On a particularly light-hearted moment, I entered a conversation about organ donation. Are people generally for or against organ donation? One response was, “Take everything, I don’t need it.” This was an incredibly sensible and practical response; it wasn’t mine. I confessed that the idea of walking around in the afterlife without a couple of key parts, like my eyes and my heart, gives me the creeps. That’s right, I, who have not practiced Catholicism since boyhood, who aspires to epitomize logic and reason… gets the creeps about not having eyes or a heart in the afterlife.
The response to my confession was a surprisingly good out, “Once you make it to heaven, you’ll be whole again.” That’s great; it means that in some ways, I don’t need to worry about how my body parts are parceled out. I suppose that in the other case, lacking my eyes or heart would be the least of my worries.
However, reverting to my true ultra-logical fashion. I’m left to entertain the idea that the afterlife is drastically different than our current existence, and many elements that we consider ‘laws of nature’, like physiology, may no longer apply.
Flashback to anatomy and physiology
In high school, I had brief aspirations to become a medical doctor. To that end, I took a year of anatomy and physiology. I fondly remember that class and retained more of it than any reasonable human should after nearly forty years. It aspired to describe all parts of the human body and explain what it all did. Truly, it was fascinating.
To this day, I may go to the doctor and when asked where my headaches occur, I would respond with the occipital region. Occasionally, I’d reason about how quickly different bones would heal based on how much blood they get. Angular bones in the wrist mend more slowly.
Sometimes, I’ll spit out a factoid. Have you ever cut a finger and sucked on it to contain and stop the bleeding? Well, you’re drinking tiny amounts… of urine. Think about it, urine is filtered from the blood, by the kidneys, into your bladder. Your urine was at one point, all in your bloodstream. Just let that sink in.
However, as mentioned above, once we hit the afterlife, these rules about physiology may no longer apply.
Are there no assholes in heaven?
Like most people, I fixate on certain tasks and before I realize it, hours have passed. I may end up missing lunch altogether or perhaps even dinner. This is when my preoccupation outweighs my hunger. Hunger is a natural human condition from simply the way the body functions; it’s natural to get hungry when your body needs nourishment to function.
However, if we imagine heaven as the epitome of existence. I’d imagine that we would never go hungry. If we don’t go hungry, do we even eat? And if we don’t eat, do we even expel waste? In classic, Dogma-esque fashion, dare I ask if we even have anuses in heaven?
That said, I imagine that some fairly irritating people still earn the right to get into heaven, so there are likely those assholes still in heaven. Unless there’s a reason to believe that their personality has significantly changed, or my tolerance for them improves, for that matter.
How does ‘parenthood’ even function in heaven?
If we imagine that once we get to heaven, we’ve all regressed to the age (or state) where we were our best (or healthiest) selves. Imagine all your ancestors, even the ones who you’ve never met, there at the prime of their lives. It all sounds like an eternal version of In Time, where your ancestors are perpetually fixed in their best age. A 30-year-old Justin Timberlake plays the son of a 27-year-old Olivia Wilde. How is this not an Oedipus complex to the nth degree?
However, there’s no reason to believe that there’s a need to procreate in the afterlife; all that unsavory business is simply something that we dealt with in our corporal lives. If we reason that we may not need an anus in the afterlife, would we even have genitals if there’s no need to procreate? Do our eternal selves even have sex?
Furthermore, if our eternal selves have no genitals in heaven, does the concept of gender even exist? Is the gender classification of female and male simply dissipate once we arrive?
We pay little attention to physiology
Let’s reflect on all the conditions in the human body that aren’t perfect, by your standards. Do we really distress when someone else looks to improve their body?
- Poor eyesight: Lasik
- Cleft palate: Reconstructive surgery
- Wrinkles: Botox or plastic surgery
- Discolored anus: Anal bleaching (I wish I were making this up)
- Etc.
All of the above are ‘elective’; none are required to survive. In a very real way, every medical procedure can be considered ‘playing god’. Though, why do we care? If we truly believe that our time on Earth is only a blip of our entire existence, why do people distress about what we do with these bodies? Wouldn’t this be like taking our rental car through a car wash? Why do we care about something that is temporary?
However, if someone decides to make their blip of time more enjoyable, like getting a first-class plane ticket, are we really going to tell them that they can’t?
Why is gender that different?
There’s little reason to believe that gender matters at all in the afterlife. Gender and genitalia are merely a function of physiological reproduction, which probably doesn’t happen in heaven. If someone decides that their time here on Earth is better spent as a man instead of a woman, why are we drafting literally hundreds of bills to impede them?
If someone chooses to go through gender transition, why not simply treat it like any other body modification, such as… breast augmentation, tattoo, or body piercing. Why so much angst about that other people do with their bodies?
We could entertain the idea that sexual intercourse, like eating and sweating, is simply something that we do in our human existence. Thus, once that ends, so does the very human definition of gender.
Is my identity as a man more deeply engrained than that of an engineer, to which I’ve dedicated decades? Furthermore, is there a need for engineers in heaven? Probably not. Is there a need to bucketize the residents of heaven into genders? Probably not. Why believe that our human identity, whether professional or gender, persists in the afterlife?