What Happens When We Die: Part 1

What happens when we die?

It's an obvious enough question. It happens to each of us and to everyone we know, yet nobody really seems to know for sure.

So far nobody who crossed that boundary for more than a few moments has reported back. They say Jesus was dead for two days before he came back, but that was almost two thousand years ago and the only testimony we have was passed around a good bit before anyone wrote it down so basically what we have from Jesus just wouldn't stand up in court.

There are several schools of thought on this issue. The first and nominally the most logical is that nothing happens when we die. We wink out of existence like a cheap light bulb and our bodies are disposed of.

This philosophy depends on the idea that our consciousness is nothing more than the biological and electrical processes of the brain and once those processes break down, we cease to exist.

The proof of this comes from observation. If you cut off the head then death is almost immediate. So far nobody has been able to keep a head alive without a body or a body alive without a head.

I think a lot of people refuse to even consider this possibility because it's very discomforting. It's not themselves they're worriying about primarily, when it's your turn to go, there's pretty much no turning back, but we all have friends and loved ones who died and most of us would like to think they continue somehow, even in a way that's utterly beyond us.

You can't posit this as the final word on the matter yet though. We understand so little of how the brain really works. We know some tricks, for instance if you add certian chemicals it produces certian effects, but when it comes to the real basics of how ideas are formed and stored we just don't understand how it's done.

It may be that the brain isn't the repository for our conciousness, but rather a conduit between our real selves and this physical world.

Marcus Aurelius talks about the futility of life because there's such a huge spance of time before we're born and after we die and such a brief moment in-between when we're alive, but, what if the issue here really is time itself.

We exist in four dimensions: three of space and one of time. The demensions of space we move about pretty freely in. We can go forward and back or up and down at any speed we wish whenever we wish. Not so with time, we are a slave in time. In time we can only move from the past to the future and only at one speed.

But, it's only in time that we die. Six months ago, my mother was alive, sixteen years ago, my dad was alive, and sixty years ago, my great-grandfather was alive. It's only in the present that they are not alive.

If we were somehow freed of time, then everyone who ever lived would still be alive because all we have to do is move through time to the peroid where they were alive or they could move from the time when they were alive to times when they weren't. If we could move into the past or the future of our own will then we would effectivly live forever.

Perhaps that's what happens we die. Perhaps that moment of breaking between life and death is the moment where we become free of time and maybe the reason nobody ever reports back after death is because our perspective is so different once we are free of time that there is no way to communicate with those who are still its slave.

I'm convinced that we are still in just the earliest stages of our full development. In time, we will overcome these ideas of life and death.

There was a time when light and dark were absolute forces to us. During the day, we had light, but at night or in the shadows we had none and there was nothing we could do about it. Then we discovered fire, then mirrors, then electricity and more and now light and dark are a matter of choice to us. We can bring light to the darkest room or the longest night.

Perhaps it will be that way with life and death too. At the present we have no control over it, but perhaps, in time, we will come to a place where we can illuminate death as easily as turning on a lamp.

Millsaps vs Belhaven

I was never a big fan of the program they have over at Belhaven. Mixing evangelism and academics never made much sense to me. I always thought learning should be free of any preconceptions, be they religious or social or political so that you could follow the path wherever it took you.

They sure are successful though. Their program is growing much faster than ours at Millsaps. Part of it I think is because college is for young people, and parents always want their children to take the most secure path and maybe they see tying math and science and literature and art to some sort of larger religious purpose as more secure.

Being successful or popular doesn't mean it's the right path though. Sometimes the safer path doesn't travel nearly as far or as high as the one with more risks.

The Belhaven plan wasn't always that popular either. There were times when nobody knew if they could keep the doors open from one semester to the next. Millsaps has had its share of lean years before, but never as bad as that.

In the end, I will always believe that Millsaps offers the best deal possible for the people who can keep up with the challenge. We're not at the top of our game right now but that's just temporary. The time will come very soon when we'll shine brighter than ever.

Not Everybody Loves A Parade

A parade is great if you're in it. It's about half that great if you're not in it, but you have a child or grandchild who is and it's about half of that half if you're just watching for whatever entertainment value the parade might hold. (That figure increases slightly if the parade features multi-million dollar special effects like Disney or young women exposing themselves for plastic beads like Mardi Gras.)

