Its that time of night again

I seem to be whinging a lot in these posts. Sorry. I just don't have anything intellectually stimulating to write. So what I can do is kind of combine a whinge into an intellectually stimulating post to make it look like I'm not whinging. Actually, you could probably guess what I'm going to write about already.

Theres something about night time which makes me think of the weirdest things. It probably helps that nobody is around to steer my thought on to a more rational and productive train of thought. Night also naturally makes me think about stupid dark things, like death. So tonight we're exploring the wonderful world of death.

Death is something thats shared by everyone. One of the universal inevitables in every earthly culture. Yet cultures have their own way of explaining death and in many cases, what happens after. Its quite interesting how there is such a large variety of views concerning death, and almost all of it speculation. Theres heaven, theres hell, theres paradise, theres reincarnation. Its quite impossible to see which one we actually end up going to or through. So we'll consider some of the possibilities.

The Heaven/Paradise and Hell view:
So we've got this really cool place you end up in where God/Christ/St Peter/Allah dudes live if you were 'good' during your time as a living being. You can also take a short cut to this place if you just repent your sins (and you're Christian). On the other hand, we've got this firey pit of torture you can go to if you didn't spend it quite so well. Sure, thats all fine and dandy.

Now we've got the choice between
a) going to paradise with a bunch of nice virgins (adultery anyone?), sitting and hanging around with God (Genocidal vigilante - Noah and the ark), and hanging out with all the other do gooders and others who took the shortcut.
OR
b) going to 'hell'. Supposedly the worst place you could possibly imagine, and then some, hanging out with non-believers and an angel who had his wings clipped who founded the place. Kind of makes you wonder where all the people who didn't get accepted into heaven went before hell got invented. But lets not dwell...

Its a pretty easy method for getting into your place of choice. Either ask for forgiveness, or blow yourself up in holy war against Western civilisation (depends on what culture) for option A. Or just go about your daily life for option B - you're bound to do something evil at least once. But watch out, you only get to choose once, and once you've made that choice, you're stuck with it for eternity. Thats right - forever. And you thought your 80+ years of life on this world was long... This will be so long that you'll forget what life was about, which kind of defeats the purpose of an afterlife if its supposed to be what you deserved from what you did during your life. Almost like putting someone in jail because they fell off their bed while sleeping and crushed another person to death in the fall.

Reincarnation:
YAY. Not a large proportion of the population really WANTS to die. So the idea of reincarnation kinda says that we don't actually die. We just err.. get born again, into a different body. The soul is still there, whatever that happens to do. In addition, we also get the oppurtunity to do stuff... no wait. We can't remember anything from our previous lives. So whats the point of this whole reincarnation thing then? To reach Nirvana... that weird arse heavy metal band which just screams out nothing. OK maybe not. Its just the nothing part. Nirvana is nothingness. We just keep getting reincarnated until we reach this nothingness. Awesome.

Just as an aside, some Christian teachings say that Hell is actually nothingness, and they don't want to go there. Its quite strange and interesting how the Hindus' Nirvana i.e. nothingness, is somewhere they want to be. The juxtaposition conflict in what they see as a desirable is quite profound.

Bag of bones:
Now onto my favourite part of the post. My own personal belief. I like this bag of bones idea because theres no strings attached. SO after we all die, thats it. The brain shuts down, the heart stops beating. Theres no other sensory perceptions after that. In fact, the heart could keep beating, maybe in some other person's body, which would be really cool.

The soul? There is no soul. The soul is another abstraction for personality. It doesn't actually go anywhere. It just helps a large part of the population think that there is more to life than just what they are. There might be, but I doubt your soul has anything to do with it.