On the Way

Let’s take most standard discussions of a Christian afterlife for granted as a thought experiment: some sort of celestial sphere where people go when they die and stay there for eternity as a reward.

Now let’s explore some conceptual corollaries of this that have haunted me as a thought experiment.

Let’s say we have all the people from 1650s England who died in a particular section of this realm. When they died, their souls (we’ll get back to this element in a bit) are transported to their new afterlife home. They’re there with others they’ve known in life. They can share their time with them forever.

First question: what do they do? Do they sing hymns with the angels? If so, isn’t that a fundamentally different idea? Same with the idea that they continue to do, explore, etc. This isn’t life – there isn’t further growth and development to do. Do they bask in the glory of the creator but are otherwise fully passive? Just an overwhelming spiritual high forever? If so, what was the point of the time in a body, in life, etc.? Do they continue to spend time with their community and extended family from past and future speaking over memories of what they did when they were alive (and maybe continuing to view the events of the living)? – Let’s take that last idea as given for our next question.

Second question: given the idea that they’re sharing the memories of their lives forever, what are the structural consequences of this afterlife? – 1) the afterlife is a static data suppository for lives and memories: a true cloud for data that (unlike real technological clouds where data will corrupt eventually) never changes; 2) if they communicate using their learned languages from life – they can only communicate with family a few generations before and after them, giving another degree of being static within humanity’s flow of change on Earth. Furthermore, they have no hope of communicating with the larger array of all the other souls from history. There’s a lingering question here whether new skills (such as new languages) can be learned here as there’s an unaddressed metaphysical problem of what a soul can learn, and furthermore there’s no indication in our framework of some sort of organized learning system for people to study languages or share them with others.

Third question (a bonus question): which version of the person goes to the afterlife? A soul isn’t a body – so it’s fundamentally strange to have it line up with a particular iteration of a person across their lifespan (like an image of the person in their prime, as a baby, or at their oldest moment when they died). However, most any description of the afterlife is one describing a human perspective of being in a place with others, which is inherently one of embodiment – having a particular human form, not some nebulous cloud or something even more abstract which a truly metaphysical dimension would almost necessarily require – it would be a metaphysical place, not a physical one (i.e. not anything akin to the bodily places and experiences we have).

Something about this conceptual idea (which again, is right inline with perspectives I’ve heard described throughout my life) is incredibly cold and inhuman. I find it terrifying to be essentially an element of data for an eternal databank, a storehouse of human memories and experiences forever. This is fundamentally an anti-life, not just an afterlife. Life is about the flow of development. It’s about being a burgeoning and decaying human body-mind in a dynamic little planet with billions of years of history. The idea of being a static data upload set to an eternity of being functionally a human memory/experience data file is perhaps the most inhuman version of a telos to life that I can imagine, and part of that is that that entire data file is not only static but will be static forever. It is there to never be forgotten. There’s something incredibly freeing about our memories in life that we don’t have perfect recall. We forget the vast majority of moments from our lives, and on a larger scale, history is mostly dust – forgotten and turned to fresh soil for future generations to live and create anew. The organic nature of life, society, and our world is precisely what makes life vibrant. Of course, certain experiences both personally and culturally are maintained or “remembered” in the way that all memories are a construction of parts that may be reinterpreted over time, but this is only done insofar as it is adaptive to further function. Some is held onto that is dysfunctional, but it is in burying it and letting it become fully the dust of the past that it becomes room for something new. In summary: I very much affirm the idea of dissolving into this world and disappearing after death, transforming into a different unfolding of the ten thousand things that is not this current, unfolding life of a human body-mind. That seems so much more beautiful and soothing to disappear into the physical earth than for the deeds of my life to be transcribed into a metaphysical sky to statically exist forever.