Ethics/Life after death

Metaphorical language

Evolution vs. creationism

Evolution represents the predator while creationism represents civilization. Obviously evolution favors the predator as the often most intelligent being and therefore the predator is a winner.

Thus the metaphorical dispute about evolution vs. creationism should much rather be the topic of whether and how the civilization can dominate the predator sufficiently.

Angels are referred to as "created beings", which implies a state of pure civilization (apart from the fact that angels are created beings, while the evolution that created the homo sapiens was both, evolution and creation at the same time, but this is just fact, not metaphor).

Sodom and Gomorrah

The tale of Sodom and Gomorrah tells the story of a city that was apparently bombed, or something very like that.

The archfather Abraham negotiates with God that the city should be spared if 10 righteous (starting from 50 righteous) can be found within the city.

The metaphor here is that ten percent is a sorry yield rate and that discarding ninety percent of the population as predators is as if asking God to bomb whole cities.

Abraham negotiating down from fifty percent to ten percent is, of course, the wrong direction and would make him look bad, but as the archfather of the Jews he lived in an early era that could not have benefitted from good education, because there were no Jews yet. The perspective of the tale is, of course, the biblical message, that Judaism (or rather Yahwism) addressed this issue (which it, in fact, does).

Social network

Easily deduced is the problem of social networks. Lot's wife "looked back to the city" (which was prohibited) and turned into a pillar of salt.

Logically there is a social network surrounding any citizen (e.g. Lot) and his wife would be a person who, especially in ancient times, can easily be imagined to be the one to go to the market place and gossip, leading to a social network of people she may be unwilling to give up. If some people go to heaven while others do not this network must be disassembled somewhere. It may seem an unlikely disassembly to take away somebody's wife, but society consists mostly of interrelated families. Logically there is no other point where disassembly can occur, if can merely shift to other families.

Thus the message here is that good ethical education is important and the family should hold together and form a sufficiently strong social network and then that disassembly logically cannot happen in one's own family.

But why was Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt? It may not have been her own failure, but strong social ties to predators and thus one is responsible for one's social network. People who are important should have received sufficient ethical education to make disassembly sufficiently unlikely and all other people should be sufficiently irrelevant to make Lot's wife not "look back".

This aspect of the tale therefore explains that some people may be admitted (Lot as a nephew of Abraham is admitted), but people close to them may have failed so badly that they have to be excluded (the majority of the city's inhabitants). In the tale the link from one side to the other is necessarily very short and somebody has to lose.

Of course one can only speculate about why Lot didn't like his wife enough or why she was better acquainted with other people, but the true meaning is that society consists of families. Lot's family is thus metaphorically an arbitrary family, but in the unlikely situation of being surrounded by the city's inhabitants, who are all doomed. If the network has to break it has to break within a family, consequently it has to break in this family. This being understood, all families should aim not to be in this situation and the perfect society would result.

The Sodom and Gomorrah equation

The Sodom and Gomorrah equation can be interpretatively gained from the tale. The equation basically says that Jews (the in-group of the Bible, which can, of course, be extended to include any ethically responsible culture, for instance Christianity, as one of the dominant examples for such an extended in-group) do have ethical mentors, who form a chain of mentors (described by the Archfather() relation), that links them to an angel. The angel here being a metaphor for a human being with an excellent prognosis for going to heaven and becoming "like an angel". Abraham is, of course, in the biblical context not officially referred to as an angel, but he speaks with God, which is meant to convey a similar status ("speaking with God like an angel").

∀ j ∈ JEWS ∃ a ∈ ANGELS: Archfather (j) = a

The necessity for ethical mentoring (or equivalent education) is what the equation describes and the quality of that education may not be arbitrary, but must, so to speak, be certified by an angel, or may otherwise be insufficient.

The inhabitants of the city, of course, logically had no chance to have Abraham as the archfather, because when he still was alive he was not able to at the same time be the archfather of Yahwism.

What should be easy to deduce is, of course, that the mentoring function archfather() requires too much time, because it requires many generations to become the archfather of a population. Thus a sensible relation would be called archmentor() or archteacher() and create a chain of mentors within the living population.

Angels cannot guarantee what they do not control

At the same time the tale warns that angels cannot guarantee what they do not control. Abraham, one should assume, would have included Lot's wife personally as a personal acquaintance, but he was not present in the city at the time of destruction.

Thus the mentoring chain logically cannot be fully certified by a single person and can still break, if people fail to understand and apply moral culture and ethical standards in their lives, as the people of Sodom and Gomorrah supposedly did.

Can a live after death be guaranteed?

