About a year ago, I wrote a post having fun with the idea of what religious people think about the age that they will look like in heaven, any answer to which creates all manner of contradictions and problems. It turned out that St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE) had thought about this a lot and laid out his vision.
In this article, Margaret Morganroth Gullette looks at what the various religions that have an afterlife as part of their doctrine say about this question, and they all seem to think that you will look young, a fantasy that is nurtured by popular culture.
According to Christian orthodoxy, if you’re worthy of being raised from the dead, you’ll be resurrected in the flesh, not merely as spirit, with a body restored like that of Christ, who died at 33.
In heaven there will be no whip marks, no scars from thorns, no bodily wounds. If eaten by cannibals or bereft of limbs from battle – some medieval people worried about wholeness in such conditions – people would regain their missing parts.
…In Islam, in the traditional Hadiths – the commentaries that succeeded the Quran – the righteous are also youthful, and apparently male. “The people of Paradise will enter Paradise hairless (in their body), beardless, white colored, curly haired, with their eyes anointed with kohl, aged thirty-three years,” according to Abu Harayra, one of Mohammed’s companions.
She says that this cult of youthfulness in heaven clashes with the most desirable aspect of believing in the afterlife, that we get to meet the people we love.
For many people now, paradise is, more than anything, a place where we will meet loved ones. Often a beloved parent. I would have no interest in a heaven in which my mother appeared to be 33, when I scarcely knew her as a six-year-old. Nor would I want her to look six decades younger than I do, were I to arrive in my 90s.
She died at 96, and I want her to have the face I loved in her very old age. There she would be, still smiling at me benignly, as she does in a photograph I see every day of my aging-into-old-age life.
The concept of the afterlife is irredeemably problematic and its contradictions are only avoided by being utterly vague about the details and thinking about it only in the broadest of generalities. Begin to ask questions, pretty much any questions at all, and the whole thing starts to fall apart.
Given that those in heaven are supposedly able to look down upon the denizens of hell and react gleefully, I’d say they’re all about about three.
Oops, that should read “about age three”.
… people would regain their missing parts.
Will Jewish males have to get recircumcised?
Here’s just one complexity that paradise pedlars don’t think of and can’t explain:
Your spouse dies through no fault of yours, so you remarry. You and your second spouse die in a car accident. Are you now a mandatory threesome or does one get kicked to the curb?
Every discussion and feeble attempt to justify an “afterlife” reminds me of the best “got milk” ad.
Heh. Jesus got hit with that one a long time ago.
Mark 12:18-27
[repeated in Matthew 22:23-32 & Luke 20:27-38]
(Or, I should have said, the theololgians of the sects/factions who contributed to the narrative of Jesus)
If everyone is in their prime in heaven, this could lead to some unsettling ‘Marty McFly’ moments where we meet our rellies that we only knew as elderly in life, and discover that they were hotties. Like when I saw a photo of my aunt from her youth as a fit young surfie. That was weird.
And what happens with those that didn’t reach their prime?
#5
I see Jesus laid down the tradition of dodging awkward questions!
Do I still have my tattoos? And is this my pre-transition body or post transition?
If they resurrect me into my pre-transition body with no tattoos I am going to be pissed
This strikes me as problematic as well. Her mother has to look like the author wants her to look, rather than how the mother herself wants to look? That’s very selfish.
When I dream of my parents, they are usually as they were in old age: weak and withered by the end stages of various organ diseases and failures. Sometimes, they’re a little stronger, but not much. It’s very sad to me that my subconscious can’t even imagine them as they were when they were younger and healthier.
And I’m pretty sure they would want to be younger and healthier. Why should I begrudge them that?
And that contradicts the premise is that people look young in heaven. Why would the author (and only the author) look like she’s in her 90, given that premise? She and her mother would presumably look about the same age.
By an odd coincidence, I recently stumbled across some Twitter threads about the Cannibal Baby Resurrection Problem, as argued over by medieval theololgians.
What about abortions, miscarriages, and stillbirths? I have this mental image of Heaven filled with embryos and fetuses at various developmental stages. (Not saying I believe they’re, you know, people, or anything, but if we’re going with the whole Heaven thing, let’s go all in.)
I remember watching a documentary where they showed people in Africa preparing for the funeral of an old woman who had died. One man was carving a wooden effigy of her, and the narrator asked him about his choices in stylizing the figure. Her body, the narrator noted, was present youthful, with a curvy figure,, smooth skin, full breasts, etc. Her face, however, was carved with wrinkles and lines showing old age. The narrator was very confused by the juxtaposition. The carver simply replied something like, “We want to remember her at her best.” For him, that meant a face full of wisdom of years, and a youthful body, free of the pain of old age.
I’m not certain this reflects any belief they had in the afterlife, but it’s the kind of thing discussions like this remind me of.
(Great, two posts to FTB in a row talking that mention female breasts. I’m probably going on some kind of watch list. : -- )
I have never, as an adult, had much trouble grasping that an “afterlife” if it should happen would be an experience incomprehensible to the my present self. If it truly satisfies my every need in any reasonable fashion, it takes only a moment to see that it can in no way resemble this current existence.
I have therefore always treated “you’ll be reunited with your wife and kids” kinds of things as more or less “uh, yeah, sure, that too. In a way.” said by someone who knows full well that, while perhaps true, is not true in any easily explainable way. It’s like explaining quantum mechanics by saying “Ok, sure, electrons are little balls but they’re, um, fuzzy.”
That heaven isn’t just Earth with better food is pretty obvious. Not to say, of course, that plenty of people imagine it that way. Just nobody who’s ever thought about it much — including religious people.
Mark Twain answers this question in Capt Stormfield’s Visit To Heaven and the answer is: it’s how you were when you died. There are a lot of angry babies.
@1 DD: Dunglish? In Dutch you can perfectly say “ze zijn allemaal ongeveer drie”.
OK, let me play advocate of the devil. I’d say that a question like “the age that they will look like in heaven” is a category error. Ideas like “age” and especially “look like” only make sense in our natural reality. However afterlife takes place in a supposed supernatural reality. Light is natural and hence there is nothing to see in afterlife.
@9 dangerousbeans: so no, you won’t have your tattoos nor your pre-transition body. Only your soul (presupposed that we have one; I think not) will go to heaven.
@12 WMDKitty: no problem either -- you’ll only meet the souls of those embryos and foetuses.
Andrew @14:
I’ve never had trouble grasping it’s a stupid concept.
(The other word for ‘afterlife’ is ‘death’)
Not really, as the song has it: “You’ll get pie in the sky when you die”.
@mnb0 there are religions that talk of a bodily resurrection. That aside: I am not a soul, I am an embodied being. Take something out of me then it’s no longer me, you need the whole.
To ressurect a human you need all the biological baggage (I think PZ wrote about this in regards to brain uploading)
Owlmirror @10 beat me to it. Gullette wants an afterlife that’s about her wants and needs, not her mother’s. Also, wouldn’t her mother want to see a daughter she recognized and not one who aged however many years since she died? What about children who died before their parents?
Then there’s the question of why we would look human at all. I assume we wouldn’t have to breathe, so we wouldn’t need nostrils. We wouldn’t need to eat so there goes teeth and and the end points of our digestive systems. Even if we could still eat for pleasure, there shouldn’t be any waste. There wouldn’t be any procreation so genitalia would depend on whatever god created that afterlife feels about sex (sorry, Catholics and conservative Protestants).
No. No afterlife for me please. I just want to be able to live until I say to myself, “That’s enough,” and die peacefully.