As I get closer to the 18th green in my metaphorical life, I find myself thinking about what if anything comes next.
The average American man lives to be 77 years old. Since I’m about three weeks from my 74th birthday, the golf metaphor would probably leave me out on the fairway getting ready to hit my second shot.
I said many years ago that if I could live to 80 without being a burden, I’d be satisfied. That would leave me getting ready to hit an approach shot to the 17th green.
Enough golf metaphors. If I can make 80, I will see my youngest grandchild — lovely Albanie Kastner — make it to 15. Seeing how things turn out for her is one of the things most interesting about my life.
But as for what happens next …
I was raised Protestant and converted to Catholicism about 30 years ago, so theoretically I believe in Heaven and Hell as possibilities.
Except I’m not sure I do anymore.
The older I get, the more I see organized religion as a system designed to keep people in line and make them follow the orders of the ruling class. Heaven is an incentive to be good, hell is a warning of what happens if you’re bad.
“He’s making a list, checking it twice …”
Organized religion gives us God as a sort of cosmic Father Christmas. Candy for the good children, coal for the bad ones.
That’s why of the three Abrahamic religions, the one most based on reason is Judaism. Both Christianity and Islam are based on a system of rewards and punishments. If you’re good, you go to paradise. If not, you go to the bad place.
Paradise isn’t a significant part of Judaism. It isn’t that they don’t believe in an afterlife. It’s that people should behave ethically toward others not because they want a reward but because behaving ethically is the right thing to do.
As for the anti-paradise, certainly the traditional view involves eternal fire and constant torture..
That’s where they lose me. I tend to agree with the version of perdition in the wonderful 1998 film, “Whate Dreams May Come,” based on a Richard Matheson novel. In that story, the main character is in heaven and learns that his beloved wife will not be joining him there because she killed herself. He decides heaven is nothing for him without her, so he ventures into hell itself to rescue her.
The catch is that she is alone and has no memory of her life at all. Her only feeling is despair.
That to me is what hell would be.
If I believed in hell.
I guess I would tend to agree with Jean-Paul Sartre when he said, “Hell is other people.”
Of course that quote is misunderstood by many. Sartre wasn’t saying that other people are all assholes. Here’s what he said before a 1965 recording of his play “No Exit:”
“‘Hell is other people’ has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell.
“Why? Because … when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves … we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves.”
People who believe in a literal heaven and hell generally believe there will be far more people in hell than there are in heaven. If that’s true, by now hell must be something akin to Manila, the most densely populated big city on Earth with more than 41,000 people per square kilometer.
So the greatest punishment in hellwould be the equivalent of sitting in your car on the 405 freeway during a sig alert at rush hour.
You can’t move.
Actually, the belief system of major Eastern religions makes a great deal of sense. Start with the fact that the soul is eternal.
So when a body reaches the end of its usefulness, the soul moves on to a newly born body. It’s called reincarnation. Couple it with the concept of karma and it makes a great deal of sense.
Karma basically means that people are responsible for their actions and will be rewarded or punished in their next life for what they did in this one. So someone like Jonas Salk might be a king in his next life while someone like Donald Trump would be a slug.
Now that’s an afterlife.
It seems like as long as you’re a person or an intelligent animal, you can improve and move up. But if you’re a slug …
Bye bye Donnie.