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in Heaven everything is fine
Thursday, July 18 2002
It's been a very long time since I had a theological conversation with anyone with whom I disagreed (unless, of course, you count people who came knocking at my door or proselytizing on the campus of Oberlin College). I think after about third grade people in America learn an important social skill: it doesn't pay to argue about religion. It is, after all, awfully hard to convince someone that your religious views make more sense than theirs. Besides, the only approach that seems to work is convincing a prospective convert that your religion's afterlife reward system is better. But to me the selfishly-motivated conversions that result have all of the romance of switching from AT&T to Sprint. Any all-knowing deity worth His salt can see right through that sort of thing.
My last argument about theology probably took place not long after I moved to rural Redneckistan and my atheism was demonstrated by my refusal to participate in classroom prayer and off-campus Bible study (phenomena that probably still take place in rural Southern public schools). I was only about seven years old at the time, but atheism was an integral part of who I was and it wasn't about to succumb to the unnuanced religious arguments of Redneckistani classmates. Nonetheless, I envied them for their delusions of Heaven. I knew the unsanitized truth, and even at that age (when death is still many lifetimes away) the truth of death is pretty bleak.
But more recently I've come to an important realization: an atheist's conception of what happens at death isn't really any more bleak than that of a Christian who feels he is going to Heaven. Indeed, for someone with my tastes, oblivion is a far preferable fate to an eternity in remade perfection with a reprogrammed mentality concerned only with praising Him. Let me explain.
I don't know how many of my readers are Christians who believe in Heaven and think of it as a reward for a life well-lived, but I hope my occasional atheistic asides don't offend you too much, particularly since I don't grumble about the "In God We Trust" printed on my filthy lucre. My opinion, of course, is an essentially Marxist one: Heaven is an ingenious swindle engineered by Western society to get peasants, slaves, and the working class to break their backs in exchange for rewards granted not by the ruling class, but by a contrived deity in the afterlife. Western society probably couldn't have accomplished world dominance without it. I wouldn't make the contention that conspiratorial forces in Western Society created Christianity deliberately for this purpose; I just think that the reason it became wildly successful and propagated rapidly throughout the world had something to do with the civil tranquility it imposed and the hard work it facilitated. Like other memes, Christianity is subject to Darwinian forces.
But let's examine that great Christian reward for a moment. Heaven. What's it like in Heaven? Not being a Christian myself, I'm forced to consult online resources.
- Is there sex in Heaven? This page says yes, while this page says no, and this page beats around the bush. I'm inclined to believe the one that says there is no sex in Heaven, since this page gets it from the Man Himself. Christ is quoted in multiple places as saying, "For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven." (Matthew 22:30; Mark 12:25; Luke 20:35,36)
- Do we have to go to the potty in Heaven? I couldn't find anything addressing this subject for the Christian religion (Christians don't even need to use the toilet on Earth), but according to Muslims, there is no need for bathrooms in Heaven.
- What do people spend their eternity doing in Heaven? This page says several things: We reunite with saved loved ones. We experience something called "perfect rest." "They will rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them." (Revelations 14:13). We get new minds, bodies, and characters. We worship, we sing. There is no boredom. We get a chance to finally see God and worship Him "perfectly." We don't need to eat or drink, but if we want to, we may (and delicious food is available in infinite quantities). Given that no one defecates in Heaven, one probably avoids eating in order to keep from becoming constipated, though even constipation feels delightful in Heaven.
- What happens to the retarded, deformed, and dead babies in Heaven? How about ugly people? Do they stay that way? Do the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich? Or do the powerful and weak all experience a cosmic equalization? This page claims that all people in Heaven are equal.
The sense I get from all these descriptions of Heaven is that it is a place where everyone, on entrance, gets an immediate and substantial upgrade and (unlike on Earth) no one gets the shitty end of the stick. This must be a bummer for some people, since the chief joy for most folks on Earth is a feeling of superiority: my girlfriend is more beautiful than yours, my house is larger, my SUV gets fewer miles to the gallon, and I know more celebrities than you do. In Heaven, we're told, all status and competition goes away and we're granted faces and bodies that are uniformly gorgeous along with new vastly more powerful minds that yearn to do little except glorify God. I also get the feeling from these references that there is no discrimination in Heaven based on one's former status back on Earth. In short, we become completely different people. What we used to be dies.
