Week Forty Seven

The Heretic’s Guide to the Afterlife
Book One

Your beliefs brought you here. Or, perhaps, you lack of beliefs. Nevertheless, you are here, and you are welcome. Also, congratulations, you’re dead. But really, the most important part isn’t that you’re here, but how you got here. As they say, it’s the journey, not the destination, and fuck it: they were right.

You aren’t a dick. Or, more to the point, you weren’t a dick. At least not a giant dick. Maybe you accidentally killed a squirrel with your car. Maybe you punched your brother in the stomach - not out of malice - but because the dude fucking deserved it. But when it comes to the global view of things, you were upstanding and maybe perhaps only slightly a dick when necessity demanded it.

You didn’t subscribe to some sort of thought control run by a bunch of old white guys in a far off land who seem to think they know what you should believe more than you do. And deeper than that, you aren’t basing your life off of the teachings of a book that was written when there were only two items in the periodic table of elements (gold and not gold).

But what you did was good. Literally, you did good. Not “well” in terms of becoming a billionaire by sucking long-dead dinosaurs out of the ocean and converting them into a hyper-flammable substance. No, you brought more good into the world than you took out of it.

And that’s a hard thing to accomplish.

Like, really hard. Have you ever been in line at the grocery store and the person in front of you sends their four year-old kid to go find something to add to their check out and it ends up taking the kid five or ten minutes because they don’t know fuck all about the difference between diced tomatoes or stewed tomatoes? And all you want to do is stab the customer in the face because they should be punished for their giant mistake of not getting the proper tomatoes when they were in the tomato aisle.

But you didn’t. And that makes you good. And when you spread “good,” either actively or passively, it has a positive impact on the universe. And when people think about you, either in the present or past tense, they’ll think of you as good.

That’s fine, you say, but what about those who criticized me for not believing in a higher power? Is there a higher power? Is there anything but a void?

First, let’s say there is an all-powerful, all-seeing, and all-knowing, “man upstairs.” Do you think they really take comfort in someone/something that let both Small Wonder and the 5th Die Hard movie be created under their watch? That’s just bad judgement.

Second, you’re probably noticing now that you aren’t about to have lunch with Albert Einstein, or take your dog that was run-over by a car when you were in 3rd grade out for a walk. But what you have done is taken the collective positive energy all these people and creatures brought you, infused it into your life, and spread that positivity and goodwill throughout the world. So they live on, you live on, and the world will live on. You are a higher power just by sharing your love.

Let’s say you were a dick. Let’s say you told people how to live their lives based on your ideas, or you shunned people because they believed different things than you. Guess what, you were a dick then, you’re a dick now, and people are going to remember you for being a dick. Adolf Hitler was a supreme dick, and no one these days is saying how well he treated his dogs or how great his casserole was - unless the person saying it is also a dick.

Positivity and negativity are virulent, but on the tipping scales of infinite justice, it was positivity that won out in your life.

So, where do we go from here?

Close your eyes and it all goes away. Or stay wide-eyed and watch the light of the stars blink out one by one.