"Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission,
and for my sins they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service.
It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I'd never want another."
-Captain Willard, Apocalypse Now
Anyone who has not read the Preface to this post should go ahead and read that first.
In programming terminology there is a wonderful little thing called a conditional loop. I remember loops of various kinds vividly from my BASIC programming days, they were essential to any kind of structured programming. I remember back in like the Eighties when I was first exploring the wonderful world of computers, I didn't know initially that there was such a thing as a conditional loop. As a result, my primitive little programs were full of GOTO statements, resulting in code that was almost impossible to read, even for me. It was what the programmers call "Spaghetti Code", unstructured code. Can you tell I am a geek from way back? ;)
Anyway, getting back on point, a conditional loop is a block of instructions nested inside a conditional statement. In generic terms, while a certain condition remains true, the instructions are repeated. At such time as the conditions no longer remain true, the program drops out of the loop, and potentially continues on to other parts of the larger program.
The relevance of this programming structure to our topic today might seem a little obscure, but bear with me.
What happens to people after they die? Of course many people would say, there is no after. You die, you become worm food, that's it. That's all well and good, but I am not addressing those people. See the Preface.
Some people, such as Christians and I guess Jews and Muslims too, believe that you get one lifetime and after that you go to heaven or hell. I think that most people who belong to one of the Abrahamic religions are okay with that outcome for a couple reasons. First, they think they will be one of the ones to go to heaven. Secondly, they may think that only really bad people go to hell, and the majority of people go to heaven. For Christians, that latter point of view is clearly doctrinally untenable, please reference Matthew 7:13-14. Jesus clearly thought that heaven as a final destination after this life was the exception to the rule. What then is the rule? What happens to the majority?
This question was brought home to me by my Dad's recent brush with death (he's okay now). During all this time I am thinking, "what happens to him?" He is absolutely not a spiritual person in any way, so probably we can rule out heaven. I don't think he would even like heaven. It would just totally not be his thing. Does he then deserve hell? I didn't think that, either. What, then?
Another major branch of world religion derives from India: Buddhism and Hinduism. Unfortunately, talking about what Buddhists and Hindus believe is a little like talking about what red-haired people believe, they are very diverse religions. For the purposes of this blog post, I will mostly restrain myself to Buddhism, and only to the form of Buddhism (Theravada) that is frequently considered to be closest to Gautama Siddhartha's original teaching. *
(*Mahayana Buddhists obviously deny this, but in terms of documentation, the scripts from the Theravada school are the oldest)
In both Hinduism and Theravada Buddhism, we are condemned to repeat this life as a result of karma: more bad deeds, and you may be reborn as a mudskipper or a marketing exec or something. Be nice, and your next incarnation may bring you to being born in a palace with nice things and lots of pleasurable activities. The mechanism here is essentially negative and external: be bad, and this impartial external karma will poop on your parade. It is not actually very different from the Abrahamic idea of God's punishment, except that it is recurring and proportional instead of final and absolute. The idea of a final heaven, just like the idea of a final hell, is not really a part of Hindu thinking. Your afterlife is here, in other words. The Hindu afterlife in structure is not like a conditional loop, but more like a program with a lot of GOTO statements. Do bad, and you might get reincarnated as a shrubbery. Do good, and you start slowly heading towards all the good stuff; successful career, vacation home, good looks, nice teeth, or whatever.
Here, Buddhism and Hinduism go their separate ways. In Buddhism, any human being no matter how low on the Karma totem pole they are, can become enlightened and hence leave this world. So for Buddhists, Karma governs rebirth but not escape. If Adolf Hitler gets reborn as a human being, he could bail out of this rebirth scheme even if his karma is atrocious. So in Buddhism we begin to see the makings of a conditional loop structure (apologies for my sketchy BASIC):
Dim enlightenment As Integer = 0
Dim karma As Integer = 100,000,000,000,000
Dim goodness As Integer = 0
Do
GOSUB incarnate(karma)
' Live your life, the pleasantness of which is
' dictated by the karma of your previous life.
If goodness=1, ' Were you good?
Then karma = karma - 1 ' Less bad karma for you
Else karma = karma + 1 ' more bad karma for you
End If
If karma < 1 ' Minimum bad karma level is 1
Then karma = 1
End If
Loop While enlightenment < 1
' If you aren't enlightened, you have to do it again
karma = 0 ' Enlightenment trumps karma
GOTO NIRVANA
Now, when you ask who exactly it is that goes to Nirvana, and who exactly it is who is going through all these incarnations to begin with, you run into all sorts of problems since according to Gautama there is no self or soul to get reincarnated or to go to Nirvana to begin with, and not really any Nirvana either, but I digress.*
(* the reality or non-reality that the concept Nirvana refers to, is not considered to be capable of being expressed in concepts. One can consider the Buddhist idea of Nirvana to be sort of like training wheels on a bicycle.)
