You go to the store, you buy some stuff, and you leave.
This is the expectation that any regular folk has when going throughout their day. A benign and even boring task that we do on a regular basis; however, something we know won’t take forever. Maybe 20 minutes to an hour depending on distance, quantity of goods to buy, time in transit, etc.
Now, what if the fact shopping for groceries had an end to it made it mortifying?
I.e., The fact that in a moment or so, the “shopping experience” (I hate that this sounds like some corpo terminology) will come to a close… Would that make you petrified, screaming, or ready to cry to sleep? No?
I mean, you can always go back to the shop.
That is a fair point back– any 30 minute visit to “Store” can always be returned to next week or next hour. It’s repeatable and once you grow out of infancy (as children can be challenging) you can logically conclude that even if the experience is delightful it does not have to be the end. You can always come back. But, well, I suppose there could be a last time.
That is somber, is it not?
Sure, for however a mundane store could be– perhaps you plan on retiring and moving, or changing careers, or getting out of the country, its days could be numbered. Regardless of what kind of inevitability, there is guaranteed some inevitability that there will be a visit to “Store” which marks your last visit. And, maybe this is a bit saddening; but, most people live and move on.
I am saddened by the fact that the lady at the register, the cleaning-robot in the isles, the guy working the night shift, and my favorite special flavors of Yakult from that particular refrigerated shelf, will one day see me for the last time. But that’s not really petrifyingly sad. It’s just, what it is.
An inevitable end.
And as we grow up and develop into some form of human adults, part of being a functional member of society is embracing and accepting this time-based reality. Yeah, relationships, places, people, events, all come to a close. Curtain call. Finale. All good things must come to an end, but even all things, too.
Except the one thing. The religious mind invites.
That is, life itself. Because death is too tragic a concept that we cannot accept, a forever, secondary life comes in to supplement our petty existence. Now, with new-and-improved Live Forever(trademark), you don’t have to stay dead in the dirt!
The embroiling efficacy of this belief system is that it fundamentally changes your psychology– you can no longer accept finite existence. While there are religions that perhaps do not teach the idea of an infinite afterlife, the primary three (Christianity, Islam, and Hindu) all do. So to suddenly turn around and say that we live finite existences, just like our trips to the store, and Macbeth’s brief candle (out, out brief candle!), is simply unacceptable and mortifying.
Suddenly, a cloud of cognitive dissonance plagues the mind, because even most religious adults can comprehend and fully accept that their trips to stores, leases on homes, times on vacation are all finitely measured. Yet, when it comes to life itself, it is a different story.
This is part of the absolutely Machiavellian construction of religion, like a corkscrew-shaped cock of a duck, it firmly cements itself in the mind of the believer. Even when presented the historical error of their religion, or the logical contradiction of their scripture, or the ethical quagmires that their persecutory beliefs hold, they are, as their bible may say, “steadfast in the Lord,” in large part because of the obsession with eternity. If you believe with even 1% of your being a possibility of an eternal paradise after our comparatively nonexistent one today, then you are confined to draining your emotion within that belief.
Math Agrees — Infinity is Big
It’s a simple point but is worth repeating, infinity is inconceivably large.
If you’re familiar with third grade math, then you know dividing something by two is cutting it in half. Imagine this “afterlife” paradigm was not actually infinite, but lasted just as long as we live our current life. Suddenly, this life feels quite important, as it is mirrored 1 to 1 in an afterlife, and it is exactly one half of everything we experience.
What about a world where heaven is twice as long as our existence. Lived for 80 years? Be in heaven for 160! Like a bargain sale. Now, life is still quite important to you, but you get double that experience in the afterlife. Suddenly, your life is one out of three parts long.
Here’s a big one: 10 times as long. So the 20 years in retirement you get? You worked 40 and get 20? That’s .5 times as long, right? Imagine you work for 40 years and get 400 years of retirement. Wow! So now take that to your life as a whole, and your 80 years of existence is trumped by 800 years of afterlife paradise. Incredible. Suddenly, the worries of this life are basically gone.
Well, they are literally gone with an infinite afterlife. Because mathematically, as you divide something closer and closer to infinity, it approaches zero. And the ultimate conundrum with accepting an eternal existence after dying is that suddenly this existence is worth literally zero in value.
The religion may preach still to act well in this life, do good, live the word according to the scriptures or what have you, but wouldn’t this be like the lame duck period of senior year in High School?
In America, kids tend to apply to universities and get accepted in the first part of their 12th grade experience, so the last quarter or so, many soon-to-be-alumni live in a much more carefree way, knowing that this last part of the school year is, in a sense, meaningless. Taken to an extreme, some of these students will stop going to class, stop taking tests, and accept any other failing grades based on the confidence of their acceptance to whatever university.
In the extremities of religion? Suicide bombings, mass-killing sprees, and terror all in the name of some god. In part this is fueled by the acceptance of eternity– the idea so megalomaniacal that it makes this sole life we have one of zero value.
The Ethical Effect
You almost can’t blame the religious person for feeling the way they do, as in their mind this life is but a stepping stone for something greater.
What is a terrible irony, too, is that religious people often try to accuse me, an atheist, of having no value or moral core. There is no god, so rules and morals can be whatever, and we will all end up raping and killing one another. However, religious people are the ones that I think view this world in a nihilistic lens. I am not the one preposing “since there is no god, let’s commit whatever crime we want,” no, they are. And for the exact reasons that make sense– they are tied to this idea of existence being absolutely nothing.
The great appreciation naturalists like myself have for the universe comes from its preciousness– there is in fact nothing more rare than this existence as it is literally all we got. That quick math I did earlier, well my afterlife I believe is not 10 times, not two times, or not even the same size as this life. I think there is zero afterlife, as do likely all secular people, which in turn makes the one life we have now infinitely valuable.
It is literally the one thing we have, and it will end, so we must cherish it and make the best society we can for others who toil with us.
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