More usually there is no guarantee that any particular person will enjoy a life after death.

The guarantee is more systematically anchored in society itself and thus in the social networks that constitute society, but may be limited by people's moral culture and ethical standards. Consequently there is also no guarantee for a society that it must include persons who will go to heaven.

In the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah Lot just leaves the city. Logically he could have done so at any time and then the society of Sodom and Gomorrah would no longer have contained the tiny group of righteous people from his family, thus turning the society of Sodom and Gomorrah into a doomed society without anybody ascending to heaven.

Consequently one should strive to be a morally and ethically acceptable person until oneself is satisfied with the result and that should in theory be sufficient motivation to accomplish the goal.

Life after death is meant to be a self-fulfilling prophecy and thus the aim to join heaven is meant to be the salvation, but without legalizing arbitrary misconduct, of course, and with increasing ability to act and intelligence comes also increasing responsibility to do so.

Image of God

The Image of God is a metaphor with multiple meanings. One meaning is that the Kingdom of Heaven is not actually a monarchy.

Angels do have free will, of course; everything else should be unimaginable. The monarchy of heaven is thus rather a democracy, but a democracy with the unimaginable perfection to act in consensus, according to the will of God, thus every voter is a constituent of the group that confirmed or defined the will of the sovereign of heaven.

By human standards this could easily be discarded as impossible to achieve, but in heaven this is the goal, because one is civilized and all voters thus strive for the perfect consensus as a cultural dimension. (One is a very cultural dimension up there in heaven.) In theory angels would take the time to educate each other sufficiently until perfection becomes possible, but that is, given the assembled education, wisdom and intelligence, of course, usually not required.

Failure to reach consensus

The question if God can move an immovable object is just an invalid question, because immovable objects do not exist. More disconcerting is the issue of problems that do not have perfect solutions. (Another tale tells that Zeus, Lord of the Sky, has been known to have turned such a paradox into static constellations in heaven.)

Of course heaven can fail to reach consensus, because the perfect choice may not exist. It is easy to construct choices where there is no ideal decision. Given a failure to reach consensus heaven can, as one possible option, agree to disagree and postpone the result until a desirable or required consensus can be reached.

Sometimes heaven may act conservatively because of the goal to reach consensus and reluctance to change a previous perfect decision.

One could see the Peaceable Kingdom as an example for such a situation: It is the perfect decision to demand of humanity to fulfill human rights as a convergence criterion. Acting conservatively heaven would hesitate to come to a new evaluation of the situation, since the previous perfect consensus decision still seemed quite reasonable.

Thus slow progress in the human rights situation may be seen as irrelevant, even though observers might be inclined to see the positive change as an indicator for the final success to tame the predator.

Judgment

Is it true that there will be a judgment of one's sins?

That is definitely true and because angels watch everything humans do the judgment starts immediately with the sin, usually not much later.

Mankind does, however, not have a reliable book of law that would detail the actual laws of heaven. All works that try to describe heavenly law were written by humans and contain cultural bias, human opinion and moral standards considered adequate at the time of writing. They may, of course, also contain an unknown amount of fact and/or metaphorical language originating in heaven.

The educated reader may be able to distinguish the different types of content.

As tourists people often travel to foreign countries without first learning all their laws. It is thus not really unusual not to be aware of the legislation of a state. As a rule of thumb any legislation can be approximated with the categorical imperative, especially heavenly law favors the categorical imperative and resulting moral culture and ethical standards.

The Peaceable Kingdom

The Peaceable Kingdom is a future society that is supposed to precede the Kingdom of Heaven.

What this actually means is that the predator (the homo sapiens is a predator) must be tamed and that people do have natural rights, which must be guaranteed.

The Peaceable Kingdom is thus neither more nor less than a future state of society in which natural rights are sufficiently guaranteed. This is a necessary, but not a sufficient convergence criterion for the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Kingdom of Heaven will require even higher standards and human rights that do not even exist as human rights today.

The land Canaan is associated with the Biblical Promised Land, which can be reinterpreted as a promised territory in which migrants find refuge and this then would metaphorically and applying the categorical imperative include heaven as a refuge for humanity for a live after death. According to the categorical imperative, of course, one should strive to provide refuge to migrants, especially during climate change, who may otherwise not survive in their state of origin, and thus in part satisfy the convergence criterion Peaceable Kingdom.

Duality of personal future and the future of mankind

The duality of one's personal future and the future or mankind is meant to convey that one should aim for a future of mankind that is desirable.

