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| Sierra Nevada, California, 2012 |
I ordered a hardcover copy of “Heaven and Hell: A History
of the After Life”, by Bart D. Ehrman, sometime back because, well, of my
current situation with age and the pandemic, and my writing, where certain
character are “angels” (particularly in the screenplay “Epiphany”).
The publisher is a biggie, Simon & Schuster, ISBN
978-1-5011-3673-3, 326 pages, endnotes and index starts at 297, fourteen
chapters.
I expect to do a more thorough review on Wordpress
after some time, but I want to note that the middle chapters provide a sequence
of views, from the old testament (“why wait for a resurrection?”), then Jesus himself,
and finally the apostle Paul.
One theme that comes up is that for many people who
did not “make it”, death is simply annihilation, and back to
non-existence. Indeed, it seems, if the
brain is physically intact, even after death, there might occur a “life review”
and time could stretch out infinitely and create the impression of eternal
life, if one never “converges” to death.
But if the brain is destroyed traumatically, as in war, of some forms of
self-harm, or by an enemy with religiously based destruction, there could be no
opportunity for such an indefinite extension. Paul, particularly, wanted the
reward for the faithful (remember “faith” = “works”) to come with some kind of
re-embodiment, as an angel. In theory,
at least in the realm of science fiction, this opens up the idea that “angels”
are those who came back (the opposite of “the Leftovers” as in the HBO series).
There is a review of the book by Ben Corbitt for Saint
Matthias Episcopal Church, link.
One of my own issues is my own personal agency. Given a sequence of ironies in my life, the
current pandemic challenges my agency (really, almost as a result of quantum
theory, when I was privileged enough to escape the things that happen to most
people, so I get caught in the paradoxes posed by lockdowns, quarantines and
maybe sequestrations). Situations can occur that would seem to nullify what I
had believed in my whole life. Would I
want more than annihilation if I was triaged?
This is all quite disturbing. I would have to be much more willing to bond with people "where they are" with less of my own individuality than I have been. That sounds like the tale of the "Rich Young Ruler"
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