In the sweet bye-and-bye

A fascinating reflection! Reminiscent of, but not indebted to, Twain's Extracts from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven. I love the math, the fabulous illustrations (especially the Duck family, which makes your point so vividly, with Donald buried in the middle of the tree)and the fact that one of my idols is as concerned about such matters as I am.

A fun post!

someone once asked me why do i have cerebral palsy

was it fate?.

the sins of the father passed to the son?

simple bad luck

i settled on the idea of reincarnation; in one of my previous llves l reckon i was a womanizing bastard (ill be celebrating? 37 sexfree years in august

Ebert: To quote David Mamet, "things happen."

Poor in bio and better in math, let me remind you of another number which is actually not a number but a "limit"----infinity. But not to disturb the security of your confusion, I hasten to assure you that nothing in science can be really "infinite"(the inverted commas are nececessary because the word is scientifically dubious) and physicists far better than me pronounce that even space and time are respectively not infinite and eternal---rather they are endless but finite like a spherical surface----that there is no "before" before the Bang or "beyond" beyond the beyond (correct me since I am not good enough).

Your logic and intelligence I am sure is impeccable but results in Zero. I feel more comfortable with the idea of infinity. The great Pascal ( who at sixteen discovered the dazzling Mystic Hexagram) found more reason in the heart than than in reason.

One is lonesome,two beautiful and perhaps infinity if it exists in the realm of our inner lives and if so sublime. All above sounds like and is humbug. Faith is real.

Dammit Rog, now youre gonna give me a mini anxiety attack. Even a scientific mind like mine starts to short-out when I get on these infinity logical paths, haha. And Im still too young - an ignorant Gen Y (or Z or whatever theyre calling slightly-post GenX) - living without consequences! A mortgage and a recession has cured that for my generation - thankfully. The simple comforts in absorbing these questions is the sharing of ones life with another (Im so blessed). Lets hope more can open their minds to recognize that - so some of our friends and family wont be further denied their right to express it.

A profound sharing, thanks.

I recommend Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series, if you are interested in a twisted-fairytale sweet bye and bye. No loneliest number there! Perhaps only in Steve Allen's Meeting of the Minds would you ever have met a more unlikely cast of characters.

I started first grade in a Catholic school about 1961. At the time, the nuns taught that non-Catholics couldn't go to heaven. My Mom wasn't Catholic. I was hysterical. Totally put me off heaven.

Now that I'm an adult, I think the sweet bye and bye just sounds like an excrutiatingly long and boring family picnic. You know, where there's one or two people you're really glad to see but you have to be nice to dozens - forever.

Great post, Roger!!! FWIW, you are pretty much identical in your personality here than when I saw ya back on late night TV with Gene. One thought that seeps into my head is how things that are moving at the speed of light are massive, when you freeze things down near absolute zero matter forgets what it is but it does crazy things like store light until it warms up.

SO! I think it reasonable to say that whatever problem with the aggregate total of who we came from or who came after us will be solved somehow ;p Hey if I knew the answer down here I'd be rich. Or richer, at least.

Your link to the Duck Family Tree site is incorrect, it should be: http://duckman.pettho.com/.

Ebert: Thanks. Actually, now I've substituted a link to a page with all the various Duck family trees. The top one on the page is rather amazing, although it still doesn't solve the mystery of the parentage of Huey, Louie and Dewey.

What if everybody's

Nah, never mind. They must have a really good event coordinator up there.

I've been enjoying your entries and they make a nice lunchtime diversion. While I believe in Heaven, I have often wondered exactly what the relationships will be. Will we even remember our prior life? Perhaps we will simply "know" without specific remembrences. Otherwise we would spend eternity discussing minutia such as Ali's phantom punch on Sonny Liston or the final truth of Kennedy's assasination, or even why my sister threw a dart into my hand. Yes, I dared her, but still....

It could be we will be too busy about the business of whatever the afterlife has to offer to dwell upon the neverending family reunions. I've been to a few reunions and while they are nice, to be in a continual reunion state might wear thin after a while. Presumably, there will be other diversions in the afterlife. It should be full of surprises.

Thanks for the intereting thoughts. I now have another reason to mistrust Komodos. Does remind me of that clever Brando/Broderick movie that was out a few years ago - the Freshman?

Ebert: Yes, the one Brando trashed--incorrectly.

So, self-centered anthropomorphism of the post-life existence of animus energy is a bit silly?

Yeah, I can see that.

If there is such energy, it probably just kinda blobs all together like other energy, smashing and mixing, creating and destroying. Just like when it was alive.

This column was a real joy to read. Very entertaining. I am curious what led you to this particular topic today. Or did you just say upon awakening, "I think today I'll ignite a theological flamewar. And then I'll have some toast."?

