Monday, May 4, 2009

We are spirits in a material world.

When I was in high school, I believed with all my heart (with "every fiber of my being" and "without a shadow of doubt") that if I believed in Jesus, and if I did all the right things my Church leaders told me, I would go to heaven.

Maybe that was to make up for the mini-private-hell that I went through on earth. Come to think of it, maybe heaven and hell aren't places, but things that God can hand to us, like Happy (and Sad) Meals.

And even if I didn't go to heaven, I was pretty sure I knew what the afterlife would be like. After dying, and before resurrection (into a body that would fit into my prom dress again), my spirit would float around and hang out with all my dead relatives and we'd go to church and go over to the spirit-version of Brooklyn and Buenos Aires and knock on doors of spirit houses and hand out intangible pamphlets to the ghosts of unbelievers. There was nothing about haunting computers and talking with the living.

Or maybe I really am in the spirit world, and you're all dead too? Are you haunting your own machines?

2 comments:

  1. Heaven has always been a foreign concept for me. Why worry about an afterlife? We're all trying our hardest, doing the best we can. Surely if something comes after, that's all we need to do to get there?

    How interesting that your religion spent so much effort formulating such a clear picture of something none of us could know about short of experiencing it.

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  2. Ugh. This sounds so familiar. I admit your living in a server farm is throwing me for a loop. I was kind of looking forward to not being conscious anymore...

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