The Buddhists for all their advanced thinking still inherited Hindu ideas of karma, even though they thought it didn't have the last say anymore. Karma is still functionally equivalent to divine punishment for misbehavior. Even if there is no deity in charge of that punishment, it has the same effect as an angry god except that unlike the Abrahamic God, that punishment is only for the next turn of the reincarnation merry-go-round, not forever.
Getting back to the Abrahamic religions particularly Christianity (because I know more about that one), the problem with hell is that it seems a bit disproportional to its cause. It is hard to see how any merely human badness, however bad, could be justly punished by eternal torture. In Christianity in particular, not only is hell vastly disproportionate as punishment for any human evil, but you don't even have to be outstandingly bad to go there. (referencing Matthew 7:13-14 again). On the other hand though, there seems no reason to think that the majority of people who are not particularly good either, should go to heaven. That is a disproportionate reward just as hell is a disproportionate punishment.
And, frankly, while everyone hates the idea of going to Hell, not everyone is terribly keen to go to Heaven. A common expression of that is people who will say something like: "What do you mean, there's no {sex/beer/cars/porn/cheeseburgers/television/barbecue/rock-and-roll} in heaven?? To heck with that!" ;)
Some people have tried to approach hell as a sort of structural issue with heaven - that it is not so much that God wants to torture all these folks, but that hell is implicit in the nature of heaven or God, or even that the damned ARE in heaven but it feels like hell to them. Sounds like bad planning on God's part if that were true, IMHO. "Oops guys, I am real sorry, but we had sort of a logistics issue while building heaven, so you have to spend eternity in agony. Sorry!" ;)
Let's suppose God has delegated the design of the afterlife to us. What should we look for in a well-designed afterlife?
1. It should be consistent with the mercy of God. (That rules out hell.)
2. It should not send to heaven (or to more spiritually illuminated realms) people who have never expressed any real interest in spiritual things. Heaven might indeed be hell to certain people.
3. The person's afterlife should ideally reflect what they in fact desired in life: in other words, there should be a 1=1 symmetry between what was in that person's heart and their next life. You can argue with karma, but you can't argue with what you yourself wanted.
#3 coincides very well with a recent mantra of mine, which is limited as all such things are, but I think it is very appropriate here:
EVERYONE GETS WHAT THEY REALLY ACTUALLY WANT
What they want means, what they truly want, not what they said they wanted. What comes out of your mouth is not important, what is in your heart is what is important.
In terms of what we have been discussing here, if you want earthly things, maybe you reincarnate back here. If your heart's desire is hot babes, cheeseburgers and corvettes, you are going to find those things on Earth. Not that you will necessarily get them or that you will keep them if you have them, because a transitory nature is part of this realm of existence, but you are free at least to pursue those things. If you want spiritual things, maybe you leave this realm of existence for a more spiritual one. So, from a next-life standpoint, you really do get what you really want. Want to stay here in this world or one like it? Stay! Want to get out? Is that truly your heart's desire, not just what you say? Pack your bags!
So using the conditional loop as a simile, the block of code is this type of existence. Existence on this Earth or somewhere like it. The conditional question is, "Do you want what this world has to offer?" If the answer is yes, you go back and do it all over again, and you keep on doing it all over again until you see through the world, see through its basic principles, and you answer "no". "No", I don't want to stay here. With all my heart, I want to leave this place and go to a place that is closer to God."
Now, someone might say that there isn't really any punishment for evildoers in this scheme. They would be right to say that, in a sense. Vengeance is a human desire. God does not wreak vengeance on the evil, the evil do that themselves. If your heart loves evil, you are already in hell.
Lets do a thought experiment right quick. Suppose we have Joe, a homocidal psychopath, and Jane, who is a college girl. Joe tortures Jane in unspeakable ways and then kills her.
Now Jane, in her life and in lives before, had an option as we all do: she could set her heart on material and worldly things, or on divine things. If she set her heart on divine things this time around, she will leave this world and everything in it behind her, to go to a better world. If she does not do that, she chooses to come back to this world with all that this implies. Including the risk of being murdered again at some point. Either way, she doesn't really have a lot of room for complaints. She is doing what she wants.
Now what about Joe? Well he is a homocidal psychopath, and he may choose to return to being a homocidal psychopath. That is actually not such a kindly fate. And when his turn comes, he too will return to where he really wants to be, so he really cannot complain. Everyone gets what he really wants, and we don't have to attribute the very human quality of vengeance to God.
So the conditional loop is, do you really want to stay here?
..
I died as a mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was Man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soar
With angels bless'd; but even from angelhood
I must pass on
-Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī), Sufi poet
