Where Everyone Knows Your Name

Okay:

One of the five remembrances of the Buddha is "You will die some day; there is no way to escape death."

Heavy, huh?

The other day I got into a long debate with a friend of mine about what happens to you after you die. I discovered that I have a rather unconventional theory. Most people, I think, regardless of whether or not they subscribe to some organized religion, believe that after you die you go to Heaven or you go to Hell.

And most people believe that your actions here on earth will dictate what happens to you in the afterlife.

I think that's a crock of shit.

Of course, people who believe that also believe that God speaks to certain people and tells them to write books to spread his Word, even though up until a few hundred years ago, most of the world was illiterate. Imagine if God spoke to a prophet in today's world and told him to write a New Testament in html code. The computer geeks could make a killing saving souls.

I do believe, however, that nothing can ever really be destroyed. It merely changes shape. Death, in my opinion, is a transition. But if your physical body changes or decomposes, then it stands to reason that your consciousness would also change. Perhaps it would become something that you could not recognize. Assuming, of course, that there is still a "you".

Maybe the things that we stress out about every day don't amount to a hill of beans in the world that awaits us after death. Adultery. Murder. Rape.

Maybe God doesn't care about that kind of stuff. Maybe there is no punishment or reward. Maybe things are a bit more complicated than we think they are. Maybe there is no God, in the Divine deity sense of the word.

Or maybe God is like a Kindergarten teacher. If we're nice and we share and we don't tell lies and we play fair and we learn what we're supposed to learn, then we get some graham crackers and milk and twenty minutes of recess.

I'm sorry, but that sounds a lot like wishful thinking to me.

So what happens after you die?

Here's my theory.

See, throughout history people have imagined God to be like a strict but loving parent. I think God is more like a child. A toddler, in fact. We're his toys. He made us out of clay. And like a child loves his toys, so does God love us.

When we die, we go back to the big Play Dough wad in the sky. Whether or not we were good or bad, murderers or painters, saints or sinners, is a matter of what pleases him in that moment.

There is no justice.

There is no order.

Or...

You go to a nice pub where everyone knows your name, the women are easy and the beer doesn't taste like piss water. Now that's a heaven I can believe in.


Thanks for reading.

GOBAMA!

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Confession: When I was a teenager, I honestly believed that I would be dead before thirty. As a result, I really didn't plan for adulthood. Now I'm playing catch up.