Zeno's Heaven/Hell

    I'm an atheist.  I don't believe in God or the Devil, I don't put any credence in the Bible, the Torah, the Koran or any other piece of literature.  I don't believe in the authority of the Pope or Jesus or any other religious authority in this land or anywhere else on the planet.  I don't get angry or upset about other people's beliefs, I just don't want them imposed upon me.  I think that pretty much describes a lot of people, religious or otherwise.
    I'm not religious in any sense of the word.  But I do, however, believe in heaven and hell.
    To explain, I have to drop an old name, Zeno of Elea.  He was an grumpy, old curmudgeounly fuck that lived 490-430 B.C. whose favorite thing in the world was to poke holes in other people's thinking and logic.  Geometry being the thing of the day, he invented a series of paradoxes involving mathematics, apparently just to make other mathematicians look like dicks.  His most famous paradox is called Zeno's Race.
    Say you have a guy running the 100 yard dash.  The gun goes off, and the runner goes 50 yards.  He has crossed the halfway point, and now has 50 yards to go.  He keeps going, runs another 25 yards.  He has traveled, again, half the distance left to run, and now has 25 yards to go.  He perseveres and keeps running, reaching another halfway point of the remaining distance at 12.5 yards.  You don't need to be a mathemagician to know both that he has 12.5 yards to go and where I am going with this.  According to Zeno, the guy never actually crosses the finish line, he merely keeps getting infinitely closer to it, cutting the remaining distance in half.
    Pretty clever, eh?  On paper, this is a great argument, but in reality this is clearly not the case.  The runner goes the distance, breaks the tape, grabs a bottle of Gatorade and waves to the crowd.  Unless you're a fat old chain-smoking fuck like me, who can't go 100 yards walking without passing out or puking.
    When I first read about Zeno's paradox, I was a bit younger and still struggling with the rejection of the idea of God.  Even as a kid I was a non-believer, but I didn't like to talk about it and certainly never wanted to debate anyone on the subject.  I took the usual cop out and claimed 'agnostic' status.  It's pretty safe to say that.  'I can neither prove or disprove it, so I'm not gonna argue about it.'   I was kind of an angry kid also, with an authority problem, and anytime I heard some preacher or minister railing about Heaven and Hell I thought, 'Fuck you, you repressed control-freak.'  It's always seemed ludicrous to me to tell people, especially people who live in a country as wonderful as America who have every opportunity to live a perfectly fantastic life, and say 'When this miserable life is over, if you're good you'll be rewarded and go to Heaven.'  What balls!  Who could fall for that crap?  The Here and Now is fantastic!  The idea of Heaven and Hell is bullshit, invented by assholes to hold humanity hostage.
    Every one has heard accounts of near-death experiences, with the tunnels and the lights and the celestial music and the souls floating overhead and the departed loved ones beckoning from beyond, and almost everyone has an explanation for these experiences.  Either you believe them or you don't- again, it's one of those things you can neither prove nor disprove, just like God. 
    I was of the non-believer persuasion as far as this kind of thing goes, until my Mom almost died.  In 1990 or so, my Mom had a heart attack in the kitchen at home and almost died.  What a lousy son I am, I can't even remember when my Mom had a heart attack.  At any rate, she described to me very vividly the experience, being somewhere up above and looking down at herself lying on the floor while EMTs worked on reviving her and bringing her 'back to life.'  My Mom is a very pragmatic, sensible and reasonable person and when she tells me something, I believe it.  So some rethinking on the subject was neccesary.
    Here's my theory:  When a person is dying, when their life-force or soul or whatever you want to call it, is dwindling, it's a bit like the runner who is about to break that tape and finish their race, their life has got this much left, then half of that, then half of that, then half of that, and so on and so on.  To a doctor or loved one standing by observing, it seems that one second the dying person is alive and then the next moment, they're 'gone.'  But to the person actually experiencing death, the whole thing must seem like eternity!  Time is of course subjective, relative to the experience, anyone who's ever been in a car crash or similar experience can tell you that, and actually dying is a obviously a pretty momentous occasion. 
    At some point, the conciousness dwindles to the point that no further information from the outside world is coming in.  You no longer have access to your senses, you can't hear your parent or spouse or child crying in sorrow, can't feel the hand holding yours or see the place where you are spending your last moments.  Your brain has received all the information it's ever going to get, and that's what you're stuck with.  For this entire personal eternal moment, you are absolutely stuck with nothing more than the memories of the life that you have lived.  If you've lived a good life and your brain is full of positive memories, I imagine that would be a lot like Heaven.  If you've been a shitty person and lived a shitty life, this eternal-seeming moment of death is going be really---not so pleasant. 
    That's all!  That's Heaven and Hell in nutshell.  Something that to an outside observer is over in no time at all is going to seem like forever to you. 
    So at the end of the day, ultimately we are all runners on Zeno's seemingly endless track, and whether we experience heaven or hell when we reach the finish line depends on how we run our race and how we relate to and interract with all of the other racers.  No God, no Jesus, no Pope or priest or minister or rabbi or imam or boddhisatva can change that.
    I don't know any of the for certain, of course.  But what do I know?  I am merely a humble bartender with a G.E.D., and I know very little for certain.  Outside of the fact that the sun rises in the east, the Kinks were better than the Rolling Stones and the Beatles put together, and that I am unbearably charming when drinking whiskey.  But it seems pretty reasonable to me.
    I really hope that the guy who cheered and applauded during a recent Republican debate at the suggestion that fellow Americans who can't afford health care should just be allowed to die at some point atones for his shitty attitude.  I hope that politicians who vote to take away the freedoms of the people who elected them into their position somehow make restitution.  I hope that anyone who does violence and harm to their fellow human beings somehow find a way to make up for it.  I hope that those who feel the need to repress other people's sexuality just because it's different than their own and therefore are threatened by it in SOME way wake up to this fact and act accordingly.  I hope that guys in uniforms who beat the shit out of and pepperspray non-violent citizens can realize realize that they've done wrong and find a way to do right.  I hope that shitty people somehow find a way to change.  Not because God or anybody else wants or commands it, but simply because they're going to die someday and I want everyone to have a good death, following a good life.
    When I encounter shitty people doing shitty things, I don't say 'How can you live with yourself?'  I ask them, 'How are you going to die with yourself?'


Chad Kittrell
12/06/2011