From my rationalist perspective, our personalities (or "souls" if you prefer) are little more than the sum of our inclinations and memories, both of which are data stored in the soft tissue of our bodies. When we die, that soft tissue quickly breaks down and is used by other organisms in the ecosystem. What used to be the neural network that made you think "I like the Cure" is repurposed as cell membranes and protoplasm for thousands of soil bacteria who couldn't care less about the Cure. Do you know what happens to your term paper when some asshole formats the floppy disk you stored it on? You probably don't imagine a place where it is transformed into a long-lost Shakespeare play and spends an eternity glorifying a Pentium IV. (For all you Hindu wanna-bes out there, lost term papers don't 'come back' as Stephen King novels either.) Human death is information loss, and though sad, it does have its benefits. I agree with Christians that there is no pain, desire, sadness, competition, or boredom after death. And I also agree that the state of our consciousness following death (in other words, its absence) lasts an eternity. Indeed, on most points it doesn't seem that rationalist oblivion is too different from Christian Heaven. It mostly just lacks the egomaniacal Dictator.
The concept of Heaven, you see, suffers from a common human neuro-architectural weakness. In making it a utopia of absolute perfection, Christians have removed from Heaven the variety, the ups and downs, the haves and have-nots that make existence and interaction interesting. If everyone in Heaven is as beautiful as Cindy Crawford, as funny as Reno, and as rich as George Soros, then what do they stand to gain from being together in one place and interacting with one another, especially over the course of an eternity? The claim by Christians that we find this lack of variety interesting once outfitted in our afterlife personalities indicates their acknowledgement that our deaths kill off whatever it was we used to be. How is this any different from oblivion? In effect, by granting it to everyone who makes it to Heaven, Christians cheapen perfection (much like they used to cheapen the gold once supposedly used to pave Heaven's streets). I'm reminded of hippie friends I used to have who would put down the bong just long enough to exclaim, "I love everybody!" Then they'd hug me and I'd be thinking, "Oh, I feel so special, now go hug Saddam Hussein."
Tonight I responded to an invitation by Lin (of Ray & Nancy posse and past fondue party fame) to go to a brand new Park Slope bar, one of several mentioned in the latest installment of Time Out New York. It was way the fuck down at sixteenth street and fifth avenue, one and a half miles away. The night was hot and muggy and occasional drops of rain fell from constipated skies. Setting out on foot, I covered most of the distance down mostly-residential 8th Avenue and then turned west down 16th Street, watching the neighbor degrade with each block. At first the buildings were brownstones, then brick, then aluminum siding, then vinyl siding, then plastic faux-brick veneer, finally dissolving into parking lots and one story ghetto businesses such as the amusingly-shingled Trident Telecom. As shitty as the neighborhood got, there were plenty of attractive white girls sitting together smoking cigarettes out on their stoops.
My destination was Buttermilk, directly across 5th Avenue from Trident Telecom and across 16th Avenue from a parking lot. Inside, though, Buttermilk seemed like an outpost of hip-but-casual respectability. In keeping with this ambiance, the bartender wore a black teeshirt stenciled with a phrase worded something like, "Fuck you Satan, I know where you live." Nearly everyone who had come to the bar was hip and white.
I sat down and drank at a little coffee table with Lin, her boyfriend Mark, Nalu, and that one Italian girl from Queens who shows up now and then. Mark was in a gloomy mood because he'd just been sacked from his brand new graphics design job after only one day. Apparently he'd had some sort of personality clash with his new boss, but it hadn't been something he'd been able to detect. "What sucks is that I was telling everybody I had a job." Poor Mark; his extended unemployment benefits are about to expire.
As bars go, Buttermilk seemed acceptable. The jukebox was a little too loud, but judging from what it played, it seemed to have an unusually broad selection.
Later we were joined by Ray's girlfriend Nancy and one other Ray posse regular. I brought up the subject of the "reality show" The Osbournes, mentioning something I'd read about it not being reality. "Ozzy has chronic bladder problems you know; why do you suppose you always see him dumping water on himself on stage?" I said, adding, "...Yet you never hear anything about it on the show." I suggested that Ozzy almost certainly wears DependsTM around the house, but that in the sweaty intimacy of show, where he's usually shirtless and jumping up and down like a simulated lunatic, adult diapers would have a tendency to "boil" embarrassingly out of his trousers.
In seeming continuation of the subject at hand, I went into the bathroom to take a leak and experienced something of a minor disaster. Something distracted me from the business at hand; I think it was the way my hair looked in the mirror, and I completely missed the fact that the stream of my urine was tangentially intersecting my trouser leg for most of the length of my thigh. I looked down and saw (to my horror) that I'd developed a wide incriminating swath of wetness. My pants were grey and the wetness wasn't difficult to see at all. So there I was, clambered up on the toilet to hold myself in front of the hot air hand dryer. That approach wasn't working too well so I took off my pants and held them in front of the blower and let it run until the bathroom's temperature approached that of a sweat lodge. This helped a little, but there was still plenty of evidence by the time I left the bathroom, necessitating a posture of concealment throughout the rest of our time at Buttermilk.
By the time the last of us decided to leave, the only people with cars had already departed, necessitating another hike home.
Interestingly, after only about two blocks of walking my pants were completely dry.
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