Whimsical Theories of the Afterlife

"One (possibility) is that we are, in fact, immense beings tasked with the physically demanding job of maintaining and upholding the cosmos. However, God entitles us to a vacation from time to time, and this we take as tiny, insignificant human beings, born into a resort called Earth. While here, we enjoy parochial pleasures, interesting ourselves in very small matters like watching movies, falling in love and so on. At the end of our lives, we return to work, terribly disappointed to be leaving our tiny earthly bodies.

"Strange enough? Well, here’s another possibility. “There are three deaths,” Eagleman writes. “The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” In this scheme, when we die, we go to a cosmic waiting room where we mark time until our name is never again mentioned. The famous are trapped here, of course, for a very long time; they wish for obscurity, but it may take an eternity to arrive.

"How about another afterlife, in which God is a microbe whose real concern is the battles and triumphs of other microbes? Our problem here is that we are simply too big. Our fate is irrelevant to the real show, which is the one in which microbes participate."

(Alexander McCall Smith's book review in the New York Times of David Angleman's Forty Tales From the Afterlife.)