I wrote this as a personal letter to a lady I met once when I was doing refinance work and I decided to answer her questions about my own "faith."
[Name Removed] May 23, 2004
[Address
Redacted]
Dear [Name]
I wanted to express my thanks to you for the lovely gift you gave me. I shall treasure that photograph for a long time. As soon as I have the opportunity to do so I want to show it to my next door neighbor - the lady I told you about that as a result of her illness I ended up getting a notary commission - as I believe it is the kind of thing that she would find very comforting to her faith. She also happens to be Catholic as well.
At first I wasn't quite sure whether I should write to you but I felt I should explain some things to you about my beliefs as you seemed to be bothered about them. As I have stated, I do not wish to disparage your beliefs (and your particular faith) even though I do not and cannot share them. I have done a great deal of soul searching, research and examination of issues over many years to come to my own resolution of what I believe in, (i.e. my "faith.")
I also do not expect to convince you of anything. But, as I believe the Bible says that Jesus came to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," I felt it might not be a bad idea to do the same and at least expose you to my particular point of view. Even if it does not change your opinions it might give you perhaps some insight into why others believe as they do even when it is different from yours.
I sat and listened to you for quite a bit of time on Thursday [May 20, 2004] because I'm always willing to listen to other people's opinions on their faith and what they believe in. If what I believe in is correct, I have nothing to fear from other people's opinions; I will probably discover the errors in their thinking and know why they are not valid. On the other hand, I may discover errors of my own. In any case, I will learn something. And if I am incorrect in what I believe in I may find out something I had not thought of before I have yet to hear any good opinions to push me in either direction but I'm willing to listen.
This is an issue that is both important to me and something I am very clear about because it is an issue of faith with all persons everywhere. In every person there is a series of premises that define how they understand the universe to work, their place in it, and how things are in general. For some people, they believe in a higher power that controls the universe, e.g. "the old man who turns the crank," and some people believe there is no such power, e.g. the universe is self-winding or there is no crank. There are some people who believe the universe is subject to miracles, or that the rules of the universe can be changed by prayer, or by wishing or hope. There are others who believe that the rules of the universe are fixed and/or unvarying, that in order to change them it requires effort, or action, or some of the rules cannot be changed. There are some people who believe the universe is as it appears to us; there are others who believe what we are seeing, hearing and experiencing are merely delusions presented to our senses and that we cannot know anything.
It does not matter which of these premises a person believes in, or whether you or I have some of the same beliefs, or whether we think those beliefs that we hold are correct, or reasonable, or whether we think someone else's opposing beliefs are ridiculous or anything else. The premises that anyone holds as part of their understanding of the universe and the way it is, are based on certain axioms that define and support the conclusions those premises are based upon. No matter how logical or reasonable or provable, or how whimsical, unproven and arbitrary they are, at some point, all of their conclusions and premises on this issue are balanced on at least one specific axiom that cannot be proven and has to be taken on faith.
I believe we are in a universe of predictable rules that are not subject to debate, that certain of those rules mandate compliance or death will result. Other rules are not so serious. But all that I have - all that anyone has - is some axiom at the base that has to be accepted on faith because it cannot be proven.
I can't "prove" my belief that the universe is real and substantial because we cannot "step out of" the universe to see how it works, any more than you can "prove" the existence of God by getting me an audience with Him because neither one of us can "prove" the prime axiom of our system of beliefs. That which can be proven requires no faith.
With respect to both theism - religion, Christianity, Islam, Judaism. and other forms of belief in a God or gods, etc. - and atheism, I stand on the fence refusing to accept either side's prime axiom because I have a problem with both sides. I cannot accept the concept of atheism because I do not believe that random chance is adequate to create all that exists. I cannot accept the theistic concept of God because it then raises the question of where God came from, and what created It, and so on. It is possible to argue in favor of an eternal and uncreated universe, but that idea must have so many problems it's not a good theory because I'm not seeing any serious proposals of that concept.
Sometimes I think the two faiths of monotheistic religion and atheism are almost identical because they both postulate a universe that always existed, one having no "cause" and the other having a cause but not being able to explain what was its cause, and that which was its cause, and so on ad-infinitum. Six of one, half-dozen of the other.
I have been influenced by a number of books I have read as well as my own examinations of what I believe in over the years. As I mentioned, Robert Short in his book 'Something to Believe in: Is Kurt Vonnegut the Exorcist of Jesus Christ Superstar?' raises the argument that Christ came to us to provide us a release from hell, but not the hell beyond death, but the hell here and now on earth which we experience due to separation from God and more specifically from the love of God as embodied through Jesus Christ. That most mainstream churches are doing a disservice to people by postulating the idea of a "monster God" who is so cruel, unforgiving and horrible as to place people in endless torture for the things one has done in this lifetime that they are driving people away from what we should expect God to be: a being of mercy, charity and kindness.
It is relatively difficult to characterize an entity that would sentence someone to a trillion, trillion years and longer - an endless eternity - of burning in endless torment for a mere "threescore and ten" years of life merely because they failed to act upon some offer made to them, and at the same time consider that entity to be a God who loves humanity and believes in justice. The size of the punishment which is being proposed is grossly out of line to the size of the offense. Thus such portrayals of God as this cruel and unjust "monster" drives people away rather than encouraging them to want to accept Him.
And what does this say about Christ and his complicity in this scheme to impose an eternal torture? Mr. Short makes the excellent suggestion that if there is a hell of the type that those who believe in eternal damnation claim there is, that He would be there rescuing the souls from that place because no form of justice could in all seriousness balance an endless torture against the short period of life that they are being punished for failing to abide by some heavenly regulation requiring faith in His
existence. I think Short was trying to make the point that it is not in any imaginable sense any form of Christian charity to punish a single lifetime of error with an eternity of torture. We should ask ourselves: could an entity of love, mercy, charity and justice be willing to tolerate such a spiteful, cruel and unjust imposition of merciless eternal unending punishment? Can anyone with a straight face make such a claim?
You spoke about a number of things, many of them I have already considered and discarded because I could not accept them. One of the things you spoke about was the faith one had in one's heart, and what one believed in, as opposed to what one had thought about in one's head. I do not believe there is any need to separate the two, and in fact, I think that form of separation is what is causing so many problems with religion.
You spoke of "the heart" as what is the basis for faith. I'll consider that the soul for this discussion as I think it is relevant. I quote a phrase from a book I am writing to explain why I think the analogy is relevant:
"For thousands of years it's been argued ‘what is a soul?' And I don't think anyone's come up with a conclusion. But I'll say, at least for the sake of argument, that it is one's core beliefs, that which make up the morals and personality of that individual. What they believe in their heart of hearts; what they have chosen to accept as a set of values; what they consider right, and true, and good."
- Supervisor 246 in Paul Robinson's 'Instrument of God'
If someone were to ask a person to accept something on faith that they cannot rationally accept, what they are asking for is to ignore that which is necessary to their survival: their ability to think and reason and they will be unable to accept it. If they ask someone to accept something based merely on claims of some logical issue of religion without any reference to their soul, it will not resonate to them and they will be unable to accept it. It is necessary to include one's mind and one's soul as a complete, integrated package. Anything less is an eventual recipe for disaster. And that may be why most people have really miserable problems with their system of beliefs; either they try to rectify their logical reasoning and ignore their soul, or they try to carry a belief they know logically makes no sense to them. They cut themselves in half, feeding their mind, or their soul, and leaving the other to starve.
For many years I had been tortured by issues of religion because what I believed in my soul and what I logically could accept, conflicted with the standard claims of religion. As I was a believer in God and a Christian, this caused me problems because I had issues I could not resolve. When I was very young, I asked someone a question about something in the Bible that I did not like the results of what had happened. The person said that it was unreasonable to attack the Bible by asking questions as I did. My response to him was, "if the questions of a 16-year-old boy who has no religious training is a threat to the Bible, to me it makes it look like the supposed Word of God has real problems, and the God it represents must be terribly weak." They could not respond to my argument.
Years and years went by for me, and I could not find an answer. I hoped that someday, perhaps when I was very old, I might get a portion of an answer. Well, I did get one - in fact I received a whole truckload of answers - and it was some 9 years after the above incident. When I was 27, I read the book 'Atlas Shrugged' by Ayn Rand, which then gave me an answer which allowed me to reconcile my problems with religion.
You asked me - or at least I think you did - who is Ayn Rand and how does what she have to say even come close to the standing of the Bible, and all that it represents? The prime axiom of Christianity is, of course, the concept of Original Sin and our need for salvation from it through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. And it was in two paragraphs that she essentially destroyed the whole premise I believed in to support the concept of Christianity: The statement she made is this:
"The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin.
"A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man's nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.
"Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that a man is born with 'free will' but a tendency to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game of loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he has no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free."
