One of my reading projects the past year has been Philip
Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series, which
begins with every human being who ever lived awaking after death on the banks of
a massive river. As it deals with an afterlife of sorts, there is a great deal
of religion in Riverworld and a great
deal of skepticism about religion, but what struck me most was how Farmer has
portrayed a bodily resurrection, and in doing so has highlighted what is
ridiculous about the very idea.
Every time I heard about this series prior to reading it, I
thought it sounded stupid, especially since book covers and promotional
material for the books and related media tend to highlight the jumble of people
from different places and times who find themselves together after rebirth:
Medieval kings, modern day stockbrokers, African tribesmen, ancient Greeks, and
so on. The whole thing sounded random and farcical, but after running across
the first book, To Your Scattered Bodies
Go, in a used bookstore for only $1.95, I decided to give it a try and
found myself engrossed from start to finish.
In the book, every human being who has ever lived from 99,000
B.C. to 1983--that’s approximately 35 billion souls--wakes up along the banks of
The River, which is roughly ten million miles long and winds around the entire surface
of an alien planet. Everyone wakes up at once, nude, hairless, in perfect
health, and with a body about 26 years old and immune to further aging. Grasslands
and forests run along the river, bounded on both sides by nearly impenetrable
mountains. The resurrected human race--including common folk such as you and me,
as well as historical personages such as Richard Francis Burton, Cyrano de
Bergerac, Samuel Clemens and Hermann Goering--must first learn to survive. Then,
some embark on a journey to the head of the river to confront the mysterious beings
known as Ethicals who have resurrected the human race.
As I read the mechanics of this science-fiction account of
life after death, I realized that Farmer had to answer a question that religion
avoids: What kind of bodies will we have in the afterlife? While Farmer is
simply writing an interesting tale, he can fill in the details as he wishes,
but the problem for the religious belief in a bodily resurrection--and the idea of Heaven in general, something along the lines of the vision at the end of Terrence Malick's beautiful film The Tree of Life--is that no
answer to the question makes sense or satisfies the criteria of Heaven.
Consider the common conception of Heaven as a reunion: I can imagine
myself reunited with my loved ones in their bodies from life, but does that
mean my grandparents, for example, will be the elderly people I have so many
fond memories of? They would probably prefer a younger, fitter body as in
Farmer’s Riverworld, but then, while
they would technically be my grandparents, with so much different about them
than I remember, they would hardly be the people I knew. But isn’t that a great deal of the
point, being reunited with those we once knew?
It does not solve the problem to say we will have new
bodies, because new bodies would also make everyone something different,
unrecognizable. That’s no reunion, either. Besides, a body, any body, is still a body, one that needs to eat, drink, sleep,
couple and crap. Think about it a little, and you’ll see Heaven as
traditionally defined has no place for hunger, thirst, lust and feces. With
bodies, Heaven would soon be a lot like Earth, a lot like Riverworld, actually--just
another struggle for food, shelter, power, sex.
This is why religion is better off sticking with spiritual
resurrection. Then, at least, all the details can remain vague, backed up by
assurances that the power of God pulls it off somehow. As an atheist, that doesn’t impress me much either, but
that’s a different argument.
