Easter Day 23 April 2000

Pic of the day: There were at least a few small leaves who took a hint, when the sun broke through in glory on Easter Day, after days of overcast.

I woke up around 7:30 in the morning and lay in bed for a while, listening to the news. More deaths, no resurrections. That bites. But it won't be like that forever, I thought. In the future, there will be resurrections aplenty. And likely as not, people won't find this strange at all.

I mean, imagine that you tell someone 200 years ago that the people of Israel would have their land back; and not only that, but they would be a powerful nation; and not only that, but they would make the desert bloom; and not only that, but they would come flying from the various countries they were exiled to. -People would laugh at you, and the good theologians would explain that it wasn't meant like that.

Was it foretold because it would happen? Or did it happen because of the prophecies? Will we ever know? Does it even matter?

I guess the cat is already well out of the bag about me being a Christian, of sorts. A heretic, certainly, and rarely more so than today. For while the actual day and time of Easter does not matter to me at all, the concept is vitally important, and more than that. Because I do not believe in an immortal soul. There is resurrection or nothing.

I have stated this before, but basically the soul is software. It needs hardware to run. This is not a question of the miraculous, but of the logical. Light in the dark out of nowhere is a miracle. Black light (anti-light) is illogical. The resurrection of the dead is a miracle. The soul working without a body is illogical. Some people don't get these distinctions right when they write science fiction. I'm pleased to claim that God at least got it right in his futuristic visions, as they plainly talk about resurrection and not an eternity of drifting along as disembodied memories.

Of course, this does not mean that our actual atoms will be gathered together. Firstly, the atoms vary wildly from day to day. Most of our body is water, as you may have noticed, and it is exchanged pretty often, as you also should have noticed by now. The same goes for most of the other common elements. We are a process rather than an object ... we are like a flame that keeps burning while the actual matter is consumed by it and replaced again and again. Secondly, nobody said that we would be resurrected with the exact same bodies. Actually, the Bible says pretty plainly that this will not be so. (As if anyone listened to what the Bible says, unless we can use it to prove someone else wrong.)

This is certainly as worthless as they come, but sometimes I let my thoughts roam about the possible ways in which humans can be resurrected. I must admit that it does not even seem to be within viewing distance of today's technology. This is just too bad, but on the bright side we won't have fanatics raising Hitler and Stalin from the dead to lead them again. I don't think our species should be trusted with resurrection technology at present.

A special case of course is those who had the good grace to go into the deep freezer when they died. While the actual cells of their brain are probably torn asunder by ice crystals, the structure should be easily discernible, down to the individual synapse. A good place to start, obviously. Just thawing them up would not do - but one can imagine the technology to mold a new body after the pattern of the old. This need not lie too far outside the road that science is travelling right now. But it won't happen overnight, either. So keep those heads on liquid nitrogen for a while yet.

Next in turn would be the mummies. There be DNA in them thar mummies. We would be able to clone them, really soon now; but cloning is not exactly resurrection. Ask any identical twin if they think death is OK as long as the twin remains. While they may find a slight solace in having their twin survive, it is certainly not like being there.

What we need, I think, is a breakthrough in chaos theory. Today chaotic systems are, well, chaotic. Unpredictable. The smallest error is magnified out of scale. If we could somehow find an approach that instead cancel out errors, a kind of chaos interference reversal ... We know that all of us continuously influence each other and our environment. We leave minute traces in everything we do, but they cancel each other out; like a raindrop falling in the sea makes waves that spread around the globe, but they are quickly cancelled out by the billions of other similar waves or fall beyond the boundary of detection.

I maintain that we need not have an accurate reconstruction of a person in the past to resurrect her, though it would be nice. A crude approximation might be enough. (Not that I think God would do that, if we left it to him). But think: Do you remember all things that happened in your life? Do you even remember a tenth of it? I sure don't. And most assuredly not in crystal clarity. Vague, shifting memories is the rule among the living. Why should the dead be given preferential treatment?

Just some strange thoughts from me on a beautiful Easter day. I still think resurrection should be left to God. But it sure makes for some fascinating science fiction, too.