Life is no bed of roses, it is hard and precarious. As we go through life, we are always literally just a step away from hardship, pain, suffering, disability and death. To stay alive, and make sure that our body doesn’t “break”, we need to work feverishly and pay attention at all times. We need clothing and shelter to shield us from the elements. We need to eat and drink. We need to perform all sorts of biological functions, like robots, such as sleeping, going to the bathroom, etc. Access to clothing, shelter, food and water requires having enough money to buy those things, which means we can summarize these elements under the heading of “work”. Get just one of those things wrong, and you’ll be faced with severe disability or sudden death.
According to my own calculations, all of the things listed above make up around 75 percent of our time on this planet. For some people, for various reasons and allowing for different circumstances, that can easily go up to 80 or more percent. So, if you are lucky, really lucky, you will have just 25 percent, tops, of your time that you can use for things you actually enjoy and that bring you happiness. Working on the assumption of a 75%/25% ratio, this means that if you live to the ripe old age of 100, you will not have LIVED for a hundred years, but only for 25. You will have EXISTED for 100 years, but LIVED only for 25.
Now, I am the last person to take anything the Bible and other holy scriptures say literally. I have simply too much knowledge of ancient languages and about how those texts were misinterpreted and mistranslated over the millennia to believe even a single word written on such pages, scrolls or parchments. But let’s play the devil’s advocate for a moment. Let’s pretend that the Bible is an accurate depiction of life, as well as life in the hereafter. So, good people go to heaven, bad people go to hell. Let’s assume this is true. But even if it were true, let’s say, then people have still fully misunderstood God’s message and intentions. Because, and again assuming any of it is true, it is my belief that we got it all wrong, in terms of the sequence of events, so to speak.
We think we are “alive” now, but I think there’s a greater probability that this “life” is actually… hell! After all, what could be greater punishment, more Sisyphean, than the 75%-25% life I described before? Where every little bit of joy and happiness must be bought for the price of pain, suffering or loss? Where struggle defines at least 75 percent of our time, and happiness gets only a measly 25 percent at the very most?
The whole Adam and Eve episode does, in fact, seem to support this thesis. Paradise was the place of eternal bliss and happiness. No trace of sorrow, pain or suffering. But once Eve (that evil witch!) had committed the original sin, both she and her significant other were punished and banished to… Earth! From this it follows that heaven is Paradise, and hell (the place where sinners go) is Earth. Later on, throughout the years and centuries, playing “Chinese whispers” with the story, the message at the end came out all mangled and distorted, and people then started believing that heaven or Paradise was one place, Earth another, and hell a third place altogether. Instead of putting Paradise at the top of the chain of sequences, as suggested by the Adam and Eve story, and interpreting Earth as hell, or the consequence for sinning in Paradise, it was now kind of turned upside down: now, Earth (our life here) comes first, where it all starts, and if you sin here, you go to hell in the afterlife. Be good, and you get to go to Paradise.
Think about it. On the bright side, if we really did get it wrong and this is hell, there is a good chance that it’s not in all perpetuity, as one is led to believe based on the misinterpreted and mistranslated texts, but will be over at some point—at which point, perhaps, we may RETURN, rather than go (for the first time ever), to Paradise.
My mother, who had lived through a war and was therefore less inclined to give life the benefit of the doubt, used to say: “I wonder if anyone asks us whether we wish to be born before we arrive here. I do appreciate my children and such, and I have experienced a lot of nice things too, but I think if we were given the whole truth and nothing but the truth about life before they send us here, most of us would simply refuse and say, ‘No. Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll stay right here where I am now.’”
Feel free to say amen to that, if you are so inclined.