I was joking, of course. My background was Christian. Christians only have one reincarnation: first there's life, then there's resurrection. Pushed, the way Clarence Darrow is supposed to have pushed William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Trial, I think many a Christian would concede that perhaps the soul existed before the human was born. From two, if you admit three, why not keep counting? (How about life after resurrection?)
Even a day-to-day American knows that Hindus have sacred cows. Apparently in their scheme of things, cows are a spiritual stage further advanced than humans. You're born as a bug, you do well, obey bug laws, and you come back as a mouse; do well as a mouse, come back as a monkey ... Do bad as an untouchable and you come back as Hitler: or Bush. Anyone can see that I'm winging this, making up the particulars; I haven't researched any particular Hindu hierarchical taxonomy. Nevertheless, notice: there are traces of complementary thinking in Judaic tradition: God is perfect, angels are good, man is mixed, snakes are evil ... But mainly notice that Christians like things in twos: good and evil, God and Satan: no grays.
So: there's me, the mortal, then there will be me, the immortal: saved or damned.
There are Americans – good – and Muslim terrorists – bad.
Anyway, I never seriously bought reincarnation: till just now. Now I've had yet another rebirth. Now I'm certain that reincarnation is true religion. I don't know if I could become that old mountain, but maybe, if I'm good, I could become a cow.
All I had to realize is – what the physicists have been telling us – that there are infinite universes. See, if this universe is all there is (and if souls exist before they're born), then where's God getting the new souls from? A million years ago let's say there were a million people, maybe ten thousand, maybe a hundred thousand. Now, there's what? six billion of us? about to be twenty billion of us? Do a million of us have souls and the rest not?
Of course if we're using graduated insect souls, and insects use graduated bacteria souls (and snakes use souls that got left back), then maybe it would work out: there are lots of bacteria to keep us supplied, lots of insects. But put that arithmetic aside for the moment so I can get to my point.
See, if the universe is a closed system, then nothing can come from outside that closed system. But if universes are infinite, then, ignoring transportation problems for the moment, the supply of whatever you need must also be infinite.
Point is, if universes are infinite then God could be having Judgment Day every day.
Here's how I now see it: and I'm certain I'm right: this time.
With infinite universes an infinite God can have infinite heavens and hells and earths. And with existence as it is, so famously, an illusion, any hell, heaven, or earth can be mislabelled: especially when it's the occupants doing the labeling.
Thus we say we live on earth. Wrong-O. We live in a hell. We've already lived elsewhere, elsewhen. And we've been judged. And damned. God had us reborn here: a hell in which illusion is the rule, in which choice is illusion, communication is illusion. We had our choices, elsewhere, elsewhen: and we made the wrong choices.
Still that model needs modification. If this is a hell, mislabeled an earth, then how come for some, for me, sometimes, it's a heaven? If everyone here is damned, then where did Jesus come from? Do we have that wrong too? Was Jesus also damned? An illusion? An illusionist?
Where did Ivan Illich come from? I'm not sure about Jesus, but I know that Illich was a saint: wasn't illusion, was capable of communication (at least some of the time).
And where did I come from? What am I doing here? Surely I can't be damned too!
No. That's exactly it. That's the whole point. This "Earth" isn't an earth, it's a hell, with some glimpses of heavens. But it isn't a permanent hell. It's a further testing ground: just how damned are we?
God sends a Jesus into this hell: to see what the semi-damned will do with him. Even we know the answer there. Jesus being here didn't prove that he was damned. Maybe devils can't get into a heaven, but angels can certainly get into a hell: temporarily: the way the lab demi puts a blue dye into the clear liquid: to see what happens to it in that specific environment. (It's seldom the dye that's being tested; it's the environment that's being charted.)
Maybe the saint is being tested. Maybe God isn't quite sure how much of a saint he is. Put him among devils for thirty years, forty years, sixty years: see what he does. (Like Hollywood script writers: take a guy, kick him in the balls, see what he does.)
Out of an infinity, out of an infinity of infinities, God took an earth: nice atmosphere, nice oceans, nice forests, nice diversity of species ... Then he seeded it with the damned from some other earths, making it a hell. Then he poured in more damned, watched the air go bad, the oceans fill with garbage, the forests fall down, get chopped. One proof that the population is damned is that while this is happening, the damned publish newspapers, fill the electro-magnetic spectrum with self-advertisement, tell lie after lie, and give themselves sterling marks: IQ tests, Academy Awards, Nobel Prizes ...
But each saint who appears, however human, however flawed, gets the same treatment: and it doesn't include any prizes.
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