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.

Cosmology’s Biblical Resolution: Part Two

There are but two possible or realistic fates for our expanding Universe. Either it will expand forever and ever, or else the expansion will eventually halt and reverse into a contraction. If you had to choose between the two, based not on the science of cosmology, but on the Bible, you’d have to opt for the former. Fortunately for the Bible, cosmologists place their bets on that option as well.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

ETERNAL LIFE

*Heaven as the happy ultimate in retirement villages and facilities has drawbacks when it comes to life eternal or everlasting life. The big drawback as I see it is that you are going to end up bored, not to death obviously (you’re already dead), but out of your feeble little mind. You might occupy yourself with the novelty of it all for the first million years or so, but what of the following billion years after that and the trillions of years that follows on from that – and you’re not even a stone’s throw within being ‘everlasting’ or ‘eternal’ yet.

ETERNAL YOUTH

*There’s another and usually overlooked issue with respect to having eternal life – eternal youth. A common situation in mythology arises when someone asks for and is granted immortality but forgot to request that the ageing process be suspended – oops!

RESURRECTION

*Now to get from this life to the afterlife that you hope to spend eternally in a physical place requires two events, your death and your resurrection. Death is the natural order of things. That’s the easy part.

*Resurrection as I understand it means the return to your former self after your demise (your death). Resurrection however defies the second law of thermodynamics – it’s like unscrambling and un-cooking a cooked scrambled egg – unless there some intelligence with super-science behind the resurrection; something beyond our reckoning.

*As per the above linking of immortality with eternal youth, I’ll assume that once resurrected, the ageing process isn’t also resurrected.

*Jesus (J.C.), if there ever was a Jesus, was a 3-D physical being. J.C. is the prime example of someone allegedly resurrected back into a 3-D being (unless he was ‘resurrected’ as a hologram of course, though a hologram is still a something that involves physical principles and energy. Still, a hologram is an interesting way of providing a ‘resurrection’).  

*Now issues arise as to what your biological age will be when you are resurrected. The unwritten assumption would be to be resurrected back to the age you were at the time of death as was the case with J.C. That’s nifty if you’re 50, but what if you snuff it at 100? Do you want to spend eternity as a 100 year old? The opposite problem – what if you die as an infant, say a day or two after your birth. Would you want to spend your infinite afterlife as a new born baby? It would be even worse if you die before even being born! 

*Maybe the optimum solution would be if everyone were resurrected to what they were, or what they would be at say, age 30. And of course all deformities would be corrected in the resurrection process. That would be super-science indeed, but how does one know what, say a two-day old infant will look like at 30-years of age, and how does one resurrect experiences and learning and memories that a 30-year old should have but a two-day old infant doesn’t.

*Then again maybe one size fits all. That is, there is only one body model and you, and everyone else, gets resurrected into that single form or body type, though that still isn’t much help for issues arising with our two-day old baby.

*Well maybe we should just forget resurrection of the entire body. It’s a can of worms. Even more so a Mission: Impossible to resurrect a body that was cremated and had its ashes scattered to the four winds and already recycled unto other life forms.

SOUL

*Well, instead of resurrection of the body, there’s usually just talk of your soul winging its way to Heaven, or alternatively your soul suffering eternal torment as in “damn your soul to Hell”. Now the soul; your essence; what makes you, you; what makes (or made) you tick, leave the body upon your death. Now either your soul has mass, and one study – never independently verified said it was 21 grams, or your soul is without mass. If it does have mass, we’re back in the realm of chemistry and physics again and now one can imagine a physical Heaven inhabited by floating souls instead of bodies. I assume here that a physical soul (21 grams worth or otherwise) has sensory apparatus; otherwise you’ll be eternally floating deaf, dumb and blind. It would be like spending forever in a sensory isolation tank – you’d go bonkers really quick-smart.

*Now if the soul has no substance, no mass, it weighs zilch, then it’s hard to understand how it could represent the essence of anything. A weightless, no mass soul couldn’t interact with anything. There could be no physical forces holding it together and so it would dissipate, if the concept of nothing dissipating has any meaning.

GHOSTS

*Somewhere between a resurrected body and the soul must be something akin to wraiths or spirits or phantoms or ghosts – call them what you will. This is at least clear-cut – if you can see a ghost, hear a ghost, if the ghost interacts with other matter and energy, then the ghost is a physical object. Though the concept of a spirit or a ghost (holy or otherwise) is noted in the Bible (phantoms and wraiths miss out), somehow the image of Heaven as a celestial version of a haunted house just doesn’t resonate.

*Equally unexplained is how one goes from a dead body to an animated ghost – what part of you stays dead and what part of you returns to an animated condition? In much the same way that applies to reported out-of-the-body (OOB) experiences. OOB happenings have to really be all in the mind since you cannot have by any physics we know a physical body split into two physical entities, each with functional sensory apparatus that interacts with energy (mass in another form), like light and sound. How do you divide one live physical body into two live physical bodies, even temporarily? Even if the OOB part of the original physical body were light as a feather, gravity would pull the OOB back down to earth. It couldn’t just float around like a hot air balloon.

ENTROPY & OTHER COSMIC DANGERS

*As the Universe expands it gets colder and colder – the Universe’s finite amount of energy gets spread around in an ever increasing volume. Further, heat spreads from areas of warmth to areas of coolness thus ultimately making everything a uniform temperature – a concept known as entropy whereas a high state of order (hot areas and cold areas) turns into a lower state of order (temperature uniformity).

*How does Heaven shelter itself from entropy – the second law of thermodynamics? When all the stars in the Universe have all exhausted their fuel supplies and the temperature of the cosmos just hovers above, just a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero, how does Heaven cope from the Big Freeze and shield itself from this and for how long can Heaven keep itself isolated?

*Heaven must have some sort of ‘force field’ to protect it as the Universe sinks ever lower in temperature. (Hell need not worry quite as much as it obviously has a lot of energy storage, supply and reserves in stock!)

*Heaven, being a part of the cosmos (it’s around somewhere), needs to shield itself not only from entropy but other cosmic catastrophes. Heaven may have a force field to shield it from gamma-ray bursts and other deadly radiations (wouldn’t you just love to hear God say “Increase power to the shields, Scotty”) but no amount of shielding will stop it going down a Black Hole gurgler, so you’d better hope Heaven has a good helmsman and sensors!

ALTERNATIVE ONE

*One solution is that Heaven and the afterlife aren’t physical at all, but somehow ghostly in the extreme or nebulous or without actual form or substance. The problem there, just like with that soul with no mass, is that no physical presence means no matter, therefore no chemistry and physics is possible. In short, if there’s no matter, there’s no energy. It’s hard to conceive of existence of any kind that doesn’t involve the transfer of energy. For one thing, all your five senses would be inoperative. What kind of afterlife would it be if you couldn’t see, if there were no sound, if you couldn’t touch and feel anything. All this requires physics and chemistry and the transfer of energy.

ALTERNATIVE TWO

*There is no Heaven (or Hell for that matter); no afterlife, no resurrected bodies, no ghosts and no soul. Cosmologists will have to continue to rely on traditional methods to figure out the ultimate fate of the Universe.

CONCLUSION

*Any Biblical promises of eternal life are simply pie-in-the-sky and cannot be a believable scenario by any critical or rational person. Thus, the fate-of-the-Universe question is still up for grabs, or in limbo land, though, irrespective of Biblical claims, just based on current scientific (not Biblical) evidence, any sane person would in fact put their money on infinity and not on the Big Crunch.