This argument made me come to the conclusion that I could accept the concept of Christianity and the requirement of Original Sin but I would have to also accept that it meant those who accept it admit that they are being held responsible for something they have no control over, or I could reject the concept of Original Sin as being invalid, and thus the whole concept of Christianity - that all have sinned (past tense) and thus need salvation from that sin - was invalid because I have free will.
Even you got the point I made that I have caught a number of very strongly religious people on: you cannot postulate a universe where God has total omniscience of everything that has and will happen, including the entire outcome of your life through your death, before you were born, and then at the same time be able to seriously claim that you have free will to choose different actions other than what has already been predestined.
If you grant to the individual free will and the ability to make choices, then existence cannot be predestined and you cannot grant omniscience to God, because the future cannot be known in advance; if you grant omniscience and the ability to know the future in advance to God, the you cannot grant free will and the ability to make choices to the individual. Either concept is logically valid but they are mutually exclusive.
And the argument apples here: you can presuppose the existence of Original Sin but you cannot then assign people responsibility for their actions as a result of that pre-existing condition, any more than you can assign blame to someone for being born with a birth defect. And if you deny the pre-existence of Original Sin then the whole premise of Christianity goes down the drain.
This resolution to my problem meant I could accept that I was a human being who could think and has free will and I could no longer consider myself Christian or needing salvation because I could not be subject to Original Sin from the moment of conception and/or birth; or I could accept the concept of Original Sin and the need for salvation, but it would be due to a pre-existing condition I had no control over, and thus I had to accept responsibility for something I had no capacity to prevent because I do not have free will.
And with that I understood why I had a problem because either I could believe I was a thinking being not subject to Original Sin and thus not needing Christ's salvation, or I could believe I was incapable of making a choice in matters and was subject to needing Christ's salvation for the original Sin I had no capacity to resist or prevent. I could be a human being or a robot.
I chose to be a human being.
On the other hand I could be wrong. If I am wrong then I had no choice in the matter and I did not make a decision; the outcome was predestined and I have no power to have changed it.
I noted that the Bible tells us that no man has the power to remove us from Jesus Christ. That includes ourselves. Some people do not like that conclusion, in essence that Salvation is irrevocable and once you are saved you cannot lose salvation. Well, if you claim a person can remove themselves from Christ, you grant to them a higher power than God. Further, the Bible says that salvation is a free gift that doesn't depend from one's works. To claim otherwise is to argue that salvation is conditional on "good behavior." The reason for having such a conclusion makes for a good method of allowing churches to define what is "good behavior" and making people support them in order to stay in good graces with God because their particular church can then declare one's actions to be inadequate to maintain salvation. It's a nice theory - nice for the established religions that cash in on it, any way - a theory which I do not believe is supported by scripture.
The resolution that I realized as a result of reading what Ayn Rand wrote gave me a piece of mind and a clarity to my soul which I was previously unable to obtain. So basically, I have my faith, and you have yours. To quote from Socrates, "which one is better God only knows."
I am including a copy of the preface to a book I am writing and this may explain a great deal about my own thoughts on the subject.
You spent a considerable amount of time explaining your beliefs to me. I thought that the only way to be fair to you was explain mine so you could understand that I have not made a casual decision, but a deep soul searching conclusion that resonates to me both in my head, and in my heart. My decisions have given me over many years the peace in my soul that I know many others search for in vain all their lives. What I believe works for me; I do not know if it would work for anyone else, but as a resolution it works for me and that is all that matters.
On a side note, when 'The Passion of the Christ' comes out on video I will rent it and watch it.
I want to thank you for the time you spent with me and the time you have spent reading this letter.
Sincerely Yours
[ Signed: Paul ]
Paul Robinson
"A computer programmer and
Notary Public in and for
The Commonwealth of Virginia."
My own comments on religion from 2004
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My own comments on religion from 2004
"Baby, I was afraid before
I'm not afraid, any more."
- Belinda Carlisle, Heaven Is A Place On Earth
I'm not afraid, any more."
- Belinda Carlisle, Heaven Is A Place On Earth
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Current Preface from "Instrument of God"
I'm not really sure if a fiction book is supposed to have a preface, or is it a foreword? I'm not really even sure what the difference is. I just looked it up. A general purpose talk at the beginning of a book about that book is an Introduction; some books have that, possibly when the book is by multiple authors or the talk is. A preface is when the author writes the introduction, a foreword is when someone else writes it. So I have just now changed the name of this section from a foreword to a preface, and reversed the appearance of the two words in the first sentence of this paragraph. So there!
I don't know where the idea for this book came from. I know I've had inklings about it and hints for years, both from my private thoughts and from my personal notes of things I wrote down when I was writing the first book "In the Matter of:" series, "The Gatekeeper: The Gate Contracts" ("Gatekeeper") more than twelve years ago. (When I started this book, it was over seven years ago; it has taken me more than five years to write this one, and over eight to finally finish it.) Where has the time gone? Back then, the book wasn't even part of a series, just a drug-induced hangover. Oh, no, I don't do illegal drugs (basically because I can't afford them and I'm far too lazy to steal to pay for them); it was because I was taking Phen-Fen for treatment of depression. And because of severe overweight but that's beside the point.
You'll notice some of the words in this section are in boldface. When I mention a real or fictional person or company for the first time I'll do that. It's a trick I picked up from the Washington (DC) City Paper, when its column about happenings mentions someone, it puts their name in bold. I thought it was a nice idea so I decided to do that.
What am I going to use this preface to talk about? This book, in hope that you'll find it interesting enough to buy it. Or read it on yours or someone's electronic book. (I had to add this line when Amazon.Com released the Kindle.) Or borrow and read it if it's at a library. Nothing more complicated than that. So I'll tell you something about it so maybe you will.
I have to ask myself, is this book perhaps some advance notice to me and perhaps to others about what we could expect? Is it just some weird dream that popped into my head? Is it a shared experience passed on to me from others? I do not know and may never know.
What I'm going to do here is to say a few things about death, and maybe about life, and their meanings. The points I make here are supposed to be for fun, to maybe make you think about some things, and maybe make you a little bit uncomfortable about your pre-set notions so you'll want to hear more about what I have to say. But I'm not really trying to rock your world, or shock your world; that's what the rest of this book is for. So read on, and maybe you'll learn something in a fun way, and hopefully consider this book interesting enough that you'll want it and I'll get a chance to tell you the story that awaits, starting on page 1. But you don't need to read this introduction to enjoy this story, I just wanted to say a few things as background to the story.
What I am doing here in this preface is a discussion of the philosophical concept called metaphysics. That's where someone asks those really weird questions that keep people up at night, like, How did this universe get here? Why does it seem like I am the only person in the Universe? Why are things the way they are, i.e. is the universe the result of some planned intelligence or is it random chance that caused everything? What happens after you die, if anything? Or the even less asked question, what happened to you before you were born? Have you been here before, or did you just suddenly appear here because you were instantiated anew and never existed before? And there's lots more questions after that. Lots and lots of questions. Lovely questions, really interesting things to think about. Only problem is, I'm not allowed to answer any of them. If I do, I'm being dishonest.
I know one of the first rules of metaphysics: You're supposed to ask questions, you aren't allowed to give answers unless you admit clearly that they are only your opinions and are not necessarily right and you may even know them to be wrong. If you claim your answer to a metaphysical question is a (or the only) correct one, you crossed over the line into religion, which is kind of like cheating. Philosophers aren't allowed to have answers (that are claimed to be correct) to metaphysical issues – only questions. (If there does turn out to have a legitimate answer to the question, it stops being metaphysical.) Preachers and ministers are allowed to have answers to these questions (that are claimed to be correct), that's their job.
Since I'm wearing my Philosopher's Hat today, not my Reverend's Hat, I'll try and avoid that trap of religion (pun unintentional) by saying that everything I say in this preface about life beyond this world is merely my opinion; some of it may be right or wrong. I do not know the correct answers and do not claim to know them. So lets take a look at some possible answers, some of which I can guarantee will be wrong, because they conflict with one another. Remember, I'm trying to have some fun with you in order to get you to take this book, so I'm going to toss different ideas at you, not all of which are compatible with each other.
The late Robert A. Heinlein, probably the greatest science fiction writer in history, wrote a short story about a man who wills himself across to another universe while in prison after he got caught committing some white collar crimes, and becomes a teacher in the new universe he now inhabits, teaching some of his students to do what he did, to be able to Cross Over. At the moment I can't remember the name of the story, this sentence will be replaced with the name. Oh yeah, Elsewhen. In that story, the main character makes the statement that nobody will ever cease to exist when they die, because no human being has the capacity to believe in their own death.
So, have you thought about what happens after you die? There are only two possible conclusions. You cease to exist or you continue on in some form. The former is a dead end (pun unintentional) and the latter has two possible states, either you'll like the way things turned out or you won't. (Well, maybe you won't have an opinion either way, but eventually, I think you will.)
