Ghosts and Olympian Gods
Coexistence. Community & Consequence
Most of us rightly don't want to think about what happens after our last breath. Too much living to be done to worry about the afterlife.
Oblivion of nothingness is what many of us expect. Millions of others hope our religious influencers are correct in their assurances that what they say is what there is.
Various afterlife packages are available, all you need do is believe. Most offer a single God to welcome us, though which name and form of worship is acceptable has caused division and conflict down the ages.
Which is why science encourages us to abandon 'superstitious fantasy' of religion because it causes people to harm other people, over what is after all a mystery.
Long ago our ancestors were more accommodating of other peoples' Gods. Whichever god or goddess you worshipped was fine, because there were lots of them. Only during the last 2000 years or so were these outlawed in favour of a single deity.
Does Any God or Goddess Exist?
Science has preferred an alternative, supernatural-free view of life on earth: the Gods of our ancestors were imaginary beings of a pre-scientific age. Look at their stories.
Like scientists and religious leaders of today, our ancestors tried to figure out how and why we all got here on this lost-in-space spinning rock and ocean, planet earth. They decided upon a variety of supernatural influencers - goddesses and gods. Until some two thousand years ago when God-the-Everything was thought to be the best explanation.
“Big Bang” is our current preferred origin story. Ours is one of millions upon millions of universes, mostly invisible but wholly free of supernatural beings, so science maintains. The Gods were characters of a distant past age: the Age of Myth, dreamed up by our science-ignorant predecessors.
We have always told stories to help us understand why we are as we are. Our distant parents had the same challenges we have today: tribal integration and the yin yang of sex and gender dynamics; otherwise known as the 'Battle of the Sexes'.
So What Do We Know for Sure?
The natural perception of how things are, among humankind, is generally influenced by two fixed events: birth and death. Beginning and ending is our preferred way of describing change.
Things seem to begin somewhere, sometime; an origin story.
The personal beginning of each of us seems simple: Pa impregnated Ma and she grew us in her belly for nine months. That’s how we got here; the same thing happened to their own ma and pa, and so on all the way back down the line to Adam and Eve.
People of scientific inclination prefer their origin story among the ancestral unicellular sea-creatures in the ocean beyond Sandown Bay. Where those came from is the next need-to-know question; traced back through evolution to a primordial soup; and then to the singularity “Big Bang”.
Or whichever Black Hole is identified as responsible.
The island community is a statistical miracle of random assembly of the ninety-two elements forged in the life and death cycles of stars, combined with the subtle influence of gravity and time -13 billion or so years.
All of which finds expression in the everyday of life.
Science is Everything vs God is Everything
Religious-minded islanders believe the statistical improbability of life existing as it does, is the consequence of design not accident but non-believers insist sufficient information exists to explain why things work, without God.
The world has moved on from mythical supernatural beings as the best explanation for why things are. Technology tells us everything we now need to know.
Satellite navigation guides visitors to the Isle of Wight and beyond into the unknown, but offers no reference or context where our universe is relative to anything else before the Bang. Or whether or not this island population, and the whole world community beyond remains part of the Age of Myth.
Isle of Wight Council's Quantum Conundrum
Consensus among decision-making members of the council is generally science-based. The world is what it is, it works, so long as people don’t look too closely. Technology tells us where we are in time; boils kettles at council meetings and suggests when cake is past its use-by date.
It also tells us the cake is an illusion. For some science-minded council members keep up with incoming theories on how our world is generated from a mysterious vibrant mix of particles and quark communities whose behaviour is more magic than science. No one yet knows how or why they make reality real.
Technology also tells us most of our universe is invisible, one among gazillions of others out there. But decisions still have to be made on matters relating to the community here and now.
Put the Kettle On. Everyone Knows the Truth
As yet no scientific data is available to indicate if these sibling universes are peopled or not and what, if any, relationship they have with this one in which we live.
The Isle of Wight, like the world community beyond, is peopled by those who insist everything is science; and those who believe someone supernatural is responsible for the miracle of life.
Both sides of the divide are united by life. And believe in making the most of their everyday. At the hard-work tired-out end of which a comfort cuppa is all that matters. Boiling a kettle is simple, press a button. Not exactly rocket science.
And everyone knows the truth about the hereafter: "No one knows and never will, until they get there."
Some lucky people did exactly that. And lived to tell the tale.
Is Out-of-Body Into the Multiverse?
As NHS medical science has advanced more people are resuscitated from flat-line death states and say they still had consciousness, even when their body was clinically dead. They watched from an unexpected and surprising second-person position, observed the frantic defibrillator activity that shocked them back to life.
Science's response mostly is such experiences are hallucination. However the consistency and quantity of these descriptions leave only two conclusions: the human species is pre-programmed with a 'Sweet Finale' hallucination, or what these people say is correct.
The ghost-body is real.
Who and What Else is Out There Beyond Life?
The only information we have on who else is out there comes from our distant parents. Our ancestors' stories are peopled by many different gods and goddesses. How and why they believed this we never will know for sure.
Science dismisses them as fictions. Like the problem with ghosts, science needs proof of their existence. Needs data.
On our way to the promised Theory of Everything, modelling, calculations and data yield fascinating theories to account for the astonishing miracle we are here at all. Latest of which is that our world is a simulation.
Life cannot be a statistical miracle, or the product of an infinite beta-testing sequence of failures to launch life in other not-so-lucky creation mixes. Our world is so perfect for our existence because we live in a Matrix-like simulation.
Who created the simulation and why? is pretty much where our distant parents got to.
Other Gods and Me
Our ancestors assumed there was intelligence behind the everyday production that we call life. Attributed it to a complex division of labour among many different goddesses and gods.
Modern world religions acknowledge the existence of other Gods but outlaw them. 'Have no Other Gods Before Me, for I am a Jealous God' was the message for the past 2000 years. Why is a creator of everything jealous of its own product? Don't know.
Part of the problem is no one knows, because God doesn't speak to anyone.
The old Gods liked to speak to mortals, so the poets Homer and Hesiod told. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer related how the Gods interested themselves in the business of humankind; others presided over nature and its processes. Quite literally behind-the-scenes intelligence.
Some were - and presumably still are - responsible for deciding who does and does not exit via the temporary Tunnel of Light wormhole portal, after their last breath is spent.
And so are trapped in time, as a ghost.
3 Ways to Become a Ghost
- Choose not to enter portal.
- Miss the Tunnel of Light exit. Accidental own fault.
- Tunnel of Light exit does not open.
Nature's Response to Human Unkindness
The old Gods have a right to contribute to the current environmental debates on the destruction and dangers to our home planet earth. Be included, not excluded. Before the human crazies turn us all into ghosts.
Not so impossible as you might think.
Thank you for your company on this short tour of being alive mysteries. If you would like to know more about how ghosts and Olympian goddesses and gods are connected read this book. Now available from Amazon.
