My recent contemplation of my thoughts on religion and secularism has been provoking more and more of these little moments where I find myself mentally confronting another of those beliefs that has no rational basis, but which has managed to hang on determinedly in my mind all the same.
These kind of beliefs remind me of knick-knacks: they serve no purpose, take up space and are often kept around for purely sentimental reasons, but you know you still kind of like them. For example, why do I have in my den, among other things, a miniature carnival mask from Venice, a replica of the Eiffel tower, and a Native American pot? They're not high quality and I don't need them to remind me of where I've been; that's why I have photos. They're just tourist junk, but I keep them around all the same.
Anyway, in this particular instance the issues that came to mind were the existence of heaven, the immortality of the soul, and really, the existence of any soul at all. I was driving back from CVS on my lunch break and thinking about death (which is not that unusual, for me) and how I think it's kind of foolish for people to be afraid of what happens when you die. I mean, everyone fears the unknown, and of course we also fear the pain of dying, and what it means to be cut short from life, but really, if you're a good person, what do you have to be afraid of? If there is a God who has a heaven, you're probably going to go there. Alternatively, if there is no God or no heaven or just nothing, you won't know that until....ever. Because you'll be dead. End of story.
Then I stopped myself, because I started to question the assumptions that I was making. Does God, if he exists, necessarily have to have a heaven? My concept of God as a remote observer does not include the threat of eternal damnation, so I don't quite see that there would be the promise of eternal life, either. I find it entirely possible that there could be a God who offers nothing more than your single, finite life on this planet. Next, if I accept that there could be a heaven, what part of you resides there? Most religious authorities would say the soul. I'm not going to spend a lot of time going over the various concepts of the soul, but I think a lot of people would think of it as something that separates 'man from beast.'
Of course, then my question becomes the following: if I accept as scientific truth that humans emerged from so-called lower forms as part of a continuous (and continuing) process of evolution, instead of the dirt-and-rib creation myth, is it possible to identify a moment in that process where God stepped in and said "Well, the ape behind you had no soul, but you're a man now, so you have one. Go put on a fig leaf." It's kind of impossible to do so, especially since species don't evolve in an instant. There was never a time when there was one single homo sapiens that suddenly popped up among his soul-less Neanderthal relatives as the only creature on the planet with a soul. I don't believe God 'steps in' anyway. So this theory for the human soul doesn't make sense to me.
Alternatively, you could posit that what we think of as the soul is really just a by-product of evolution, a more highly developed sense of self-awareness that other species, given infinite time, would have at least the possibility to develop. This would obviously make a lot of people unhappy, because just as mankind clung so long to the theory of geocentricity as a way of underlining human exceptionalism in the universe, suggesting that our precious individual souls are nothing more an yet another evolutionary outgrowth would be a damaging blow to the collective ego of the species. Still, this is the explanation that makes the most sense to me. So, if I don't believe that God, at my conception, created a unique soul for me and sent it out into the world, how can I expect that, at my death, there is anything more special reserved for it than the same end the rest of me will meet?
The obvious and disillusioning implication of this theory is that if the soul does not have immortality and there is no afterlife, there is no chance that I'll ever see my parents again. That is a bitter thought, indeed. I remember being on the point of tears a few weeks ago in Zoi's Pizza when Sean casually mentioned, during a conversation on old age, that if I lived to be 85, when I died I wouldn't have seen my dad in seventy years. But like I said before, a lot of beliefs we keep because they're comforting, not because they're logical. Of course it's comforting to imagine my family waiting for me in heaven, but...I have to admit to myself that I don't really believe they are.
I think humans have spun tales of the afterlife for so long precisely because it is so terrifying to think that we have only this short span of life on earth, and that those whose are gone, are really gone. We want more--when haven't we wanted more of everything? Humans are frequently, if not inherently, greedy with food, money, status, and sex. Life is no different.
Viewed in another light, for those people who quake with fear at the thought of facing judgment when they die, this concept can really be more freeing than anything. What will you do with your life if there is nothing more beyond it? How will you use the time you're given, and how will you be remembered by the ones who loved you? To my mind, that's the only immortality we can hope to achieve. In that sense, then, my family is not only present, but enduring. As long as there are stories to be told of the Fat Man and Mrs. D., they'll live forever.
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