I think I can, for the moment, skip discussing what happens if you like the results after you die because if you're totally happy about it, there's no point in looking at it because if it's perfect, the subject is pretty much dead (pun unintentional again), you don't need to change perfection. I'm going to look at the other possibility, that you continue to exist, but you're in some manner dissatisfied with the results.
Of the ways that people consider life after death - an Afterlife, by whatever you want to call it - to be unpleasant, the most common one seems to be the idea of hell, or something like that, where you roast in fire and brimstone for a long time, maybe for eternity. Sounds boring. And a real example of a stupid way to punish someone, read the next paragraph. It ain't hard to torture people, that doesn't take much smarts, there are lots of stupid torturers in those South American countries where Death Squads roam the countryside and those fighting, both in and out of the military, barely even know how to shoot the guns they carry, and a lot of them "couldn't pour piss out of a boot if you printed the instructions on the heel." ("Cañal trés presents our next programme, Exécuçion of de Week. This execution is sponsored by the Départmenté de Taxaçion which reminds you that failing to pay your taxes - which is whatever we say you owe, even if it's more than you have - is very dangerous and could result in fines, imprisonment or even death, or possibly a visit from your friendly neighborhood officer of the Ministry de Disappeariançes, whose motto is "We specialize in invisibility. They'll never see you going or where you've gone. In fact, they'll never see you again. And neither will anyone else. Nor will anyone who asks about you ever be seen again.". It is also sponsored by the Office of Religious Affairs, reminding all Catholic nuns and priests that they will be sent to see their boss any time they disagree publicly with government policy. And we don't mean the Pope, we mean his boss.")
Read this book for some really great ideas on how to make life after death into a real hell, without having to hurt those who are being punished at all. And not only are they punished, they learn something. Which should be the reason for punishing someone, to make them understand that they did something wrong and need to learn not to repeat their misconduct. And if punishment is meant to deter someone's conduct, it has to have an end so they can continue the usual and customary affairs of their existence and go about their business.
If you read more of this book, Supervisor 246 discusses with someone named Akers the issue of eternal suffering after one dies and whether it makes any sense. If all you do is torture people, you don't allow them to fix what they did wrong, and you don't even let others know that they are being punished, why do you want to do that? You're going to punish them for something they did wrong, but they can't let others know about what they did so the other people might learn from this person's error, and you're not going to ever end their punishment so they can't learn from their mistake so they don't repeat it. Torture for torture's sake is an asinine way to punish someone. Unless it's because that's what the person being punished wants as punishment.
Some people believe there are really bad people who should be punished after they die. Now, the question is, will they be, and what is the standard? Who decides, and why?
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met with Joseph Stalin - one of those so-called ‘people' whom we can put on our ‘double-plus ungood list' - at the Yalta Conference, where they decided how to divide up the world after the war, someone asked Stalin how he knew that he was destined to become ruler of the Soviet Union. He said that God came to him in a vision and told him that it was to be so. FDR turned to him and said, "Now wait a minute, Joe, I never said any such thing."
I think that it's pretty hard to expect someone who believes (or at least claims to believe; I have no idea if he did) he was divinely inspired to be ruler, and ended up having over 20 million people murdered in mass collective farming schemes, to believe that he was a bad man who deserves to be punished. As he himself put it, "One man's death is a tragedy; a million men dying are a statistic." So if he is punished, it's because someone else is going to impose punishment upon him for something he probably doesn't even believe was wrong.
So if someone else decides the punishment, it's probably going to be arbitrary, might be capricious, and may not have any relation to what is appropriate. Might be too lenient. Probably be too strict. If we are going to punish people after they die, if they deserve to be punished, that is, would it not make more sense, by letting them determine their own fate? Maybe they do exactly that.
Following along with what I just pointed out and the quote from Heinlein's Elsewhen, perhaps we get the Afterlife we believe we are supposed to have. In such a case, then, eternal suffering for eternity would make sense, because the person who got it believes that's what they deserve. In which case, they can probably get out of it simply by changing their mind, ala Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, who plays the deceased wife of Robin Williams after he dies, when he goes to try and rescue her from Hell in the movie What Things May Come.
But I think that might not happen for those we would think would really deserve it, because the really bad people that have, as Dr. Malcolm Stevens refers to Dr. Hugo Sign in Gatekeeper, "so contaminated this universe that a trillion years of torture in boiling acid, wouldn't cure one second of what they have inflicted upon it by simply existing, wasting space which would be more usefully occupied by maggots," don't believe themselves to be evil, and thus won't ever be really punished in ways we might find appropriate. I pointed out the example of ol' fun lovin' Joe Stalin. And I'll bet all those people who committed horrible crimes in Nazi Germany didn't think they were bad either.
I think it was said that the War Crimes Trials at Nuremberg, Germany showed, not the horror of evil, but it's banality. Being a guard in a concentration camp, where you raped a few Jewish women, gassed their husbands, stole the gold out of the teeth of the corpses, and worked the survivors to death, was just another job like being a file clerk, or any other ordinary occupation. (The willingness of people to simply obey otherwise horrific orders would later be confirmed in the Milgram and Stanford Prison Experiments, among others.)
Watch The Green Mile sometime. Being the guards at a prison Death Row, to them, it's a job they do, and yet to some, what they are doing is a clear and obvious example of barbarism, of some form of sadistic death rituals which we can wonder how sane human beings can commit themselves to be part of. (Coincidentally, while I was writing this preface, that movie was released on free broadcast television.)
So, since the really bad people don't believe themselves to be that way, who does get punished? Those of us like you and me (well maybe not me; see below) who have a conscience and believe we should be punished when we die for whatever we did wrong. The character played by Tom Hanks in The Green Mile later comes to realize he's being made to live a long time as punishment for what he did wrong in performing the execution of a man he knew to both be innocent and something which in some people might consider to be a Messenger of God. Consider the plight of Hattie Durham in the Left Behind series of Christian thrillers, after she realizes who Carpathia is, for a long time believes that she doesn't deserve Christ's salvation by becoming a Christian, and deserves to be violated six-ways-from-Sunday in Hell for eternity for what she did.
Well, maybe you think you deserve that, more power to you as you scream in agony then, I hope you enjoy the torture since you wanted it so much. I don't think I've done anything wrong enough to deserve being punished at all when I die. I figure all the suffering and hell I put up with in this life, plus the trauma of dying, more than makes up for anything that I might have done wrong here, if I did do much of anything wrong. See Robert Short‘s book Something to Believe In on the subject of Hell on Earth.
So you get to the end of your life and you believe you done wrong and deserve some punishment. So you get it and you realize how horrible it is. Who do you blame for this state of affairs? Well, it ain't me, I'm giving you a new idea for the meaning of death, and it ain't God, if (s)he exists, because (s)he didn't decide to punish you, you did. So maybe you need to rethink what you believe is going to happen to you at the end of your life here on earth.
The clock is running, sooner or later your time will run out. And it was Robert A. Heinlein, again, who said about his own death, exactly what will happen next: Either you will know what happens after you die, or you will know nothing.
What am I saying here? If you will know nothing, that is, if you ‘die dead' - that when you die, the result is oblivion, that is, annihilation and subsequent nonexistence - then you don't need to concern yourself about what happens when you die. I used to think the thought was terrifying until I realized - or actually it was my sister who pointed it out to me - that it's exactly what it is, if the end result of your life is oblivion, that you'll never know that you don't exist. That's one of those kind of self-evident ideas that, until you think about it, is probably something you don't realize.
Do I think it's sad if that is the case? Yes, I am deeply saddened by such a concept. All the horribly pointless waste of human potential that is lost at death and can't ever be recovered. Thirty billion souls - the estimated total population that has ever existed on earth - all used once and thrown away. If that doesn't say something about the need for recycling, or reclamation or something, then nothing will.
But there are a few glimmers of hope. One of the finest examiners of myth and mythology, the late Dr. Joseph Campbell, asks the question, "Are we consciousness or are we the vehicle of consciousness?" One way to put that is, are we, that is, our soul, and our personality, our essence, merely a display, or is it part and parcel of what we are as an entity?
If our consciousness, our ‘soul' as it were, is merely a display, then when we die, we go with it. Maybe some part of our existence will remain, if you can call it that. And I think that's still a waste, because if you aren't around to remember what happened to you, what is the point of living, of having lived? Maybe there isn't one, as Supervisor 246 says later in this book.
But if - this, I hope with every fiber of my being is true - that I am something more than mere display, then I continue notwithstanding my death, and birth or rebirth, that I exist for all time, I always have existed, will always exist, and never will cease to exist. And neither will you, either.
Also, consider this. Science tells us that matter and energy are the same thing. If the energy in our brains represents our soul, then it should stand to reason that if one's soul is a form of energy, and is thus matter, then under the rules of science that matter can neither be created nor destroyed; we have always been here, we always will be here.
