Blasphemy

Imagine thinking you'd never have to grieve.

Imagine, for the purposes of this essay, that you’re me. If you were, your earliest memories would be of learning about everlasting life, which as Jehovah’s Witnesses, we’d all been promised. At three years old, you already knew that you’d live forever, on an earth made perfect again like the Garden of Eden, and that you’d share this paradise with all the other faithful Jehovah’s Witnesses. Which was good, because almost all the people you loved were Jehovah’s Witnesses, so you didn’t have to worry about them dying.

If you were me, you’d start to pick unwilling holes in the doctrine as you got a little older. You’d start to wonder if you were actually a good enough Jehovah’s Witness to survive Armageddon at all, and you’d become tormented by the idea that your family would go on to live everlastingly without you, if you failed to make God’s final cut. You’d torture yourself with the knowledge that your family would become perfectly happy without you there, because that’s what Jehovah had promised — perfect happiness, on earth, forever.

Separately, you’d worry about the people you loved dying before Armageddon struck. You’d start praying obsessively for them, because the world had been painted as dangerously wicked by the Jehovah’s Witness literature, and absolutely full of people who’d love to kill all of your family members, and you too. You’d stare at the brutally vivid images in the Jehovah’s Witness magazines, and hope that Armageddon would be soon, even though that meant you’d definitely never get to be a ballerina, because Jehovah didn’t care about ballet.

Imagine that years passed, and that your family left the Jehovah’s Witnesses. At thirteen years old, you’d try to come to terms with a whole new doctrine, that actually you would die, as would everyone you loved, but that (if you were a good Christian) you’d go to heaven afterwards, and be reunited with your family. You’d eventually conclude that it wasn’t so different from believing in an earthly Jehovah’s Witness paradise really, and almost as comforting. You’d wonder if you could really trust your parents’ choice of religion, since they’d managed to be wrong multiple times already, but you’d try not to think about that too much, because the alternative, believing that everyone eventually dies, was too frightening, too foreign.

Eventually, your grandmother would die, and you’d know that she hadn’t gone to heaven because she wasn’t a Christian. You wouldn’t mind too much for yourself because, unkindly, you hadn’t liked her, but you’d feel desperately sorry for your parent, who’d lost their mother with no consolation of a reunion in heaven one day. Atheism was a foreign country and you had no notion of how anyone would make their peace with the catastrophic prospect of permanent death. You wouldn’t understand exactly what your grandmother had believed, and even if you had, you’d have known that she’d been wrong.

You’d grow up, and eventually conclude with some regret that you didn’t believe in God’s infinite wisdom and mercy after all. Atheism, when it came to you, was a relief, because it meant that rather than God being the capricious, egotistical and tyrannical maker of endless demands, God simply didn’t exist. Not believing in God gave you the responsibility of creating your own moral code, but the comfort of knowing that there would be no eternal punishments for getting your judgements wrong, only the natural consequences of imperfect choices. This belief system felt small and manageable, in comparison to religion. You found it more comfortable.

People you knew would sometimes get frightening diagnoses, and some would pass away, but while you’d be sad for them, and for the people who loved them and who’d been left behind, your foundations were not rocked. Because death is part of life, and they’d lived long lives, and your atheism told you that it was natural to be sad, but appropriate to focus on the people who were still with you, and be grateful for them. You sent cards, and tried to say helpful things, and thought you were dealing well with the fact of death, given that you’d spent your formative years believing it would not exist for you, or for the people closest to you.

Then, someone you loved got sick. Really sick — probably-can’t-get-better sick. Wanting-to-watch-her-for-hours-to-memorise-her-while-you-can sick. Reading-webpages-late-at-night-looking-for-good-news-that-doesn’t-exist sick.

Wishing you were a specialist medical doctor who could fix her with experimental surgery, instead of being a fucking fetish model who couldn’t save anyone.

Failing that, wanting to lie to her, and have her believe you so she won’t have to be scared. Wanting to pretend to be a medical doctor for her, if you can’t be the real thing.

Desperate to hug her so hard, and for so long, that you make her well through the osmosis of your desire for her recovery, leaking into her bloodstream.

Wanting to reallocate all the years left to everyone else on earth, so that she could have longer, even though that would mean behaving like the wicked, capricious God you ejected from your heart.

And worst of all — discovering an appetite to find another religion that denies death, and present it to her as the truth, having already convinced yourself. To dive together into that denial, and be lulled, again, by the fairytale of your childhood.

Understanding, finally and viscerally, why people convert to religions that promise them everlasting life. Because being able to give everlasting life to someone you love is powerfully beguiling, when you understand that they’re in real, present danger.

You want to present this luminous person, who is young, and fit, and joyous about life, with an answer. All good people live forever on earth. All good people go to heaven, and you’ll one day find her there, and hold her again. That death is just the beginning.

But for that to be true, you’d need to resurrect your God. The one who doesn’t stop evil on earth, although he could because he is all-powerful. The one who demands endless worship as an entry ticket to endless life of a sort. The one who created us all, but is still punishing us for our ancestors’ sins. You discover you wouldn’t resurrect this monster. Not to save yourself. Not to save the people you love, because it wouldn’t really save them. It would make them into slaves.

You wouldn’t hand over anyone you loved to this deity. You wouldn’t hand yourself over to them, even to save the people you love the most.

You will be there, til the very end, but the end will come. The end of her, the end of you, the end of everyone you love, in an order you can neither control nor predict. There is no magical Eden to retreat to. But now, you are here, they are here, and you will love them all as perfectly as your imperfect self can. You will do this though you aren’t made in the image of God, after all. All you are is exactly as brave, and as kind, and as loving, as you are able to make yourself. Because we are all that there is, but that is enough.