For the rest of the world, a parade is pretty much just and obstacle to traffic and a nuisance. The nuisance factor is exaserbated by the size of the parade (and the amount of traffic it blocks) and the noise and garbage factors.

The trash factor is not negligible. The Mal's St Patricks Day Parade, besides enough beer bottles to open a pub, has in the past left dog shit and dirty diapers in the small space in front of my business, several blocks away from the parade itself. They do a pretty good job of cleaning up, and within 24 hours most of that stuff is gone, but still, if you're not in the parade, it just isn't very pleasant.

Today they had the Jackson State Homecomming parade. They've been having the Jackson State Homecomming parade every year for my entire life. You'd think, by now, everybody involved would have it down to a science. Not so. You never saw so much confusion and mess for one marching band in your life.

The worst part was the traffic detours. The parade stretched from the campus itself to the fairgrounds, which meant it split downtown in half with almost no possible way to get from one side to the other. The detours lead to nowhere, mostly moving you to dead ends or stuck, the wrong way, on a one way street.

Twice I stopped to ask the police officer or homeless person or whoever was directing traffic at intersections how to get around it, and all they could say was "follow the signs". Well, the signs lead to nowhere. Eventually, I was able to cross Capitol street somewhere around The Stewpot and wind my way back up to court street and finally to my destination.

So, I called city hall to find out what went wrong and let them know what they were doing just wasn't working very well. Nobody knew and nobody cared. One lady told me, it was Jackson State and I just had to put up with it. I suppose she was an alumi.

So if you're ever in a position to plan a parade or be in a parade or even just watch a parade, keep one thing in mind. It's great for you, but for the rest of the world who's not involved in your little event, a parade can be a huge pain in the ass.

If Obama Can Do It

It looks like the next president will be a Democrat. I'm pretty much OK with that. The parties are so polarized now that we really need to change colors once in a while so that one administration can check and repair the excesses of the previous administration.

In case you haven't noticed, Obama is a pretty liberal guy. The problem with liberals, is that most of what they want, if it were that easy, would have been done a long time ago. It's much easier for conservatives. Most of what they want is to remove restraints from the rich which is pretty easy to do. Liberals however have to try and figure out a way to make their big ideas work and often that's not so easy.

For instance: Bill Clinton ran for president on the promise of national health care, and he spent the first few years of his presidency trying to get national health care, but in the end, there were so many obstacles and so many challenges to the idea that he eventually had to give it up.

All of those problems with making national health care will be waiting for Obama once he takes office. Problems like that tend to stick around. We could use national health care though, if they can figure out how to make it work.

Jimmy Carter ran on a platform of peace in the middle east, but by the time he was done, Anwar Sedat was dead and our embassy in Iran was under siege. Obama has similar goals, lets hope he has better luck.

Carter also wanted to improve housing for the poor and working class. It's pretty hard to be against that idea. After twenty years though, his plan for improving housing evolved into the sub-prime mortgage disaster. It was a great goal, we were just on the wrong path for getting there.

Lyndon Johnson ran on the idea of a "war on poverty". Who could be against such an idea? It's not like somebody was going to come out and say they were for poverty.

Forty-five years later, a lot of people blame Johnson for creating a near-permanent welfare class that's almost impossible to evolve out of. It took another Democrat, Bill Clinton to go in and roll back a lot of what Johnson tried to do.

One of Obama's plans is to re-strengthen the unions. He says we were a better country when the unions were strong. That may be so, but I don't know how you're going to strengthen the unions without bringing back manufacturing and I don't see how you're going to bring back manufacturing without weakening the unions. So, if Obama wants to bring back the unions, I'm all for it, I just don't see how he's going to do it.

I hope it doesn't sound like I'm bagging on the liberals needlessly. What they want to do, we need as a nation. It's just that they face a lot more obstacles to their goals than just the opposition party.

There's only one way to achieve these goals though, and that's to keep trying, from administration to administration, through the years until we eventually do get what we need.

Some of the efforts towards these goals will be misguided though, and in four years or eight or twelve, we'll elect a republican president to roll back Obama's mistakes, just like Obama will roll back the mistakes of George Bush.

That's how our system works. Checks and balances. It's the promise of Democracy and we'll rock along toward the future, even if it is three steps forward and two steps back sometimes.