On the other hand - and I hate bringing up this point, but if I am to be honest with myself I have to make it - there is the possibility that while our existence is a form of energy, it is simply kept as an electrical storage within the construct of the brain, the way the files stored on a computer disk are simply the change in magnetic flux; the disk never changes, just the contents, and the contents can be modified, changed, replaced or lost. Or, the contents of the electronic memory of a computer, its "RAM," as long as it is refreshed by electricity the contents remain; if the computer ever shuts down, the physical memory remains but the electrical contents, the running program, disappear. If it's the same thing in our case, then when we die, we're gone, annihilated, we cease to exist and we become part of the consignment to oblivion. (Somehow, that seems like a cheesy and weak cliché.)
Ayn Rand put it quite simply in her book Atlas Shrugged: "There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence - and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: this issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence."
There is one possible answer which, if that answer does occur, then provides for certainty of life beyond existence. If it ever is shown that, even using the best possible atomic storage capacities, that the human brain's capacity is inadequate to store the contents of the mind of a human being, then obviously part of us exists somewhere other than our brain. It may be that the brain does have the capacity to store all of us. Or perhaps it does not. I'll leave that point open for now.
And let's not forget all the reports of people who can remember having been here in a previous life. And Near-Death Experiences; I get to those in a later paragraph. And other things. Maybe all of these things are all coincidence and mere self-induced delusion to make ourselves believe in something beyond existence. But there are enough reports of people who, never having heard of other people having these reports, coming forward to say the same things without knowing about the others, at least as I understand it they did not know of the others.
Maybe all of these people got together and concocted these stories. Now, one thing experienced interviewers such as police officers and security people tell us that when two people tell a story about an event, there should be minor differences between them. If two people tell exactly the same story about an event, they're lying or they've been coached (or both). If these people did not know of each other when they told different people the exact same things about what they saw and what happened, it provides a question: Why are all of them are telling essentially the same story? If they are a bunch of co-conspirators, who is raising the money to finance this operation and what are they getting out of it?
It can't be some religious organization, because the way this stuff is coming out, it doesn't necessarily favor any specific religion, and I don't see where it favors a political agenda since a lot of people won't believe it. I suspect it might simply be either cracks in a very well designed system or game to keep those on this side of the line from finding out about the other side, or hints thrown at us to keep us guessing.
I think a very good reason to argue for continued existence with our memories intact, but it staying hidden, is that if it has the sort of promise that what this book talks about, the many people living in less than subsistence conditions, if they had positive evidence of there being something more and possibly better than this world, would commit suicide in such mass numbers that there would be almost no one alive here in some parts of the world.
Just consider how much better the lifestyle of some yuppie stockbroker on Wall Street would look to some less-than-subsistence farmer in sub-Saharan Africa. And yet the stockbroker has his own set of problems to deal with. And yet, think about what's possible when your only limit on what you can experience is your own imagination. Go see The Matrix if you haven't. I think it's going to be one of those special pieces of work that becomes a classic, the sort of thing that the people who made it may not have had an idea of what they would end up doing at the time, sort of like what happened to Citizen Kane.
So I think we can build a case on almost any side of the issue for the continued existence of the soul, the death of the body notwithstanding. The reports of Near-Death Experiences ("NDEs") also provide good hearsay evidence of this. As I said, there should be discrepancies in every story; if two people tell the exact same story, they're lying or they've been coached. And it seems like everyone who has had an NDE is telling the same story. Are they all lying, or is the experience so explicit that they all had the same thing?
Now, they've done experiments where they simulated the Near Death Experience (sounds like the name of some New Age punk rock group) by causing certain parts of the brain to experience loss of oxygen or being struck on the head or something, and the results seem to be the same. But I have this suspicion there is something more there, something I can't quite put my finger on, that makes this phenomenon more than the mere dying or almost dying of a few brain cells. Perhaps it's some misguided faith on my part that wants to believe it enough to discard evidence to the contrary. I hope not, I believe I am a good enough philosopher of reason and scientist of logic to accept such evidence - if there ever is any - even if I do not like the answer. But call it a hunch.
To quote Mr. George Green in my first book Gatekeeper again, only I'll use it on the subject of whether there is something more than this life, "Perhaps you just have a gut feeling [about it]... I know how that is; more than once I've had gut feelings about things where I couldn't put my finger on it, but I knew something... Later I would discover why I had that feeling, and, more importantly, why I was right, but at the time I did not have the evidence or knowledge to know why I felt that way."
I think, should that be the case, that perhaps it is possible to forgive everyone for their stupid screwups when they are here. Come on, someone screws with you for a few years and tortures you to death once? You going to hate him (or her) for the next trillion years? What if, in your previous life, you were a soldier and killed a bunch of people, should they be mad at you too? Or what if it was him you killed then, isn't he entitled to payback in the next life for what you did in the previous one? How do you know what you might have done before? Or what about some crackpot who thinks you did wrong to him?
If you play a game of Monopoly and you crucify one of your friends, I mean "grind them into the dust and drown them in their own gore"Tm, and bankrupt them, and really enjoy watching as they have to liquidate everything, turn over everything they own to you and quit the game in ruins, are they supposed to hate you for several years over that? Or might it be likely that the next time you play, they should do their best to destroy you then? Could it perhaps be that life is like that?
When I first learned to play chess back in 5th or 6th grade in school, I was about 11 or 12 at the time, I was terrible at it and a friend of mine kept crucifying me, I kept losing badly. I got so mad one day I swept all the pieces off the board. Well, one day - and he swears he was playing his best and did not throw the game - my friend made some really bad mistake in one of his moves. You can bet I enjoyed every minute of that game as I turned around and destroyed him! No mercy and not a bit of charity, I enjoyed watching him suffer and lose big time. You have to figure it was a significant moment of my life when I can remember one chess game I played over thirty years ago, and yet sometimes I can't remember what I had for breakfast yesterday.
Do I regret destroying him in that game? Of course not, it was payback for what he did before. And if he was able to come after me again, I should have no complaints. And yet we could still be friends in other circumstances even if we were merciless competitors on the chessboard.
Back in the summer of 1995 I had a friend named Erwen Tang, whom I have never met in person, only spoke with him by telephone and e-mail even though we only lived maybe 40 kilometers apart. We played the computer game DOOM - in deathmatch mode - by modem a lot. I'd kill him some times, he'd kill me a lot and we always played take-no-prisoners mode. One time I and one of his friends went at each other and we toasted each other left and right, a charnel-house of killing. When we got finished, we both talked how much fun we had, especially when the other guy did a really neat way of killing us. Erwen and I were still friends even though we always fought to the death - and redeath - in the game, and we even collaborated on writing a map for the game, that ended up being included in a third-party book on maps done by expert players of the game. He went on to college and I went back to work so we sort of drifted apart and I haven't spoken to him in several years. We never took our game playing attitude of "kill the other son-of-a-bitch at all costs" toward each other out of the game.
So maybe we have to consider the possibility that we're playing a game on earth or we're learning things, and as such, once we die we shouldn't hold people responsible for what happened here, because maybe what they did to us here is payback for what we did to them before. Or just maybe, you're going to violate them six-ways-from-Sunday in their next life to make up for what they did here. Presuming you can find them.
A dear friend of mine mentioned how one of her friends died and promised if there was any way to do so they would try and send a message back from beyond. And she never got a message from them. I said that if sending a message is possible maybe what happened was, they wanted to learn something and decided to come back to earth in order to learn whatever it was in the life of that particular entity.
Maybe what happened was that they got to Heaven, Paradise, The Afterlife or Valhalla, or whatever you call it, and the Death Traffic Manager or Incomings Support Clerk, or Optional Recycling Operator said to them, before they could even get to the equivalent of a phone to make a call back to earth, "Hey, I got just the thing for you, we have a birth in an hour and 45 minutes where that person will have over 20 of the experiences you put in a requisition that you wanted to learn, and you have a priority reservation for them, since it's a pure match for what you've selected. Only problem is, you have to immediately go under the knife now, you just made it in time if you want to catch that one. Otherwise, from looking at our plans for the future of earth, someone having all these experiences won't be around for another 10 years and unless you stay here the whole time you won't be available. You were chomping at the bit to get three of these and you only took your last life because you knew you were going to die early and would get one of the experiences you wanted badly in that life you just left. Or you can pick up each one of them, but you'll have to die and be reborn as many as 30 times to get all the things you want. So it might take you 2500 years to get all these experiences versus maybe 70. We've got all of eternity but you might not want to take that long. It's your call, do you want to take this birth now or pass?"
And they took it, did a u-turn, so they're no longer dead and can't signal her. But maybe, because they know them, their Circle of Life will touch again. My sister has a friend whom they suspect they knew each other before in previous lives. In one life, she claims they were both soldiers in the same army (which implies they were both men at that time), and in another they were husband and wife or lovers, I'm not sure which. In this life, both of them are female, so maybe people get Real Sex Changes quite often. Or maybe you don't get to pick your sex when you're born. Maybe you don't get to pick, it's involuntary. Or there is no Afterlife (in the sense that you don't get to stay after you die) and since you have to come back, recycling is automatic. Or maybe you don't get to come back, you only get one chance, and the people who think they have been here before are mistaken. Or maybe you keep coming back until you get it right (see my David Letterman parody about "Top 10 Reasons you can't remember what was before life" following this preface.)
