Into the Afterlife III - Lent 2023: Day 35

I roundly reject the doctrine of salvation in the context of the afterlife. 

What are we to be saved from? By whom? In Christianity, salvation means saving people from sin and its consequences - eternal damnation - through the death and bodily resurrection of the Saviour, Jesus Christ. 

If there's one Christian doctrine which smacks to me of social control, it's that of salvation. "Do as the Church says, and you will be saved; if you don't - you will be damned."

What is sin? It's not a term I use, but I'd categorise the notion as "behaviour that would cause one to feel a need to apologise for it". Something you'd feel guilty about. But do you need a saviour to redeem you from your transgressions? Can you not redeem yourself, through self-reflection, atonement and resolution to improve? Do you need to whisper your sins to a priest in a confessional - an intermediary between you and your Purpose, you and your Maker - for them to be forgiven?

And then - what is original sin? If anything, original sin is anger - the primitive rage that wells up in our reptile brain, a throwback to pre-human, pre-mammalian neurobiology wired for fight-or-flight. Only we can save ourselves from that. More evolved brain regions are used for regulating and controlling the instinctive 'kicking-off' effect. 

We all have our own personal demons. As I wrote in the first week of this year's Lent, most of us can be placed upon one (or more!) psychiatric behaviour disorder spectrums. This knowledge makes it impossible to have a one-size-fits-all tariff for sin and redemption, as laid out in the Catechism. 

The crucial question in this post is the correlation between how one lives one's life and what happens after you die.

The foundation of my spiritual worldview is the subjective conscious experience. With consciousness comes conscience; how that balances along the spectrum of good and evil - and thus sin - is indeed a subjective matter. 

Mass-murderers such as Putin or egregious narcissistic liars such as Trump and Johnson might be acting entirely within the boundaries of their own conscience. Being biological entities driven purely by their Ego, any conscious experience is crowded out of their mind which is constantly shouting "I! I! I!"(or else it's missing altogether - the philosophical zombie). They feel no guilt, no remorse for their actions, nor for the consequences of their actions. Nor are they ever likely to atone. 

Do such people experience an afterlife?

I really don't know. I have had several dreams that square with my flashbacks to mid-century America that suggest that my consciousness previously incarnated in a man with violent tendencies. Does karma have a role in assigning future incarnations? A climate-change denier with a private jet born again into extreme poverty amidst a deadly drought in Sudan? 

This starts getting speculative. I don't know. There does need to be some memory of continuity of consciousness if the spiritual journey along a path of universal unfolding is to have sense, if it is to mean spiritual evolution - an ever greater understanding of the totality of life.

The long-term aim of these Lenten blog posts is (hopefully!) to create a record of my progress in understanding, based on intuitions, divine inspirations, discussions and reading. A slow journey.

Lent 2022: Day 35
Altered states - caffeine and alcohol

Lent 2021: Day 35
The science of coincidence

Lent 2020: Day 35
Soul and Body