OCTOBER 1997

Why is it that almost every human culture yet discovered has found it necessary to believe in an afterlife of some sort, but not a "before-life?" Why are there so many versions of Heaven, Paradise and The Great Beyond, but almost none about The Great Before..….

The human mind has been almost inexhaustible in its creative descriptions of life beyond the grave and how to go about arriving at the correct destination. Historically, humans have maintained a fiercely stubborn insistence on the existence of an afterworld, and a baffling lack of curiosity about their whereabouts before they were born. Why?

In looking at the world around us, we are fixed in time and space. We are here and it is today. The possibility of time-travel fires our imaginations, which is why it is the subject of so much popular science fiction. But even in those scenarios, as we travel back or forward, we are still us, and the moment (whatever the year) is still now. The I-am-here-and-it-is-today perception of the world is so universal we rarely think about it. Except for perhaps Albert Einstein and a handful of similar geniuses, we have no other options in thinking about the world. We are limited by our usually non-genius intelligence, and our ultimate sense of self.

Babies display the unwavering conviction that the universe revolves around them, and growing up is really just a nonstop lesson in being disabused of this notion. Religion could therefore be described as a means of holding on to that infantile conviction. It is simply an extension of our egos. It reassures us that we are very important indeed.

And our egos make no bones about it. They speak quite clearly on the subject. "Now that I'm here," we tell ourselves, "the world is an important place. And not only that, but I can see no possible way for the universe to continue without me in it. So, though I am smart enough to understand that I must die some day, that doesn't necessarily mean that I must end. I'm too important to just end." And the rest, as they say, is religious history.

Once we're here, we immediately recognize our importance and proceed to figure out ways to ensure that some part of us will always be here. Or at least somewhere. But we don't seem to care much, one way or another, where we were before we were here. Who cares what was going on before I existed? Certainly not I! And in a way, it makes a sort of self-centered sense.

Although this view of existence may explain how some of our religious myths came into being, it is still a mystery why so many religions, particularly Christianity, devote so little thought to the question of "pre-existence." At least the theory of reincarnation attempts to answer this Where-Were-You question. Recycling, so to speak, answers the question by suggesting that you were always somebody, even if not exactly yourself. (Don't discussions of religions make us say some strange things? What do I mean, "not exactly yourself?") But Christianity acts like it isn't even a problem, this concern over where we were before we existed. However, it is a major problem if you postulate, as Christians do, an "eternal" soul. If eternal, those souls had to be somewhere, doing something before joining their new human bodies. And they had to have been doing whatever it was they were doing, for a never-ending period of time, regressing inexorably and forever backward in time. It's hard to imagine, then, (for me anyway) how they could ever get to "today."

Christianity is based on the Bible, which tells concrete stories about concrete events in real time. On the fourth day, God did thus. During the reign of King Somebody, these battles took place, and so on. Time is measured in years and days, as we have come to know them; but the eternal nature of God's plans for us is a constantly woven thread throughout that same Bible. Therefore, this biblical timeline must be able to be traced backward into eternity, accounting for everything that has ever happened, including events that preceded our existence. If Christian theologians cannot do this, their failure means that they don't understand existence or time any more than I do, which is to say not at all.

I cannot begin to understand the concept of eternity. I just can't get a handle on it. So it is not surprising that I can't begin to understand any sort of eternal paradise, the hypothetical resting place for that intangible essence of humanity—the "soul." Even if I could understand eternity, though, I think the concept of a "soul" would still elude me.

(The "soul," which cannot be seen, heard, touched, smelled or detected in any way by the human senses, is also invisible to X-rays, CT-scans, MRIs and blood tests. It is said to have no physical properties, meaning it has no mass. This pretty well defines nonexistence. While it's true that thoughts, for example, can be said to "exist" without possessing mass, the neurons required to create those thoughts most certainly have mass. So I'm afraid the human "soul," totally detached from any physical body, literally hasn't a leg to stand on.)

But Christians steadfastly claim certain knowledge of a very real place called Heaven, where these ephemeral souls will reside for all of eternity, and where time runs in only one direction—forward. The childlike assertion that on Day One God created the universe, explains nothing. To maintain credibility, Christians must explain eternity, which means explaining what happened the day before Day One.

When I was a young child I asked my mother what God was doing before he created the world. I was told he was making switches for people who asked such questions. Thanks for the enlightenment, Mom. But as far as I know, no Christian theologian has answered that question any better.

I've heard the quaint little story about how we were all angels before we were born, at which point we came "down" to Earth to take on our mortal cloak. Aside from the undeniably fairy-tale-ish nature of this explanation, which hasn't a thread of theology to support it (even though there is theology aplenty to support some truly outlandish claims) this scenario has real practical problems.

If a pre-existing angel or spirit of some sort descends to join a human body, does that event take place mere minutes after sexual intercourse, at the precise moment that sperm joins ovum? Does ensoulment take place while a woman is, say, showering? Or on the bidet? Or snoring? If a zygote is a fully human being, as many anti-choice fundamentalists claim, then these are indeed the times at which the soul enters the body. But isn't there something very wrong with these images? Doesn't the word unseemly apply?

If ensoulment takes place later, then when? At thirty or forty days after conception, as the Catholic Church once taught? At birth? Does anybody know? Shouldn't it be important to know?

Christians carry on about Heaven, offering details about it and the rapture involved. They can provide equally detailed accounts of the agonies that await sinners in Hell. But if you ask where they were before they were born, they just shrug. There seems to be a yawning void in their "certain" knowledge of things eternal. But they may not shrug this off. If they are going to ring our doorbells and preach to us about the intricacies of salvation and damnation, then they must also be able to explain the equally important issue of where we were before we…were.

The burden of proof is not on me in this discussion. I threw up my hands long ago and cheerfully conceded that I haven't a clue as to what "forever" means. I cannot, and need not, try to explain it. Christians, though, are making authoritative, proprietary (and loud) pronouncements about the subject, and bandy about the word "eternal" with reckless abandon. All right then, Christians, explain eternity. But please explain both directions of it. Please explain the "other end" of eternity—the "back end" if you will. Explaining time in one direction only (forward) is like explaining the life cycle of a chicken without mentioning the egg. Eternal paradise and eternal souls are pure wishful thinking unless this problem is addressed and solved.

So, I challenge all Christians to explain precisely where they were before they…were. If I had to guess what I was doing before I existed, I would hazard that I was probably writing an essay about what it was like to be nonexistent.

© 1997 Judith Hayes

Portions of this were originally published in the Summer 1997 issue of Secular Humanist Bulletin.

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