Which brings up a whole new kettle of fish: presuming, for the moment, that people do survive death, do they come back? If so, is it because they have to (no afterlife to stay in), they choose to come back, or is it that they come back because of some misconduct (or simple insufficiency) and don't qualify to stay there? (Alfred Brooks in the movie Defending Your Life.) And if so, what level of misconduct justifies "taking the being born course over"? What might we consider to be the sort of thing that says that people have to go back and try again?
My sister has this fascination with Serial Killers. Don't get them confused with Mass Murderers, as I did, of which someone could be both. A serial killer kills usually one, or perhaps two people, at a time, or maybe a few extra if the opportunity comes up, but they do their killing more than once. Mass murderers might kill 5 or 6 people or more people at a time, and might only murder once. Ted Bundy was a serial killer. So are John Mousaui and John Malvo, the boy Mousaui was molesting, who, as this book was being written, were allegedly shooting 13 people from Fredericksburg, VA, to Montgomery County, MD, killing 11 of them before they were caught on their way to Pennsylvania. So was Supervisor 246's dear friend, Jeffrey Dahmer, of which he speaks so highly. Those who crashed the planes in the World Trade Center, Second Edition event were Mass Murderers. As was, of course, 246's other poster child, Timothy McVeigh. The Manson Family members who killed people were both. I spoke to my sister about her fascination with Serial Killers, that maybe she's learning something to understand how she was in a previous life, or perhaps she's taking advance lessons for her next life. As 246 says, maybe she'll have quite an accomplishment if that's going to be the case.
Someone once said life was too short to feel bad about things. How about eternity is too long to spend it wallowing in pity. Or seething in hate. If there is something beyond life, and it holds the kind of capacity that an entity of pure energy can obtain, then there is really no reason to have those negative emotions once you cross over. In this book I'm holding the Afterlife to a mirror-image copy of earth, because it gives me a good pallette to paint my story upon and comment upon our world. But if you have no restrictions upon your existence, and the universe is what you can dream it up to be, then the capability is unlimited for happiness, to do anything you please. If you've ever seen "Q" from Star Trek: Next Generation then that's the sort of thing that everyone just could be. Of course that character is a pest because he's too needy, but that's beside the point.
On a side note, I'm an agnostic. I do not know and do not have enough evidence to express an opinion one way or the other. Professionally I remain neutral but personally I suspect something is out there as a controlling entity. The problem I have with the whole scenario is that if you have nothing there, the universe makes too much sense, or, they still have the problem in which the universe was created but have no explanation as to what caused it. On the other hand, if someone did create the universe, how did they get here? And why are all the ways I keep hearing about whoever might be running the universe depict Him - and it's almost always a Him, the writers of most religious tracts tend to depict their God as male because, as Ayn Rand notes, when they created Him in their own image - and it's usually men who write religious tracts - God usually appears to have the social graces of an uncivilized two-year-old, being exceptionally rude, throwing tantrums and fits, and generally acting like someone who has severe self-respect problems? The character TDR - Tansin A. Darcos - exhaustively explains my reasoning on the subject in Gatekeeper which I don't need to reiterate here. That gives me yet another excuse to sell my other book to you also.
So I think maybe I've rambled on just a little too much. Maybe I've given you some questions to think about. But again, I'm not claiming I have the answers, that is, the ones that are right, or any answers. While I love what she has to say and I believe much of it, in my opinion I'm a much better metaphysicist than Ayn Rand because I learned from one of her errors, as I have stated from the beginning, that the most important rule of metaphysics is: it's a system of questions, you aren't allowed to give out the answers. Once you try to answer a metaphysical question, and claim it is correct, you stop dealing in metaphysics, you cross the line and you fall over into religion. Rand made that error at least once. I learned from it. And sometime in the future I'm sure someone will spot one of my errors and point it out. Maybe I'll be lucky enough to be alive when that happens, so I can learn too.
Well, anyway, let's go on to the story before I scare you so much that you put the book back on the shelf without buying it. The story is supposed to be fun to read, and while I don't know if you'll have fun reading it, I sure had a lot of fun writing it. While trying to do all the other things, e.g. look for work, settle an automobile accident claim, write to the CEO of a financial organization to tell him how I felt he shouldn't think he broke his promises, get clearances for some of the things in this book, handle my application to become a common carrier, notarize documents, clean up my room, and so on and so forth. Oh great, I finally get the chance to legitimately use "e.g." in a sentence, it's very hard to get that opportunity as most times "i.e." is the one you have to use to be correct. I treasure such rare pleasures.
You can read more about and discuss this book online at
http://www.instrumentofgod.com
or send e-mail to
246@instrumentofgod.com
In writing this book, I wanted to say that I had a hell of a lot of fun doing it. But I can't say that. What I can say is I had a Heaven of a lot of fun doing it! And if there is anything to a Heaven, or an Afterlife, or something, I hope it's organized like this one. If it is - and I hope with every fiber of my being that it is so - I can't wait until I become part of that society when some nice lady picks me, takes me to her room, and ‘loves me back into the world'.
On to the book. Here we go. It's all yours. Go to town on it.
"One thing seems clear and obvious from the lessons of history. It stands out singularly among all the things the lessons of history can teach us. The one thing, more than any other, that the lessons of history teach us, if the lessons of history teach us anything at all, is that no one ever learns the lessons that history teaches us."
- Paul Robinson
Paul Robinson paul@paul-robinson.us
Prince George's County, Maryland, USA, North America, Terra
August 18, 2002 - September 30, 2010
Commonwealth of Virginia )
County of Arlington )
I certify that this book, In the Matter of: Instrument of God, is a true and complete copy of the original on file and of record in my office. Witness my hand and seal, this
_____ day of _______________, 20_____.
_____________________________
Paul Robinson
Seal "A Computer Programmer and Notary Public in and for the Commonwealth of Virginia at large, and the State of Maryland in and for Prince George's County."
Virginia Commission No. 318185
My Commission Expires November 30, 2014
I don't know where the idea for this book came from. I know I've had inklings about it and hints for years, both from my private thoughts and from my personal notes of things I wrote down when I was writing the first book "In the Matter of:" series, "The Gatekeeper: The Gate Contracts" ("Gatekeeper") more than twelve years ago. (When I started this book, it was over seven years ago; it has taken me more than five years to write this one, and over eight to finally finish it.) Where has the time gone? Back then, the book wasn't even part of a series, just a drug-induced hangover. Oh, no, I don't do illegal drugs (basically because I can't afford them and I'm far too lazy to steal to pay for them); it was because I was taking Phen-Fen for treatment of depression. And because of severe overweight but that's beside the point.
You'll notice some of the words in this section are in boldface. When I mention a real or fictional person or company for the first time I'll do that. It's a trick I picked up from the Washington (DC) City Paper, when its column about happenings mentions someone, it puts their name in bold. I thought it was a nice idea so I decided to do that.
What am I going to use this preface to talk about? This book, in hope that you'll find it interesting enough to buy it. Or read it on yours or someone's electronic book. (I had to add this line when Amazon.Com released the Kindle.) Or borrow and read it if it's at a library. Nothing more complicated than that. So I'll tell you something about it so maybe you will.
I have to ask myself, is this book perhaps some advance notice to me and perhaps to others about what we could expect? Is it just some weird dream that popped into my head? Is it a shared experience passed on to me from others? I do not know and may never know.
What I'm going to do here is to say a few things about death, and maybe about life, and their meanings. The points I make here are supposed to be for fun, to maybe make you think about some things, and maybe make you a little bit uncomfortable about your pre-set notions so you'll want to hear more about what I have to say. But I'm not really trying to rock your world, or shock your world; that's what the rest of this book is for. So read on, and maybe you'll learn something in a fun way, and hopefully consider this book interesting enough that you'll want it and I'll get a chance to tell you the story that awaits, starting on page 1. But you don't need to read this introduction to enjoy this story, I just wanted to say a few things as background to the story.
What I am doing here in this preface is a discussion of the philosophical concept called metaphysics. That's where someone asks those really weird questions that keep people up at night, like, How did this universe get here? Why does it seem like I am the only person in the Universe? Why are things the way they are, i.e. is the universe the result of some planned intelligence or is it random chance that caused everything? What happens after you die, if anything? Or the even less asked question, what happened to you before you were born? Have you been here before, or did you just suddenly appear here because you were instantiated anew and never existed before? And there's lots more questions after that. Lots and lots of questions. Lovely questions, really interesting things to think about. Only problem is, I'm not allowed to answer any of them. If I do, I'm being dishonest.
