Who does the vacuuming in Heaven?
I'm going to preface this by stating I respect others' faiths, no problem. I have faith in things like gravity keeping us stuck to the ground and most likely the sun will come up tomorrow, based on reasonable expectation of continued reliable performance of such things. I do not, however, have any certainty there is an afterlife or a Rainbow Bridge. I know these are very comforting concepts to many although I don't think it's very logical. In fact I reserve the right to poke fun at glurge like the Rainbow Bridge poem. You can read the text here.
The basic premise - when an animal that has some sort of connection with people dies, it goes to a sort of heaven, becomes well again, and frolics happily until their human also dies and comes comes to hang out with it in this heaven for eternity.
I guess wild animals, or feral domestic animals, just - what? Go to another place? Do they get made whole and get to frolic happily into eternity, or do they get shafted? This is not made clear.
What if the pet had two owners it liked very, very much? Will it just ignore the second one who gets there?
What if the pet loved its human, but the human doesn't want to be eternally together with said pet? I can think of several devoted pets I've had that I don't particularly want to meet again.
Come to that, some of us are going to have one hell of a crowd of animals hanging around us for all eternity.
Who vacuums up all that dog hair?
What if the first owner loved the pet very very much, but died and got to heaven first. Then, a second owner adopts the pet and loves it very very much. Then the pet dies. Does it go find the first owner, thus making eternity blissful for that person who has been waiting anxiously for the jooyful moment? Or does it gambol about with its own kind and wait for the second owner? Seems one way or another, at best eternity is going to get awfully complicated for many folks, or at worst will be a sad and lonely eternity.
Do tarantulas, fish and slugs count, if people cared for and loved them?
How would that work, really?
What if the owner loved the pet very very much and gave it a great life but was otherwise a horrible person who tortured and murdered people. Does that person go to the Rainbow Bridge Place, or do they go to another place thus leaving the pet waiting for eternity?
What if the loving owner dies pregnant. Then gets to the Rainbow Bridge Place where pet is waiting. Then gives birth to a psychopath who becomes one of those children who tortures animals?
Well, you get my point. I think this is a very tenuous fantasy, fraught with complications.
I believe what I have experienced over the last 48 years. People, plants and animals die. You never see or hear from them again because they are, well, dead. Then you die and nobody ever sees or hears from you because you are, well...dead.
The End.
posted by Carina at 6:44 PM
6 Comments:
Would it be appropriate to declare, "Amen!" at this point, or should I just say, "I agree and concur!"
what if your like me..old fart who has had many dogs..and cats...are all of them going to be waiting for me..who's going to tell bill that nate is also my dog..will bill try to kick nates ass? will nate kick bills ass?...will chuck and rocky the cats scratch and bite them?...sigh*..in that case..i hope i go to limbo..do they still have limbo?..what about purgatory? is there still a purgatory?...am i going to have to clean up after them fuckers in heaven too? who feeds them..im confused..im over due for a nap..plus the cowboys are sucking..
You're right...that's all pretty cornball. I see a lot of people at work carrying Sylvia Brown's books around. She's that lady that talks to dead people,and yaddah, yaddah...she's on Oprah sometimes. Well, she claims to have died on the operating table several times and been brought back. And she has actually been to heaven. (She's very special!) According to her, everyone in heaven is white...that's one of the first things I noticed, so it has always confused me to see all of the black women carrying the book as I found that concept offensive even as a white person. but yeah, it's amazing what people will believe. Sylvia Brown makes a lot of lot of money she's like a modern day PT Barnum. But....I guess whatever it takes to make you feel okay.
Cherie - haha, you are bad.
jackie sue, didn't they get rid of limbo, recently? But yeah...it just seems like a terribly confusing concept.
Diana, I'll have to look up Sylvia Brown. Holding onto things that make you feel OK is...useful for some people, I suppose. I don't get believing something that is patently untrue though. Basing anything on lies and fantasies doesn't seem very mature!
think it will all come out in the wash by design. we'll all find out one day, eh?
I think the Pope was planning to give up "limbo" but then never made a definitive statement on it, which leaves us all still in... limbo. That Pope -- he's a jokester ;-)
I am an atheist. The Rainbow Bridge poem makes me get a bit weepy because I don't believe it, because I honestly feel my passed-on pets are indeed gone. I do, however, believe that their energy lives on in some way -- not in a religious sense, but in a physics sense. If energy can never be eliminated but can only change, I like to think that when my pets die, in some way they become part of the world around me. Maybe they're a molecule in a tree, absorbed somehow through fertilization and photosynthesis... I do think their "energy" still exists in the universe, although not in a form I'll ever recognize. I find comfort in that, and comfort in the fact that they live on in my memory.
Post a Comment
<< Home