation makes relatively little if any real sense.

If reincarnation is bestowed upon you as a reward or punishment for whatever you did (fill in the blank yourself) in a previous life, the lesson is lost if you have no memory of that past existence(s) or of whatever it was that you did (fill in the blank). Now here I discount the claims of some people that they have lived prior lives and have memories of same. No matter what the merits of reincarnation are (and there are none IMHO), it is impossible to recall past lives. The egg and the sperm from which you were conceived had no past memory of your alleged past lives since they came from individuals not so related to your past existences. So, you started out from the get-go with no memory. A newly conceived embryo (blastula) has no memories. Any and all memories you now have started from that day of conception onwards – full stop*. On top of that, there’s been no absolute hard and fast historical evidence to support any such claims – otherwise reincarnation would be scientific fact, not pseudoscience supposition. It’s rather suspicious that all too often a previous  life or lives includes, against all probability, well known historical figures, like Napoleon, Elvis or JC (Julius Caesar -  presumably, if you believe in the Biblical account, that other JC is alive and kicking in an somewhere elsewhere). The probability, based on sheer numbers, of a previous life or lives, actually favors said life (or lives) being that of a cockroach, or ant, or microbe by odds of billions to one in favor. 

Anyway, the reincarnation mechanism isn’t ever explained other than by resorting to supernatural powers – there’s no known physics or chemistry or biology that could explain reincarnation.

And exactly what is reincarnated?  It’s certainly not anything physical like body shape, sex, or eye color, and it can’t be anything to do with memory, since nearly all of us have no personal you-were-there recall of what happened in say 1812 (AD or BC for that matter).  Do you have the identical personality, emotions, I.Q., etc. as your previous lives did? It’s all too nebulous!

Another thing, if Julius Caesar, Napoleon, or Elvis, or even your not as well known great, great, great Aunt Gertrude were floating around in their afterlives, and you are now ‘they’ reincarnated, you’d think they would have a vested interest in you and might therefore appear to you, keeping you on the straight and narrow  to ensure that when you get reincarnated in turn, your whatever goes to a good family who are about to conceive a child instead of a puppy dog about to drop a litter off!

Of course if your previous lives still exist in an afterlife, then what part of them can actually be in you? Of course maybe there’s no afterlife and somehow Julius Caesars’ essence goes directly into someone else hence someone else, etc. hence Napoleon, hence more people of unknown race, creed, sex and nationality, until we come to Elvis, and you (assuming you were born post Elvis’s demise)!

What if someone is totally obsessed with a particular historical time, event, and/or character, might this be a sign that they, in a previous life, lived in that time period, or participated in that event, or was that character – even if they have no direct memory of same? Methinks not. For example, there are way more individuals, with a lot of time on their hands and with a less than healthy obsession over the RMS Titanic disaster, than there were individuals on the actual ship – obviously not all could be reincarnates of the actual crew and passengers. In fact, there’s more than one individual claiming to be the reincarnation of her captain – a mathematical impossibility.

Then too, some people are equally ultra-fanatical over fictional characters, like Sherlock Holmes, James Bond or Harry Potter. Clearly you can not be the reincarnation of a fictional being! And how many thousands of Star Trek fanatics are out there whose life seems to revolve around that universe?  If it’s impossible to be a reincarnate of a fictional character from the past, then its impossibility squared to be a reincarnate of some literary character depicted as existing in your future.

The upshot is that you can be a person totally immersed in, highly knowledgeable of, or even obsessed to the point of delusion, with something historical, without there being any actual causality connection between the then and the now that one could interpret as reincarnation. Some people just live in fantasy worlds of their own making.

Then there’s the interesting “On the Beach” scenario. The novel (plus film plus made-for-TV remake film) deals with nuclear war. Unfortunately, fallout radiation spreads across and around the entire globe. Everyone is doomed – the plot deals with the waning days of the last few survivors in Australia as the radioactive ‘cloud’ heads their way. The question is, if all of Earth’s billions of people (and other higher animals) all die off, what happens to all those essences in search of something to be reincarnated into? Oops!

To pile on the absurdities, why confine your reincarnation(s) to Planet Earth? Perhaps you’ll be reincarnated as an ET (extraterrestrial) – perhaps you were an ET in a previous life!

No, reincarnation doesn’t make any sense, IMHO.

*When I mentioned this observation to a friend, she immediately suggested that the memory of a past life or lives was due to the implantation of your soul. It’s your soul (assuming there is such a thing) that has the memory.

Actually I was under the impression that it was one soul per person, but maybe not. One soul might be passed down from one person to that person’s reincarnation to that person’s reincarnation for however long the process goes on for. Maybe it’s like in Doctor Who - you only get so many regenerations (or in this case reincarnations).

Anyway, I was also under the impression that the soul is intangible or nebulous – it has no actual substance. The soul isn’t a thing that can be examined in the laboratory and under a microscope. If it has no actual matter/energy substance to it, it can’t store any memories.

Memory has to be something part and parcel of the biochemical’s and biochemistry and associated energy flows that happens in your brain whenever you remember something. Memory is encoded in your brain’s biochemistry. Memory must have some physical substance – it takes mass and energy to store and process memories. Memory can be affected by chemicals and energy. A soul that doesn’t have mass or energy presumably can’t be altered by external influences. So, if your soul contains the memories of your past lives, then no amount of foreign drugs, disease, lack of sleep, the aging process or injury will make you forget past lives because the soul is indestructible. Sorry, but if you have a memory of a past life then I suggest that memory, even though it’s a false or delusional memory, can be affected by physical influences, like drugs, disease, lack of sleep, the aging process or injury.