I know one of the first rules of metaphysics: You're supposed to ask questions, you aren't allowed to give answers unless you admit clearly that they are only your opinions and are not necessarily right and you may even know them to be wrong. If you claim your answer to a metaphysical question is a (or the only) correct one, you crossed over the line into religion, which is kind of like cheating. Philosophers aren't allowed to have answers (that are claimed to be correct) to metaphysical issues – only questions. (If there does turn out to have a legitimate answer to the question, it stops being metaphysical.) Preachers and ministers are allowed to have answers to these questions (that are claimed to be correct), that's their job.
Since I'm wearing my Philosopher's Hat today, not my Reverend's Hat, I'll try and avoid that trap of religion (pun unintentional) by saying that everything I say in this preface about life beyond this world is merely my opinion; some of it may be right or wrong. I do not know the correct answers and do not claim to know them. So lets take a look at some possible answers, some of which I can guarantee will be wrong, because they conflict with one another. Remember, I'm trying to have some fun with you in order to get you to take this book, so I'm going to toss different ideas at you, not all of which are compatible with each other.
The late Robert A. Heinlein, probably the greatest science fiction writer in history, wrote a short story about a man who wills himself across to another universe while in prison after he got caught committing some white collar crimes, and becomes a teacher in the new universe he now inhabits, teaching some of his students to do what he did, to be able to Cross Over. At the moment I can't remember the name of the story, this sentence will be replaced with the name. Oh yeah, Elsewhen. In that story, the main character makes the statement that nobody will ever cease to exist when they die, because no human being has the capacity to believe in their own death.
So, have you thought about what happens after you die? There are only two possible conclusions. You cease to exist or you continue on in some form. The former is a dead end (pun unintentional) and the latter has two possible states, either you'll like the way things turned out or you won't. (Well, maybe you won't have an opinion either way, but eventually, I think you will.)
I think I can, for the moment, skip discussing what happens if you like the results after you die because if you're totally happy about it, there's no point in looking at it because if it's perfect, the subject is pretty much dead (pun unintentional again), you don't need to change perfection. I'm going to look at the other possibility, that you continue to exist, but you're in some manner dissatisfied with the results.
Of the ways that people consider life after death - an Afterlife, by whatever you want to call it - to be unpleasant, the most common one seems to be the idea of hell, or something like that, where you roast in fire and brimstone for a long time, maybe for eternity. Sounds boring. And a real example of a stupid way to punish someone, read the next paragraph. It ain't hard to torture people, that doesn't take much smarts, there are lots of stupid torturers in those South American countries where Death Squads roam the countryside and those fighting, both in and out of the military, barely even know how to shoot the guns they carry, and a lot of them "couldn't pour piss out of a boot if you printed the instructions on the heel." ("Cañal trés presents our next programme, Exécuçion of de Week. This execution is sponsored by the Départmenté de Taxaçion which reminds you that failing to pay your taxes - which is whatever we say you owe, even if it's more than you have - is very dangerous and could result in fines, imprisonment or even death, or possibly a visit from your friendly neighborhood officer of the Ministry de Disappeariançes, whose motto is "We specialize in invisibility. They'll never see you going or where you've gone. In fact, they'll never see you again. And neither will anyone else. Nor will anyone who asks about you ever be seen again.". It is also sponsored by the Office of Religious Affairs, reminding all Catholic nuns and priests that they will be sent to see their boss any time they disagree publicly with government policy. And we don't mean the Pope, we mean his boss.")
Read this book for some really great ideas on how to make life after death into a real hell, without having to hurt those who are being punished at all. And not only are they punished, they learn something. Which should be the reason for punishing someone, to make them understand that they did something wrong and need to learn not to repeat their misconduct. And if punishment is meant to deter someone's conduct, it has to have an end so they can continue the usual and customary affairs of their existence and go about their business.
If you read more of this book, Supervisor 246 discusses with someone named Akers the issue of eternal suffering after one dies and whether it makes any sense. If all you do is torture people, you don't allow them to fix what they did wrong, and you don't even let others know that they are being punished, why do you want to do that? You're going to punish them for something they did wrong, but they can't let others know about what they did so the other people might learn from this person's error, and you're not going to ever end their punishment so they can't learn from their mistake so they don't repeat it. Torture for torture's sake is an asinine way to punish someone. Unless it's because that's what the person being punished wants as punishment.
Some people believe there are really bad people who should be punished after they die. Now, the question is, will they be, and what is the standard? Who decides, and why?
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met with Joseph Stalin - one of those so-called ‘people' whom we can put on our ‘double-plus ungood list' - at the Yalta Conference, where they decided how to divide up the world after the war, someone asked Stalin how he knew that he was destined to become ruler of the Soviet Union. He said that God came to him in a vision and told him that it was to be so. FDR turned to him and said, "Now wait a minute, Joe, I never said any such thing."
I think that it's pretty hard to expect someone who believes (or at least claims to believe; I have no idea if he did) he was divinely inspired to be ruler, and ended up having over 20 million people murdered in mass collective farming schemes, to believe that he was a bad man who deserves to be punished. As he himself put it, "One man's death is a tragedy; a million men dying are a statistic." So if he is punished, it's because someone else is going to impose punishment upon him for something he probably doesn't even believe was wrong.
So if someone else decides the punishment, it's probably going to be arbitrary, might be capricious, and may not have any relation to what is appropriate. Might be too lenient. Probably be too strict. If we are going to punish people after they die, if they deserve to be punished, that is, would it not make more sense, by letting them determine their own fate? Maybe they do exactly that.
Following along with what I just pointed out and the quote from Heinlein's Elsewhen, perhaps we get the Afterlife we believe we are supposed to have. In such a case, then, eternal suffering for eternity would make sense, because the person who got it believes that's what they deserve. In which case, they can probably get out of it simply by changing their mind, ala Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, who plays the deceased wife of Robin Williams after he dies, when he goes to try and rescue her from Hell in the movie What Things May Come.
But I think that might not happen for those we would think would really deserve it, because the really bad people that have, as Dr. Malcolm Stevens refers to Dr. Hugo Sign in Gatekeeper, "so contaminated this universe that a trillion years of torture in boiling acid, wouldn't cure one second of what they have inflicted upon it by simply existing, wasting space which would be more usefully occupied by maggots," don't believe themselves to be evil, and thus won't ever be really punished in ways we might find appropriate. I pointed out the example of ol' fun lovin' Joe Stalin. And I'll bet all those people who committed horrible crimes in Nazi Germany didn't think they were bad either.
I think it was said that the War Crimes Trials at Nuremberg, Germany showed, not the horror of evil, but it's banality. Being a guard in a concentration camp, where you raped a few Jewish women, gassed their husbands, stole the gold out of the teeth of the corpses, and worked the survivors to death, was just another job like being a file clerk, or any other ordinary occupation. (The willingness of people to simply obey otherwise horrific orders would later be confirmed in the Milgram and Stanford Prison Experiments, among others.)
Watch The Green Mile sometime. Being the guards at a prison Death Row, to them, it's a job they do, and yet to some, what they are doing is a clear and obvious example of barbarism, of some form of sadistic death rituals which we can wonder how sane human beings can commit themselves to be part of. (Coincidentally, while I was writing this preface, that movie was released on free broadcast television.)
So, since the really bad people don't believe themselves to be that way, who does get punished? Those of us like you and me (well maybe not me; see below) who have a conscience and believe we should be punished when we die for whatever we did wrong. The character played by Tom Hanks in The Green Mile later comes to realize he's being made to live a long time as punishment for what he did wrong in performing the execution of a man he knew to both be innocent and something which in some people might consider to be a Messenger of God. Consider the plight of Hattie Durham in the Left Behind series of Christian thrillers, after she realizes who Carpathia is, for a long time believes that she doesn't deserve Christ's salvation by becoming a Christian, and deserves to be violated six-ways-from-Sunday in Hell for eternity for what she did.
Well, maybe you think you deserve that, more power to you as you scream in agony then, I hope you enjoy the torture since you wanted it so much. I don't think I've done anything wrong enough to deserve being punished at all when I die. I figure all the suffering and hell I put up with in this life, plus the trauma of dying, more than makes up for anything that I might have done wrong here, if I did do much of anything wrong. See Robert Short‘s book Something to Believe In on the subject of Hell on Earth.
So you get to the end of your life and you believe you done wrong and deserve some punishment. So you get it and you realize how horrible it is. Who do you blame for this state of affairs? Well, it ain't me, I'm giving you a new idea for the meaning of death, and it ain't God, if (s)he exists, because (s)he didn't decide to punish you, you did. So maybe you need to rethink what you believe is going to happen to you at the end of your life here on earth.
The clock is running, sooner or later your time will run out. And it was Robert A. Heinlein, again, who said about his own death, exactly what will happen next: Either you will know what happens after you die, or you will know nothing.
