Occam’s-Razoring the Afterlife
Belief in an afterlife (survival after the death of the physical body, to live by the right hand of God in some nice place in a parallel universe), to put it bluntly, is evil. It devalues the one life that you really have: the here and now.
Why “evil”, you may ask? Because “afterlifers,” like the common Pinoy or that suicide bomber sitting oh-so-nicely right next to you on a TAS Trans bus, think it’s more important to ensure your place in an afterlife. Thus, they work, think, act, and speak in the best interests of their lives in the Great Beyond. They have a value system that inevitably shortchanges and devalues their life here and those of around them.
Maybe you can understand me if you’ve already met somebody who is so passionate about hell and demons and hands you eternal damnation each time you commit any arbitrary “sin.” Oh my, you’ll go to hell if you say “fuck” or lustily look at the yum-yum smoothly-shaven armpit of that girl next door. On the other hand, if you live your life by the Good Book, your place is assured in Heaven after you die and got eaten by maggots—which also means living your life against human nature.
Maybe you can understand me much better if you’ve been closely following what has been happening in places like Israel and Iraq, where fundamentalists believing in the eternal rewards they’d get in the afterlife willingly blow themselves up—including those women and children who happen to be around them when they pull the pin.
But there is no afterlife. Human consciousness is material, dependent on a material brain. The fact is that people only want to believe that their consciousness will continue to exist—like some desperate coping mechanism. They usually do this through some sort of reverse logic: conclusion first (there is an afterlife), then selecting comfortable “evidence” (near-death testimony by people guesting in shows like Mel and Joey, ancient scriptures—the very same ones that say diseases are caused by demon possession)
But to quote another honest atheist, Aaron Kinney:
“Religion is often referred to as a ‘crutch’ and I believe the same thing applies to the afterlife. It is a crutch for the weak minded. It is a comfort for those without the stomach to face the evidenced truth…Discarding the afterlife belief makes this life much more important; it raises the stakes; it puts more responsibility on a person to make this life the best life possible, when most people would rather not have such responsibility.”
I used to walk around Makati in a white T-shirt with a message, “Live. Here. Now.” It also has a quote from Filipino poet Eric Gamalinda: “I will comb the city’s streets and wrestle the Evil One until finally, quoting Rene Char, disappear without too much paraphernalia.”
I still have that shirt (it’s six years old now), and I’m selling it for ten thousand pesos—I need the money to help me “live the good life, here, now.” Call me if you want to buy it.
The first sucker can have it for a good discount.
Uncategorized | Comment (0)Guesswork
Last weekend, while I lounged around the house reading Eco’s How to Travel with a Salmon, I thought of a new plot for a novel: why not write about my hellacious situation in the company I previously worked for as a happy little writer-elf, that peculiar situation that had inhabited most of my waking hours for some three years? Why think of something else, weave it out of a daydream, when there was all the grit of a smashing story, sparing me the mental effort of conjuring false ones?
I also realized, still while reading Eco, that because of my preoccupation with death, self-annihilation, and the nonexistence of God, I have altogether forgotten how to observe everyday life—the ways of everyday people, the subtle expressions of the daily culture in which I exist. Back in the days of my juvenile poetry, I used to make them up in my head even as I walk the road to my university, or while on the LRT. I wrote love poems, hate poems, angsty poems, poems that purported to have some social or political purpose, verses that mimicked the beginnings of a romantic epic, only to end abruptly like what the French do. So I decided to observe, again, the people, the daily grind, the little colorless details, in the hope that somehow, I’d be able to take something from it: a new way of seeing things, for example.
Now, this is what I’m going to write, while outside a slight rain mists the glass panes. I just received my assignment for a five-day thing. It’s a profile of a company I barely know about. This is what my work is about: guesswork. Adapt to someone else’s style. Lick the wounds of others. Take full ownership of the issues of the original writer, feel for him, fight for him, kill his enemies for him, dominate this planet and ride on his high horse. Terrific, isn’t it? That’s the intangible “joys” of working at home.
I was editing some manuscript today when something suddenly hit me. It was a small Eureka moment, the kind that descends on you when you’re alone and staring at the sinking sun. It’s about living and dying (a girl named Ciaramarie Abalos died of E. coli just Friday last week, by the way). Even if I’d be able to live for 75 years, it’s still a fleeting existence, a brief spark, a short interlude before the final curtain call. As the late artist Levi Celerio said it so aptly: even if you’d live a hundred years, it passes like one cloudy afternoon, it feels like you’ve lived for only one whole day. It’s that compelling sense of brevity that sometimes drives me mad. And when I look around, no one else seems to notice those very things that confront me every single day. Ah, the entire universe is maya, an illusion. Tyler Durden is right: We are part of the all-singing, all-dancing dungheap that lives each day to forget about and deny the fast-approaching The End.
And what do I do for the meantime? One writer said: “Sit on the banks of the river and wait for the corpse of your enemy to come by. Obviously, in the meantime you have to think of something else—that’s what I mean by polychronic personality. Wait on the banks of the river, but in the meantime you read Plato, you write books."
Well, I will, man. I will. And for the meantime, too, I will hold a sword and slice through the thick, stinking flesh of this all-singing, all-dancing dungheap. And continue guessing, guessing, guessing who will knock on my door when it’s all over.
Uncategorized | Comment (0)First-rate Murder
Two things:
First, my butt is itching.
Second, John Lennon is in my head dancing his happy dance.
Why, you ask?
Because a neighborhood toughie, this kid who was my age who used to walk around our block with a revolver in his hand, is dead. Murdered by the very shadowy characters he had been dealing with for years. My regret? I wasn’t the one who pulled the freakin’ trigger.
I hated the bastard. Five years ago, I canvassed around for a hitman. Somebody told me it would cost me at least five thousand pesos and a guilty conscience. I told him the conscience I can easily handle, but I have no five thousand pesos. Jesus Christ, where would I get the five thousand pesos? So the bastard lived and wreaked havoc in otherwise Cavite’s version of Pleasantville for the subsequent few years. While I worked in Makati, I would daydream about that bright, sunshiny day when I would forget about it all and go to this bastard’s drug-smeared warren and pump six rounds into his tiny, tiny head. I would be laughing in ecstasy. I would smear the walls with his brain. I would tell my daydream to a Catholic officemate, and not halfway through my story, he would excuse himself to the bathroom and retch and retch and retch out his lasagna.
But then, somebody finally did it for me. Last night, my mother told me the bastard’s dead, and it was cinematic, worthy of a Carlo Caparas flick. Some men in a jeep took him, brought him back many hours later all black and blue from torture (but still alive), kicked him out of the jeep, and there on the sidewalk, while he pleaded for his pathetic life, blasted bullets into his face. Everybody saw it. I mean, everybody.
When I heard the news, I told my sister let’s celebrate. She reminds me how morbid I am, the fellow’s dead, why be so happy? I told her what’s more morbid is the past five years, enduring this kid’s reign of terror and not lifting a finger. I told her let’s cook some food. Buy a tub of ice cream. I told her i want rocky road, with the mallows and nuts and all. I told her I would eat and laugh and daydream about brains being smeared on the walls, and countless mothers singing a happy song for our now peaceful nights.
[I also blog at the Festering Isolation (http://jblazarte.blogspot.com), which is a humor thing, by the way. Visit it. But read it while eating ice cream.]
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