Climate change, for instance, makes it perfectly clear that an imaginable future of humanity is a catastrophic disaster. One should, of course, choose not to be the cause of a catastrophic disaster or the all-knowing judge in heaven would have to regard that as a very serious misconduct.

As a rule of thumb it makes sense to aim for a future of humanity in heaven that can actually occur, or one will not be able to enjoy it. This should be seen to include the Peaceable Kingdom as a convergence criterion: If you choose to stay divergent, applying the categorical imperative, there would as a result be no future in which you could ascend to heaven.

That is, of course, not actually true. Others may create the future without your help, but the judge in heaven may object to your presence in heaven, depending on your personal misconduct, thus making the duality come true.

Is education important for the judgment or just good conduct?

Education is a very positive cultural trait, but not strictly necessary. What is urgently required is ethical education that is sufficient so that the individual has a positive prognosis to become a good citizen of heaven. Strict adherance to a sufficient religion would thus constitute a good standard to receive such a positive prognosis, but heaven aims to make perfect decisions, so that should better be a credible judgment.

For instance acceptance of God in heaven as the undisputed sovereign and strict pacifism are very positive cultural traits, even lacking higher education, that could otherwise be seen as a qualifying criterion. Heaven is, however, also very selective about which higher education that would be and consequently one is definitely well advised to consider the constitution of heaven as God-given and pacifism as a self-evident necessity.

Of course the inhabitants of heaven enjoy natural rights and among them are the rights to freedom of thought and freedom of speech, but the constitution of heaven should be seen as immutable and thus the free will to endorse the constitution that guarantees these rights is also a very positive cultural trait, thus heaven would be, so to speak, a monarchy (as opposed to anarchy).

What if I feel insecure about my qualification?

People can join heaven as a result of their social network requesting their presence, but only if that is permitted by the judge of heaven and subordinate authorities. There may also be unexpected problems to this approach that are not well-suited for public debate, so the recommended practice is to form an adequate social network in advance, preferably with the explicit purpose of getting one into heaven.

Since the society in heaven has a tendency to become more educated over time the likelihood of a good teacher from your personal social network becoming available as mentor rises constantly. What is beneficial is a good social network, that engages in mentoring, and acceptance for people you know as mentors, that may be willing to help, on your side. Any Christian priest could be seen to fulfill that requirement for his parish, which is because that is the God-given intended function.

That is, of course, again no license for sever misconduct, because the judge in heaven can object permanently. The devil is such a theoretical terrorist, who can not be allowed to enter heaven, or would have to be expelled by force.

The ability to enter heaven without permission is, however, a rather theoretical thing. Angels would be able to try, but they don't do that.

In an existential sense the devil is not just a theory and does exist, but he may also be encountered in actions by persons who fail to employ sufficient ethical standards and as a result act as if instructed by such an agent of evil. Heaven refers to the latter as 'collectively intelligent stupidity' or just stupidity, because one should be able to deduce that it may cause incalculable problems for one's personal future in heaven, which should logically enjoy the highest priority or be among the highest priorities.

Science

Will science allow us to gain all the magic of heaven and do without it?

No, it won't, but that is a rather complicated analysis and you are, of course, allowed to believe in science.

Is physical entry into the otherworld possible?

Entry into the otherworld is not physically possible. If it were possible normal matter (water) would become exotic matter (wine), organic chemistry and especially protein folding would break down and containers would cease to contain their content. Trivially these conditions would be unhealthy for the traveler, but this is a theoretical problem, because matter does not travel to the otherworld at all.

What can enter the otherworld is only the soul, which is pure energy, light and information.

It can enter the otherworld because it does not physically exist and (notice the change of interpretation) the soul in its non-existence is about virtues, values and goodness. It, however, has no need to travel, because it resides already in the otherworld.

Can the soul come back to this world?

There are multiple issues that are not well-suited for public debate, especially not, given the different interpretations of different religions, but in theory this is possible and if an angel would be sitting in a barrack somewhere in Africa and waiting for his natural rights to be acknowledged you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. He might, of course, leave once his natural rights had been granted and could, for instance, simultaneously reside in the otherworld and sit in parliament as a special rapporteur on human rights.

This is very definitely possible, but not very likely, rather an adequate metaphor for the possibility and the goal to fulfill human rights.

Is the soul immortal and eternal?

There are different ways to see this. What is most important is that the soul should be seen as an integral part of the human being from somewhere between conception and birth on. Whether it exists before conception or not is, again, not well-suited for public debate and a somewhat academic question: Yes and No. Only this way, from birth on, the soul can grant the most perfect immortality that can be conferred. It is certainly eternal in the sense that it does not have a limited life time.