One thing that everyone who's alive has in common is their impending death. Some people think the idea of an afterlife is just a comfort blanket for weaklings who refuse to accept the possibility of a permanent cessation of consciousness, but I'm not sure about that. If I were some kind of technologically empowered entity in the distant human future, and I were able to, say, reconstruct space-time by "reading" the background radiation of the universe (or something like that), I'd certainly feel a logical, moral and aesthetic obligation to resurrect the dead, at least to ask them if that's what they wanted. Of course that's a big if, but what's wrong with hoping? Dreaming? Longing? Lots of us buy lottery tickets, after all. When the people you love most start dying this line of thinking seems a lot less ridiculous.RATING: ??
(Image of Correggio's Parma Frescoes from www.wga.hu. I highly recommend clicking on the above pic--it's gorgeous.)
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2 comments:
Remember when our logo or symbol or whatever at Berwick School was basically the photo link for "moral?"
I'd like to believe there's an afterlife of some kind. On the other hand, eternity seems like an awfully long time to sit around hamming it up with every human that's ever lived. If there is an afterlife, I'm sure our perception of time and others will probably be completely different anyway. I hope at least I can knock over some peoples' vases or mess with some kids' Ouija boards.
Yeah, Berwick school was all about interracial.
An eternity from which there was no escape would be a Hell even if it was Heaven--people are bored and neurotic enough in this life. I think the freedom to choose to continue to exist or not would have to be an essential feature of any human(e) afterlife. Even the best pool party in the world sucks after you've been up for 3 days straight.
What bugs me is the idea that the afterlife is a place where you go when you die and things happen to you--either God sends you to heaven or hell, or Karma turns you into a Boddhisatva or a bug, or whatever, as if the self wouldn't be intimately involved in and responsible for its own fate, as if it didn't get a vote, so to speak. Of course, it couldn't be the only vote, or pathological personalities with no consciences and suicide bombers would be in seventh heaven, and basically decent but neurotic milquetoasts would be damning themselves.
Ah, speculation. Things never quite turn out how you think they're going to.
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