What am I saying here? If you will know nothing, that is, if you ‘die dead' - that when you die, the result is oblivion, that is, annihilation and subsequent nonexistence - then you don't need to concern yourself about what happens when you die. I used to think the thought was terrifying until I realized - or actually it was my sister who pointed it out to me - that it's exactly what it is, if the end result of your life is oblivion, that you'll never know that you don't exist. That's one of those kind of self-evident ideas that, until you think about it, is probably something you don't realize.
Do I think it's sad if that is the case? Yes, I am deeply saddened by such a concept. All the horribly pointless waste of human potential that is lost at death and can't ever be recovered. Thirty billion souls - the estimated total population that has ever existed on earth - all used once and thrown away. If that doesn't say something about the need for recycling, or reclamation or something, then nothing will.
But there are a few glimmers of hope. One of the finest examiners of myth and mythology, the late Dr. Joseph Campbell, asks the question, "Are we consciousness or are we the vehicle of consciousness?" One way to put that is, are we, that is, our soul, and our personality, our essence, merely a display, or is it part and parcel of what we are as an entity?
If our consciousness, our ‘soul' as it were, is merely a display, then when we die, we go with it. Maybe some part of our existence will remain, if you can call it that. And I think that's still a waste, because if you aren't around to remember what happened to you, what is the point of living, of having lived? Maybe there isn't one, as Supervisor 246 says later in this book.
But if - this, I hope with every fiber of my being is true - that I am something more than mere display, then I continue notwithstanding my death, and birth or rebirth, that I exist for all time, I always have existed, will always exist, and never will cease to exist. And neither will you, either.
Also, consider this. Science tells us that matter and energy are the same thing. If the energy in our brains represents our soul, then it should stand to reason that if one's soul is a form of energy, and is thus matter, then under the rules of science that matter can neither be created nor destroyed; we have always been here, we always will be here.
On the other hand - and I hate bringing up this point, but if I am to be honest with myself I have to make it - there is the possibility that while our existence is a form of energy, it is simply kept as an electrical storage within the construct of the brain, the way the files stored on a computer disk are simply the change in magnetic flux; the disk never changes, just the contents, and the contents can be modified, changed, replaced or lost. Or, the contents of the electronic memory of a computer, its "RAM," as long as it is refreshed by electricity the contents remain; if the computer ever shuts down, the physical memory remains but the electrical contents, the running program, disappear. If it's the same thing in our case, then when we die, we're gone, annihilated, we cease to exist and we become part of the consignment to oblivion. (Somehow, that seems like a cheesy and weak cliché.)
Ayn Rand put it quite simply in her book Atlas Shrugged: "There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence - and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: this issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence."
There is one possible answer which, if that answer does occur, then provides for certainty of life beyond existence. If it ever is shown that, even using the best possible atomic storage capacities, that the human brain's capacity is inadequate to store the contents of the mind of a human being, then obviously part of us exists somewhere other than our brain. It may be that the brain does have the capacity to store all of us. Or perhaps it does not. I'll leave that point open for now.
And let's not forget all the reports of people who can remember having been here in a previous life. And Near-Death Experiences; I get to those in a later paragraph. And other things. Maybe all of these things are all coincidence and mere self-induced delusion to make ourselves believe in something beyond existence. But there are enough reports of people who, never having heard of other people having these reports, coming forward to say the same things without knowing about the others, at least as I understand it they did not know of the others.
Maybe all of these people got together and concocted these stories. Now, one thing experienced interviewers such as police officers and security people tell us that when two people tell a story about an event, there should be minor differences between them. If two people tell exactly the same story about an event, they're lying or they've been coached (or both). If these people did not know of each other when they told different people the exact same things about what they saw and what happened, it provides a question: Why are all of them are telling essentially the same story? If they are a bunch of co-conspirators, who is raising the money to finance this operation and what are they getting out of it?
It can't be some religious organization, because the way this stuff is coming out, it doesn't necessarily favor any specific religion, and I don't see where it favors a political agenda since a lot of people won't believe it. I suspect it might simply be either cracks in a very well designed system or game to keep those on this side of the line from finding out about the other side, or hints thrown at us to keep us guessing.
I think a very good reason to argue for continued existence with our memories intact, but it staying hidden, is that if it has the sort of promise that what this book talks about, the many people living in less than subsistence conditions, if they had positive evidence of there being something more and possibly better than this world, would commit suicide in such mass numbers that there would be almost no one alive here in some parts of the world.
Just consider how much better the lifestyle of some yuppie stockbroker on Wall Street would look to some less-than-subsistence farmer in sub-Saharan Africa. And yet the stockbroker has his own set of problems to deal with. And yet, think about what's possible when your only limit on what you can experience is your own imagination. Go see The Matrix if you haven't. I think it's going to be one of those special pieces of work that becomes a classic, the sort of thing that the people who made it may not have had an idea of what they would end up doing at the time, sort of like what happened to Citizen Kane.
So I think we can build a case on almost any side of the issue for the continued existence of the soul, the death of the body notwithstanding. The reports of Near-Death Experiences ("NDEs") also provide good hearsay evidence of this. As I said, there should be discrepancies in every story; if two people tell the exact same story, they're lying or they've been coached. And it seems like everyone who has had an NDE is telling the same story. Are they all lying, or is the experience so explicit that they all had the same thing?
Now, they've done experiments where they simulated the Near Death Experience (sounds like the name of some New Age punk rock group) by causing certain parts of the brain to experience loss of oxygen or being struck on the head or something, and the results seem to be the same. But I have this suspicion there is something more there, something I can't quite put my finger on, that makes this phenomenon more than the mere dying or almost dying of a few brain cells. Perhaps it's some misguided faith on my part that wants to believe it enough to discard evidence to the contrary. I hope not, I believe I am a good enough philosopher of reason and scientist of logic to accept such evidence - if there ever is any - even if I do not like the answer. But call it a hunch.
To quote Mr. George Green in my first book Gatekeeper again, only I'll use it on the subject of whether there is something more than this life, "Perhaps you just have a gut feeling [about it]... I know how that is; more than once I've had gut feelings about things where I couldn't put my finger on it, but I knew something... Later I would discover why I had that feeling, and, more importantly, why I was right, but at the time I did not have the evidence or knowledge to know why I felt that way."
I think, should that be the case, that perhaps it is possible to forgive everyone for their stupid screwups when they are here. Come on, someone screws with you for a few years and tortures you to death once? You going to hate him (or her) for the next trillion years? What if, in your previous life, you were a soldier and killed a bunch of people, should they be mad at you too? Or what if it was him you killed then, isn't he entitled to payback in the next life for what you did in the previous one? How do you know what you might have done before? Or what about some crackpot who thinks you did wrong to him?
If you play a game of Monopoly and you crucify one of your friends, I mean "grind them into the dust and drown them in their own gore"Tm, and bankrupt them, and really enjoy watching as they have to liquidate everything, turn over everything they own to you and quit the game in ruins, are they supposed to hate you for several years over that? Or might it be likely that the next time you play, they should do their best to destroy you then? Could it perhaps be that life is like that?
When I first learned to play chess back in 5th or 6th grade in school, I was about 11 or 12 at the time, I was terrible at it and a friend of mine kept crucifying me, I kept losing badly. I got so mad one day I swept all the pieces off the board. Well, one day - and he swears he was playing his best and did not throw the game - my friend made some really bad mistake in one of his moves. You can bet I enjoyed every minute of that game as I turned around and destroyed him! No mercy and not a bit of charity, I enjoyed watching him suffer and lose big time. You have to figure it was a significant moment of my life when I can remember one chess game I played over thirty years ago, and yet sometimes I can't remember what I had for breakfast yesterday.
Do I regret destroying him in that game? Of course not, it was payback for what he did before. And if he was able to come after me again, I should have no complaints. And yet we could still be friends in other circumstances even if we were merciless competitors on the chessboard.
Back in the summer of 1995 I had a friend named Erwen Tang, whom I have never met in person, only spoke with him by telephone and e-mail even though we only lived maybe 40 kilometers apart. We played the computer game DOOM - in deathmatch mode - by modem a lot. I'd kill him some times, he'd kill me a lot and we always played take-no-prisoners mode. One time I and one of his friends went at each other and we toasted each other left and right, a charnel-house of killing. When we got finished, we both talked how much fun we had, especially when the other guy did a really neat way of killing us. Erwen and I were still friends even though we always fought to the death - and redeath - in the game, and we even collaborated on writing a map for the game, that ended up being included in a third-party book on maps done by expert players of the game. He went on to college and I went back to work so we sort of drifted apart and I haven't spoken to him in several years. We never took our game playing attitude of "kill the other son-of-a-bitch at all costs" toward each other out of the game.
So maybe we have to consider the possibility that we're playing a game on earth or we're learning things, and as such, once we die we shouldn't hold people responsible for what happened here, because maybe what they did to us here is payback for what we did to them before. Or just maybe, you're going to violate them six-ways-from-Sunday in their next life to make up for what they did here. Presuming you can find them.
