Captain Yahweh and the Starship Heaven: Part Two

We’ve all heard of Heaven, but beyond that the concept is pretty fuzzy depending on your culture, your religion, your upbringing, and your personal interpretation(s). There are probably as many worldviews of Heaven as there are people who think about it. My own unique spin on the concept not only envisions Heaven as a physical place, but a high-tech one as well – not the home of Yahweh (God) the deity (who doesn’t exist) but Yahweh the extraterrestrial – once Captain, now ex-Captain of the Starship Heaven. That is, Heaven is a spaceship (or was – it’s gone away now).

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

3) Enoch Visits the Starship Heaven

Now apparently some flesh-and-blood human mortals have visited Heaven and returned in the flesh-and-blood - Enoch is another example.

Enoch apparently authored a trilogy of books, titled the “Book of Enoch” or “1 Enoch”; then there’s the “Second Book of Enoch” and finally “3 Enoch”.

While the first chapter of the “Book of Enoch” describes the fall of the Watchers, the angels who fathered the Nephilim, the remainder of “1 Enoch” describes Enoch's visits to Heaven in the form of travels, as well as visions and dreams, and his collective revelations about what he saw and learned.

In that first “Book of Enoch” there’s a chapter called “The Astronomical Book” (1 Enoch 72 – 82) which is also called the “Book of the Heavenly Luminaries” or “Book of Luminaries”. 

This chapter or book contains descriptions of the movement of heavenly bodies and of the firmament, as knowledge revealed to Enoch in his trips to Heaven guided by Uriel. Uriel acts firstly as a guide for Enoch in chapter one of the “Book of Enoch”, titled the “Book of Watchers” and he (Uriel) fulfils this capacity in many of the other chapters or books that make up “1 Enoch” like the chapter comprising his astronomical thesis. Now Uriel is one of them there archangels (or senior crewmembers of the Starship Heaven, IMHO) and therefore pretty qualified to act as host and probably chauffeur (shuttlecraft pilot?).

The upshot is that one can visit Heaven up close and personally while in a very much alive physical body and return safely to Earth. Sort of sounds like a Biblical version of Shuttle astronauts visiting the International Space Station!

4) The Afterlife Carrot-and-Stick

So why is there an entire deception over this ultimate Retirement Home in the Sky (Heaven as paradise) concept? Well, it’s a version of the old carrot-and-stick approach. Captain God has got to keep the primitives under his jurisdiction on his straight-and-narrow; keep them in line, off the streets and out of trouble. It’s like being under the thumb of your parents – if you’re good, you get dessert; if not, you get no supper at all. If you’re good, an afterlife of paradise awaits; if you’re bad, an afterlife of hell awaits. That there is no actual afterlife paradise, or afterlife hell, is beside the point. As long as you think there is, you’re under Captain God’s thumb and under control.

Now “life wasn’t meant to be easy” according to the wisdom of a former Australian Prime Minister, and no doubt in 4004 BC it wasn’t for most of the great unwashed. But an afterlife in paradise made all the hardships easier to bear. You were less likely to go out on strike and earn an afterlife down below instead.

5) Resurrection

Now I really have to clear up one very popular conception, or rather a total misconception, and that is, when you die you get resurrected, you go into Heaven, body and all. Consider how many people have died. That would make for one very crowded spaceship! The proof of that ‘no body’ pudding is that archaeologists, anthropologists, forensic professionals, the police, the medical profession, undertakers, etc. deal with dead bodies all the time. If you dig up your great grandfather’s grave you’ll find a body in it – a skeleton at least and skeletons qualify as a body or at least a vital part of what makes a body, a body. If somebody dies in a car accident their body doesn’t suddenly do a vanishing act Heavenly bound.

Some bodies don’t even survive death intact to get transported to Heaven. If you get eaten by a shark, you get converted into fish flesh and fish poo. If you were at ground zero at Hiroshima or Nagasaki your body got vaporised. Many people post death opt to have their bodily remains cremated; ashes either stored in a jar by loved ones or scattered to the four winds eventually to be incorporated into the environment. Your ashes aren’t whisked away to Heaven and reassembled into a resurrected you.

Even if the body remains intact post death, it’s not going to remain that way for very long. The zombies may not get you; the vampires may be denied; but the itty-bitty germs won’t be. A frequent phrase is “what is my purpose in life?” Well, your ultimate purpose for existing is to die and be a food source for bacteria. Your brain, that which contains all of what makes you, you – the ‘inner you’ rots away consumed as food by various microbes. Whatever remains of the ‘inner you’ (memories, personality, etc.) is now housed in millions of microbes. You become microbe flesh.

So, scratch out any immediate thought of resurrection and a quick trip to paradise within seconds of your demise.  

As to a much later, future, resurrection of the body, forget-about-it! Once dead, you’re like that fallen Humpty Dumpty. Once you’re fish poo; vaporised; cremated; your brain scrambled and digested and turned into microbe flesh, no jigsaw puzzle or Rubik’s Cube enthusiast can put you back together again – now or ever. In a nutshell, neither you nor God (supernatural or extraterrestrial) can unscramble a scrambled egg.

Now there will be multi-millions of people who will vehemently disagree with this. Why? People have a vested interest in God being able to unscramble eggs. People desperately want to and need to believe in an afterlife especially one that dangles paradise in front of you. It’s understandable but that doesn’t make it so. 

6) Is There A Starship Hell?

Now I’m sure the question on everybody’s lips is that if there is a Starship Heaven, does this mean there’s also a Starship Hell? No!

Nearly all people, therefore nearly all societies and cultures believe in an afterlife – those multi-millions referenced immediately above. Very few of us want to die even though we have no choice in the matter, so it’s not surprising that we have opted for the next best thing and invented that security blanket – the afterlife – and we would have done so irrespective of any deities be they supernatural or just plain old extraterrestrials.

Another trait universally shared by humans is the concept and application of symmetry. For every concept there is an equal and opposite one, an anti-concept. If you have goodness you have evil; truth vs. lies; beauty vs. ugly; the yin and the yang. So if you conceive of a paradise afterlife in the above direction, there will need to be an anti-paradise afterlife in the downwards direction. And thus nearly all societies have the underworld, or Hades or Hell or whatever you wish to name it.

But since there is no such thing as an afterlife the application of symmetry in this case is totally irrelevant. So just because you have a Starship Heaven (which has nothing to do with your nonexistent afterlife – those concepts of Heaven/paradise and the afterlife being just God’s carrot-and-stick strategy) doesn’t mean you have a Starship Hell – an afterlife in Hell also a part of God’s carrot-and-stick mind control. 

Fortunately, God, his Starship and those carrots-and-sticks have gone away.

Author’s note: All Biblical quotations taken from the King James Version.