Dead 13 Billion Years, but Okay

I fear death much like anyone else. In fact, much like most mammals.

Fear of death is a good thing. It keeps I, even us, out of a lot of trouble.

But humans are nothing if not complicated. Society and culture go along with giant brains that can create mental virtual realities that sometimes cause us to lose touch with the world.

Religions have long appealed to people by promising "life after death." The idea of an afterworld or heaven has competed with the idea of reincarnation for at least 2000 years.

People don't like the feeling of fear. That is the whole point. People have good memories, they see people die, and instead of getting on with life they start dwelling on death. Religions calm some people down: they don't feel they need to worry so much about death as long as they follow their religion's rules for getting into heaven.

Yet religions have many negative consequences, including making people gullible about all sorts of issues. Religious contempt for life can even lead to war, as when the Roman Catholic Popes encouraged Europeans to conquer the Middle East in the Crusades, with a promise that anyone who died in the crusade would be admitted to eternal life in heaven.

I fear death, but I don't want to be paralyzed in life by my fear of death. It is one thing to run away from an immediate, life-threatening circumstance, it is another thing to hide from life itself.

The way I figure it is that scientists say the universe is about 13 billion years old. They might change that figure from time to time, but I'll use it here. I was born in the mid-1950's. Before I was born I did not exist, not in any meaningful way. That was being not-alive, which is to say dead.

So I was dead for 13 billion years. And what of it? No big deal. I did not know I was dead. Nothing to worry about.

I am pretty sure I have just about 3 decades of life ahead of me at maximum. After than I will be dead for as long as the universe, or the space-time continuum, continues to exist. I won't be conscious, so I won't know I ever existed.

That is just the way it is for living organisms. We have our time, then we die. The important thing is to have a good time (defining good however you like) while alive.

Just in case you are missing the idea of scale here, reflect on the number one billion, or 1,000,000,000. Few humans live more than 100 years. 10 times one hundred is one thousand. String together a thousand thousands and you have a million. Then string together one thousand millions and you have a billion.

So I am just a meteor burning in the night. My entire life seems long to me, because I am in it, but to the Universe I am pretty close to nothing.

And I am fine with that. When I die other people will continue to live, animals will continue to live, stars will continue to shine. That is life after death. I won't be there. But as long as humanity endures, people like me will be there. Just as I am here now, long after my ancestors have died.

Satan, God, and Arguing Angels

"And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth."
—Revelations 12:4

According to Christian theology, of the angels created by God, one-third joined with Lucifer (or Satan, the Devil) while two-thirds remained loyal. Bad things happen on earth because some people listen to the devils; there would be nothing but good if we would all just listen to the good angels.

But what could they possibly have argued about, resulting in the split? The Bible does not say. God made them all, but apparently they were not identical. God presumably made Heaven, but apparently 1/3 of his creation thought it was defective in some way.

If earth is a reflection of heaven, if man is made in God's image, then the trouble probably started on a committee. An unimportant committee, like one set up to decorate for an annual event. "Do we have to do all gold again? I mean, everything is gold here. How about a little platinum? Platinum would really liven things up!"

The next thing you know all sort of reform and improvement movements would crop up among the angels. "I call this piece of gold a saxophone." But no, God and his gang of followers have decreed harps are the only musical instruments allowed. Soon angels are having secret, informal meet ups in platinum rooms to listen to saxophonists and watch performance art.

Or it could have started with some angel, not necessarily the eventual leader, Lucifer, being a smarty-pants. Authorities don't like smarty-pants, as I learned from my parents and Catholic School. Smarty-pants have trouble understanding that most angels like the way things are, and prefer stupidity to change. Smarty pants and heresy amount to pretty much the same thing.

"Hey, here's an idea, since this breathing life into clay figurines hasn't worked out very well. Let's start out with building something simple, I call it a protozoa. The protozoa will be able to adapt to the environment (a major reason for clay figurine failure) and have sex, and thereby produce improved protozoa each generation. They can evolve over time to have many cells, be bigger, and differentiate into species to form a mutually evolving ecosystem."

Then again it could have been cosmological questions that set angels against each other and against God. Perhaps that started as a philosophical argument about determinism (fate) and free will. The determinism angels favored the clockwork universe. The free will angels favored introducing chance, in the form of quantum probability waves for the small particles which they argued would make a better universe than just paving the streets with gold.

I suspect that God gave the smarty-pants angels earth because he could not get it to work to his liking. It was just a bunch of clay figurines dancing to his instructions on a globe of solid gold. The lazy two-thirds of the angels just went back to God and their harps.

But the entrepreneurial angels mixed things up. Earth ended up with an iron core and a stony crust with water that could support bacteria and then algae and protozoa and higher life forms.

So here we are. Unfortunately, apparently when God saw how well things were going he got jealous and tried to take earth back. Having perhaps learned a bit from the smarty-pants angels, he decided to invent a dozen or so major religions to compete with each other for the hearts and minds of homo sapiens. If you want a stupid religion to believe in, there are plenty of choices.