A dear friend of mine mentioned how one of her friends died and promised if there was any way to do so they would try and send a message back from beyond. And she never got a message from them. I said that if sending a message is possible maybe what happened was, they wanted to learn something and decided to come back to earth in order to learn whatever it was in the life of that particular entity.
Maybe what happened was that they got to Heaven, Paradise, The Afterlife or Valhalla, or whatever you call it, and the Death Traffic Manager or Incomings Support Clerk, or Optional Recycling Operator said to them, before they could even get to the equivalent of a phone to make a call back to earth, "Hey, I got just the thing for you, we have a birth in an hour and 45 minutes where that person will have over 20 of the experiences you put in a requisition that you wanted to learn, and you have a priority reservation for them, since it's a pure match for what you've selected. Only problem is, you have to immediately go under the knife now, you just made it in time if you want to catch that one. Otherwise, from looking at our plans for the future of earth, someone having all these experiences won't be around for another 10 years and unless you stay here the whole time you won't be available. You were chomping at the bit to get three of these and you only took your last life because you knew you were going to die early and would get one of the experiences you wanted badly in that life you just left. Or you can pick up each one of them, but you'll have to die and be reborn as many as 30 times to get all the things you want. So it might take you 2500 years to get all these experiences versus maybe 70. We've got all of eternity but you might not want to take that long. It's your call, do you want to take this birth now or pass?"
And they took it, did a u-turn, so they're no longer dead and can't signal her. But maybe, because they know them, their Circle of Life will touch again. My sister has a friend whom they suspect they knew each other before in previous lives. In one life, she claims they were both soldiers in the same army (which implies they were both men at that time), and in another they were husband and wife or lovers, I'm not sure which. In this life, both of them are female, so maybe people get Real Sex Changes quite often. Or maybe you don't get to pick your sex when you're born. Maybe you don't get to pick, it's involuntary. Or there is no Afterlife (in the sense that you don't get to stay after you die) and since you have to come back, recycling is automatic. Or maybe you don't get to come back, you only get one chance, and the people who think they have been here before are mistaken. Or maybe you keep coming back until you get it right (see my David Letterman parody about "Top 10 Reasons you can't remember what was before life" following this preface.)
Which brings up a whole new kettle of fish: presuming, for the moment, that people do survive death, do they come back? If so, is it because they have to (no afterlife to stay in), they choose to come back, or is it that they come back because of some misconduct (or simple insufficiency) and don't qualify to stay there? (Alfred Brooks in the movie Defending Your Life.) And if so, what level of misconduct justifies "taking the being born course over"? What might we consider to be the sort of thing that says that people have to go back and try again?
My sister has this fascination with Serial Killers. Don't get them confused with Mass Murderers, as I did, of which someone could be both. A serial killer kills usually one, or perhaps two people, at a time, or maybe a few extra if the opportunity comes up, but they do their killing more than once. Mass murderers might kill 5 or 6 people or more people at a time, and might only murder once. Ted Bundy was a serial killer. So are John Mousaui and John Malvo, the boy Mousaui was molesting, who, as this book was being written, were allegedly shooting 13 people from Fredericksburg, VA, to Montgomery County, MD, killing 11 of them before they were caught on their way to Pennsylvania. So was Supervisor 246's dear friend, Jeffrey Dahmer, of which he speaks so highly. Those who crashed the planes in the World Trade Center, Second Edition event were Mass Murderers. As was, of course, 246's other poster child, Timothy McVeigh. The Manson Family members who killed people were both. I spoke to my sister about her fascination with Serial Killers, that maybe she's learning something to understand how she was in a previous life, or perhaps she's taking advance lessons for her next life. As 246 says, maybe she'll have quite an accomplishment if that's going to be the case.
Someone once said life was too short to feel bad about things. How about eternity is too long to spend it wallowing in pity. Or seething in hate. If there is something beyond life, and it holds the kind of capacity that an entity of pure energy can obtain, then there is really no reason to have those negative emotions once you cross over. In this book I'm holding the Afterlife to a mirror-image copy of earth, because it gives me a good pallette to paint my story upon and comment upon our world. But if you have no restrictions upon your existence, and the universe is what you can dream it up to be, then the capability is unlimited for happiness, to do anything you please. If you've ever seen "Q" from Star Trek: Next Generation then that's the sort of thing that everyone just could be. Of course that character is a pest because he's too needy, but that's beside the point.
On a side note, I'm an agnostic. I do not know and do not have enough evidence to express an opinion one way or the other. Professionally I remain neutral but personally I suspect something is out there as a controlling entity. The problem I have with the whole scenario is that if you have nothing there, the universe makes too much sense, or, they still have the problem in which the universe was created but have no explanation as to what caused it. On the other hand, if someone did create the universe, how did they get here? And why are all the ways I keep hearing about whoever might be running the universe depict Him - and it's almost always a Him, the writers of most religious tracts tend to depict their God as male because, as Ayn Rand notes, when they created Him in their own image - and it's usually men who write religious tracts - God usually appears to have the social graces of an uncivilized two-year-old, being exceptionally rude, throwing tantrums and fits, and generally acting like someone who has severe self-respect problems? The character TDR - Tansin A. Darcos - exhaustively explains my reasoning on the subject in Gatekeeper which I don't need to reiterate here. That gives me yet another excuse to sell my other book to you also.
So I think maybe I've rambled on just a little too much. Maybe I've given you some questions to think about. But again, I'm not claiming I have the answers, that is, the ones that are right, or any answers. While I love what she has to say and I believe much of it, in my opinion I'm a much better metaphysicist than Ayn Rand because I learned from one of her errors, as I have stated from the beginning, that the most important rule of metaphysics is: it's a system of questions, you aren't allowed to give out the answers. Once you try to answer a metaphysical question, and claim it is correct, you stop dealing in metaphysics, you cross the line and you fall over into religion. Rand made that error at least once. I learned from it. And sometime in the future I'm sure someone will spot one of my errors and point it out. Maybe I'll be lucky enough to be alive when that happens, so I can learn too.
Well, anyway, let's go on to the story before I scare you so much that you put the book back on the shelf without buying it. The story is supposed to be fun to read, and while I don't know if you'll have fun reading it, I sure had a lot of fun writing it. While trying to do all the other things, e.g. look for work, settle an automobile accident claim, write to the CEO of a financial organization to tell him how I felt he shouldn't think he broke his promises, get clearances for some of the things in this book, handle my application to become a common carrier, notarize documents, clean up my room, and so on and so forth. Oh great, I finally get the chance to legitimately use "e.g." in a sentence, it's very hard to get that opportunity as most times "i.e." is the one you have to use to be correct. I treasure such rare pleasures.
You can read more about and discuss this book online at
http://www.instrumentofgod.com
or send e-mail to
246@instrumentofgod.com
In writing this book, I wanted to say that I had a hell of a lot of fun doing it. But I can't say that. What I can say is I had a Heaven of a lot of fun doing it! And if there is anything to a Heaven, or an Afterlife, or something, I hope it's organized like this one. If it is - and I hope with every fiber of my being that it is so - I can't wait until I become part of that society when some nice lady picks me, takes me to her room, and ‘loves me back into the world'.
On to the book. Here we go. It's all yours. Go to town on it.
"One thing seems clear and obvious from the lessons of history. It stands out singularly among all the things the lessons of history can teach us. The one thing, more than any other, that the lessons of history teach us, if the lessons of history teach us anything at all, is that no one ever learns the lessons that history teaches us."
- Paul Robinson
Paul Robinson paul@paul-robinson.us
Prince George's County, Maryland, USA, North America, Terra
August 18, 2002 - September 30, 2010
Commonwealth of Virginia )
County of Arlington )
I certify that this book, In the Matter of: Instrument of God, is a true and complete copy of the original on file and of record in my office. Witness my hand and seal, this
_____ day of _______________, 20_____.
_____________________________
Paul Robinson
Seal "A Computer Programmer and Notary Public in and for the Commonwealth of Virginia at large, and the State of Maryland in and for Prince George's County."
Virginia Commission No. 318185
My Commission Expires November 30, 2014
"Baby, I was afraid before
I'm not afraid, any more."
- Belinda Carlisle, Heaven Is A Place On Earth
I'm not afraid, any more."
- Belinda Carlisle, Heaven Is A Place On Earth
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Re: Current Preface from "Instrument of God"
The question is moot, for there is no death, and no "you" subject to it.Tdarcos wrote:So, have you thought about what happens after you die?
I thought we all agreed on that.
Am I a hero? I really can't say. But, yes.
-
Garth
I believe Conan speaking through the mighty pen of Robert E. Howard during one of his many fits of furious automatic-writing said it best:
"I have known many gods. He who denies them is as blind as he who trusts them too deeply. I seek not beyond death. It may be the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Crom's realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of the Nordheimer's Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content."
— Robert E. Howard
"I have known many gods. He who denies them is as blind as he who trusts them too deeply. I seek not beyond death. It may be the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Crom's realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of the Nordheimer's Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content."
— Robert E. Howard