thread: 2006-09-08 : Salvation, damnation, justification, a la Sydney
On 2006-09-18, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
Joe: All those individual molecules that make up Joe McDonald, they were individual molecules of a bunch of other stuff before me. And they will break down into individual molecules of other stuff after me.... it's just me not existing in my current form.
Vincent: It bothered me for a little while, that pretty soon I'll just be gone, with no more subjective experience of myself ever again. But then I realized that I've already been gone, with no subjective experience of myself at all, for billions of years, because I didn't exist yet, and I realized that that didn't bother me a bit. Why be bothered about my nonexistance in the future? It'll be just the same as my nonexistance in the past.
This may be an ironic position for me to take, especially since I'm a self-declared plan of Saint Paul, but:
I think people are thinking about this one too hard.
To join the overthinking for a minute:
What I call "me" is a particular pattern of standing energy waves, a pattern that has changed over time as I mature and decay but recognizably continuous with itself over time. Primarily it's atoms formed into molecules formed into cells formed into tissues formed into organs formed into a body, combined with a lot of loose water. Given conservation of matter & energy, and given that matter doesn't convert to energy or energy to matter very often, almost all those atoms have been around without me before I was born for billions of years, and will be around without me for billions of years after I die.
So what?
You can look at Sydney the baby 32 years ago, Sydney the man today, and Sydney the senile ruin fifty years from now and say, "Yeah, they're all different forms of the same thing." You can't look at Sydney the assorted dirt particles 100 years ago or 100 years from now and say that in any meaningful way. There's such a thing as having too much perspective, people.
So death and birth are not any kind of "arbitrary line." There's something recognizably me that comes into existence when I'm born (or arguably at conception; I'm not going to get into that debate now) and that ceases to exist when I die. And there's a definite difference between being born and dying, because my birth adds a good thing to the universe, a good thing that is unique and not quite identical to anything that has existed before or since, and my dying takes that good thing out of existence. No matter what suffering my death may have freed me from, no matter how joyful and complete my life may have been, dying is a bad thing, and I am right to be afraid of it, and my family and friends will be right to mourn me. (At the death of his friend Lazarus, "Jesus wept" - John 11:35).
Note that I'm not talking about my soul not dying or about wafting up to Heaven or anything: As best as I can understand it, the New Testament says that death is real, not an illusion—even the death of Jesus Christ—and that the dead are really dead, and it is on the Last Day that they shall be raised, in a perfected "spiritual body," but still in the body. And the resurrection narratives in at least three of the four Gospels emphasize that the resurrected Jesus ate and drank with his friends, and that He still bore the wounds of the cross and even invited the apostle Thomas to touch them: We are not talking about a ghost.
But honestly, personal life after death is not my primary concern. I'm primarily interested in living a better life now—making more happiness for myself and my loved ones and my "neighbors" (in the very wide sense of the Gospels, anyone I come in contact with)—and my prospective life after death in a new body is simply a continuation of this one in a higher octave, not a different song.
And, as I've discussed this with all of you, I've come to realize that what truly bothers me about death is not that I myself will die (although I will), nor that the universe as a whole will die (although it probably will, as I understand the latest findings), but that anything and everything I love could die at any moment—that my whole family, for example, could be wiped out by a bomb or bird flu or a bad driver. I don't want to be told that my daughter will continue to exist as dirt. I don't even really want to be told that she will continue to exist as a translucent, smiling, Hollywood-style spirit. I want some reassurance that the good in her will somehow endure, that there will be someone somewhere who will at least remember her, if not resurrect her. That is why the idea of an eternal God is comforting to me.
