Meanderings about death, hell, heaven etc...

I am already having dreams about death and most of these dreams are rather pleasant ones and some are even romantic in an ethereal way, as opposed to the erotic dreams of my youth.

The dead and the living: achieving ecological balance.

Death is both scary and fascinating. It is scary because it means the end of our existence. If one believes in life after death, death means transcending from this material world to another world, the life after death, the spiritual world. What is that spiritual or other world?

You can now find Death in rock concerts.

I don’t know. Nobody knows. Religion offers answer to that question by saying that there are two, or more, places that we go to when we die. The Catholics say there’s heaven, hell and the intermediate station called purgatory. Accordingly, by the power given to the pope and the church’s ecclesiastical council, limbo, the intermediate place where the unbaptized children go when they die, was stricken off as a dogma by the Roman Catholic Church for lack of scriptural basis. 

It was said that Nostradamus received his prophetic visions from Limbo. Now that Limbo is gone, what will happen to poor Nostradamus? I wonder if the declaration removing limbo from church dogma is retroactive. 

(I am with Martin Luther here. When Luther learned that the bishops and the pope had the power to grant salvation for the souls of the departed based on the principle of borrowing or imputing the merits of the saints and of Jesus Christ to them, he asked: Why not just let these poor souls go to heaven for free?   Anyway,  that’s church history.)

For orthodox (not necessarily correct, simply means what the majority believes) Christians, its either go to heaven or go to hell. But many are in disagreement whether the dead go straight to heaven or to hell, or they sleep first in the grave or they go to Sheol first, a neutral place where all the dead go before judgment day not different from purgatory may I  say except here there are no sufferings and no hope for the damned. Its like they are in a bus station waiting for their coaches to bring them to their destinations.. 

For the Muslims, the belief heaven or hell except in their heaven instead of having crowns for rewards the faithful are rewarded with virgins. I am wondering, what will do with all that virgins?

 Each time we sleep with a Houri we find her virgin. Besides, the penis of the Elected never softens. The erection is eternal; the sensation that you feel each time you make love is utterly delicious and out of this world and were you to experience it in this world you would faint. Each chosen one [i.e. Muslim] will marry seventy [sic] houris, besides the women he married on earth, and all will have appetizing vaginas.-Al Suyuti, Quoranic commentator. (It seems that their heaven is more fun.)

The thought that the misbehavers will go to hell scared the hell out of everyone i.e. before the enlightenment. Of course there are already people wondering why they should believe what they should believe, but they kept quiet for fear of being burned alive. Many became victims of persecutions for their world changing ideas and scientific findings; many fell victims to burnings and tortures by the Christians which I would suppose make hell a welcome relief. The persecutions did not stop the evolution of civilization; nobody can stop change.

But this changed during the enlightenment when Copernicus proposed that the earth revolves around the sun thereby smashing the belief that the earth was the center of the universe and that humanity, specifically the Christian, specifically the Roman Catholics, were the center of it all. When the traditional dogma and the superstitions of the era were challenged and the yoke of ignorance broken by the enlightenment, humanism flourished and we are now enjoying the intellectual boon and bane and everything in between. 

Copernican cosmology.

 Now, the postmodern era, hell is a common word whose meaning has lost all its power to invoke the feeling of pain; the fear fire, boiling sulfur, maggots, torture and all unimaginable suffering that goes with the package. Hell now invokes images from computer games.


 Hell is Gehenna, a place outside Jerusalem where the pagans and the apostates burn their human sacrifices, sort of a dumpsite; a smokey mountain. The place also acts as a boundary defining Jewish land boundaries as well as their religious limits, if you’re in Gehenna you’re not in Jerusalem. Let us have an analogy: To contextualize it here in the Philippines today, I suppose it’s like scaring the little children to be good or else when they die, their souls would go to Payatas where there are maggots, fires, methane gas; a place where garbage avalanche happens every hour. Jerusalem is always identified with heaven and Gehenna is with hell.  Jerusalem =Heaven, Gehenna=Hell; SM Malls=Heaven, Payatas:Hell.

This fear of hell, through religion, through the priests, pastors (hey,! I am one, sort of), cult leaders etc, inculcated in people a sense of right and wrong that is founded upon fear!  

Hell as imagined by an artist. This kind of pictures used to scare  children and adults as well, but now these  images  are mere characters in computer games where children shoot, bash and decapitate them at a push of a button.

I have always believed that scaring the hell out of people so that they behave is from the dark ages. Faith and reason is better. As dear Anselm said, “For I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand. For I believe this: unless I believe, I will not understand.”
 

The times are changing, world views change, paradigms shift.  This image of heaven's entrance reminds me of a memorial park's gates.

Upon reflection, I believe there is a worse place than hell and that is being in heaven while seeing your dear loved ones past and future suffering and being tortured by the everlasting fire while archangels, angels, cherubims, seraphim, and all the souls, accompanied by heavenly harps and electric guitars are singing in paradise telling you, “See because you did not preach to them look where they are now! You are an uncaring and selfish son of your father’s other woman.” Of course you could be happy in heaven that way if you’re an effing masochist.

Hendrix and Vaughan playing guitar in heaven.

There’s heaven. I find it amazing how the thought of heaven could inspire people to do the honorable and selfless things; while at the same time, I find it also amazing how the thought of paradise could drive people to do the most horrendous evil acts in the world.

I will not list these acts here because history books are replete with them; and, they are, in truth, depressing. But I should not judge faith based on what their extremist or their misguided members are doing and has done because these acts, in truth, I believe do not damage nor negate the honorable and the truth in people’s faith.

Heaven is a place that I look forward to going when I die. And if such a place does not exist, well, maybe my belief in the existence of the place will make it so. Of course, I am not inclined to think of heaven as a garden or a new Jerusalem in a physical sense, maybe there’s more to heaven than that.

Heaven maybe like the final scene from the movie Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Maybe heaven is transcending our humanity and becoming one with the consciousness of the universe.

 “Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God.” Shermer’s last law.

George: “Now, why do I think things like these?”

Pilosopong Tasyo:  “It’s your way of coping with the seemingly irreconcilable thoughts floating around your head!”

George: “I see.”

Enough!