Good Question

So, this 11 year old girl says to her Sunday school teacher, “If heaven is so great, why don’t we all just commit suicide?”

The Sunday school teacher (who is either some poor schlub who didn’t think fast enough to decline this thankless job, or someone trying to impress the church pillars, or -- worst case -- someone bent on bending the minds of the little tabulae rasae, and who in any case certainly lacks the training, the rationality, or the imagination to give the kid a useful answer) is stumped.

If he had studied church history (unlikely), he could have explained that suicide was a real problem for the early Christian church. Having made such a fuss about the heavenly reward, and having made life so tough for believers (at least in no way improving their lot), the church found itself losing membership at a rapid rate. The faithful, seeking a way out of their misery through redemptive martyrdom, were gruesomely bumping themselves off right and left, and the congregation was dwindling fast. Something had to be done, so Holy Mother Church declared suicide a mortal sin (some oxymoronic thinking there), thereby denying heaven to the martyrs unless they could find somebody else to do them in. So, fear of damnation keeps us from suicide. Right.

If the teacher were a rational and thoughtful guy, and wanted to explain and maybe reassure, he might have told the kid that while suicide is certainly an option, it’s hard to pull off successfully -- a failed suicide is a sad, pathetic creature -- and that survival is the most basic and powerful drive of the instinctual being. One would have to be very determined, or inexorably driven by madness, actually to commit suicide. Furthermore, heaven waits for us all, for even the worst of us. So, thinks the kid, I’m not that determined, and I have this party next weekend, and I’m not crazy, so that keeps me from suicide. A little more right.

If he had had the imagination, the teacher could have said that, again, suicide is always an option, but whatever the life lessons one might be thinking of abandoning in suicide, one was just going to have to work at them again the next time.

What? WHAT next time?

Now it’s time for the teacher to be fired from his Sunday school job, because (a) no imagination allowed, only dogma-parroting and staying within the lines of the Christian coloring book (do Judaism and Islam have the same kind of idiotic teaching aids?); and (b) this guy’s about to give these kids a brief lesson in reincarnation. Can’t have that, certainly.

If we crack THAT window, then out of it flies the power of the church to control and manipulate: reincarnation neutralizes religion’s ace in the hole, which is the capacity to damn the wayward to the eternal flames of hell. If the soul is eternal and eternally learning and growing, if everybody gets another shot, over and over again until they get it right, plus, if they get a break in between classes, no matter how they might have screwed up in a particular life, a breather (which could very well be heaven, compared to how life can be here) before they have to come back for repair and reconciliation, then exactly where in this equation do we place the religious institutions?

Well, nowhere really, unless they’re willing to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, be instruments of comfort, havens of peace and guardians of the souls of their flock, solely in the name of love, without any thought of material or political gain, period. Exactly how probable is that? The track record isn’t great, so far anyway. It may have been the original intention, or at least the intention of those avatars in whose name religious institutions were established, but less than one generation removed from the physical death of the avatar -- of any of them -- it all went to hell. So to speak.

Okay, so let’s take a look at a rational and imaginative God, the Great Sunday School Teacher in the Sky. Surely, in the process of designing and executing an expanding universe, God would probably go the micro-route and design and execute an expanding soul, yes? And, in order to give it substance -- particulate form rather than the wave form of the spirit -- he’d give it a nice fruitful planet on which to explore the experience of consciousness. Unfortunately, given the dangers and hardships of being housed in dense, solid matter, not to mention the alarming fragility of such a complex mechanical system as the human body (all those delicate moving parts), the soul would have to keep replacing the vehicle as it wore out, and as the soul simply outgrew it.

Each person’s soul, let us say, is a micro unit of the ever-expanding Great Soul, and grows itself by learning and bonding, getting bigger and bigger, greater and greater, seeking always the reconciliation of karma and the reconnection with The Great Soul.

(Uh oh -- she said the word “karma.” But that’s another show, as Oprah says.)

Anyway, in order to keep growing, all of us need try out various life scenarios, to experience all of everything: How would it be to work a life as a Hitler, and then how would one make peace with that? How can one endure a life as a modern Sudanese farmer? How would one learn to control the temptations of ease and comfort in the experience of a Mother Teresa? How would it feel to break under the strain of living as a single mother of several children and thus do them great harm? How could one transcend fear and go into the darkness of the mind of a Van Gogh, solely to produce great beauty? The possibilities are infinite, obviously; we are all killers and victims, saints, demons, madmen, artists, priests, warriors, scholars, kings, teachers, slaves.

That’s how we grow. We have to have different environments in order to study different experiences, and so, with each new entrance into solid matter, we try on a new body in new circumstances. Nothing scary about it, really; it sounds like something God might dream up. It also sounds like a framework that runs counter to normal politics; the truth of there being no soul death, that we have unlimited "do-overs", releases us from the thrall of our institutions, enables us to take more risks, be more creative in all our activities, and to see the elegant and stunning logic of our lives.

As soon as we accept that we are the sum and substance of unlimited possibility, we are set free.