Ebert: What makes you say the entry is theological?

To me, a family gathering of that magnitude could only happen in the other place.

I always thought the comedian Dave Allen was right when he said something to the effect of:
If all the saints go to heaven and all the sinners go to hell, wouldn't heaven be populated by the pious and hell be full of brothels, bars and casinos? I'd rather be in hell, 'cause it sounds like heaven to me!

What inspired this essay on the step beyond the world as we know it? A column about Heath Ledger?

I'm not too worried about Komodo Dragons and the thought of reproduction with or without sexual contact between two bodies. While the dog lover in me says there must be a rainbow bridge, in the end, I do not really believe that dogs have souls. Dogs can have soulful eyes and soulful groans, but I think they are lessons for us to learn by.

Perhaps the case of the Komodo Dragon is that humans, unlike animals that can breed without another of their kind, need another person. We need each other on a very basic level (sex and reproduction) and on a higher level--to achieve great things.

In the next world, I do not believe we have bodies. Instead, I imagine that our souls our ageless, gender-free and unfettered by the conventions of race and culture. Remember when the Internet promised to be a place where there was no race, no gender and no age?

In reality, the Internet has shown the best and the worst of people. Women, in chat rooms and blogs, are more likely to be hazed and threatened.

In this world, we are so easily dissuaded from seeing people as they are for we are distracted by gender, race, religion and ethnicity to name a few things.

I do not believe that sex as an act will be as important as love. Love is what makes a family and not all of us have great families.

As for dogs, I believe they are both a test and a lesson. We can show them kindness or cruelty, but they can teach us the true nature of selfless and unconditional love, but also point out how brief our lives truly are.

In the next world, I hope to meet people that I have loved and that loved me, but I also hope to see people who influenced me and perhaps for writers we can hope that our true descendants will be our intellectual children.

Ebert: Your final hope is one I share.

What inspired the entry? I came across the Evolutionary Tree of Life and it started me thinking.

Wow! With all the ancestors upon pets upon some magic moment when, if only in science books, the took of them, technically 'met' (and we use 'meet' the same way the Bible, way back when, would), to paraphrase Aimee Mann, "knowing would be the saddest experience / we'll ever know (Yes, it's the saddest experience we'll ever know)".

Speaking of Dr. Asimov, he once wrote a song with a friend to the tune of "Home on the Range"

Oh give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone
With the Y chromosome changed to X

And when I'm alone
With my own little clone
We will both think of nothing but sex

etc.

The image of an afterlife that most intrigues me is the one in the novel "Waiting for the Galactic Bus" by Parke Godwin, if you're in the mood for some recreational reading (and can get past the sexism). It actually sounds...fun.

I've never thought through the implications that you bring up, but it seems to me evident that, if heaven is indeed paradise, then each person will be seen by a viewer as they wish to be seen by that viewer. That means we will see ourselves as the age we were when we defined our self-image; our children will see us as their parents at some stage that provides for them the referent for "parent", and so on for our grand children. I would presume that our parents would see us either as children, or grown adults - whatever stage was most important to them.

And so on. This logically implies a conflict when we meet our children and parents at the same time, and equally logically implies a completely solipsistic universe where everyone sees what they want to see, and in fact if a grandparent, parent and child meet there may actually be three "separate" encounters happening simultaneously.

(It also logically implies that there is only one referent point in every person's life - a referent point can be replaced by another as you go through life)

Captious critics might say that this implies that in heaven, everything you see is a lie.

Ebert: Logic can lead you into strange places.

As an adoptee who's not planning on having kids, where am I on a family tree? A graft? A small tufty wicket on one side? A tough little garden rose twined around a branch?

As for two doing the tango except for those wallflower partheogenesissies, I beg to differ and display the fairly recently discovered Symbion pandora, a radically new trisexual lifeform that lives on the lips of lobsters.* Apparently, even DNA can get bored with the same old same old and can only watch so much Letterman, so they came up with a whole new species for interesting combinations!

*From Diane Ackerman's Deep Play, pages 137, 138, 141

When calculating the number of ancestors (or descendants of Adam and Eve), you have to allow for "pedigree collapse," i.e. lots and lots of inbreeding.

Ebert: Quite true. Please get back to me ASAP with those revised calculations.

This blog entry starts with Three Dog Night, proceeds through reunions in heaven, and ends with DNA and Darwinism. Reading through it, I'm pretty sure I don't know what it was about, but I think somewhere Charlie Kaufman is stroking his chin and plans to adapt it into a screenplay. By the time it's released to theaters -- with the Roger Ebert role played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and the Hoffman-as-Ebert role played by John Malkovich -- I probably still won't know what it's about, but it sure as hell won't be boring.

Ebert: You start out somewhere and end up somewhere. That's writing for you.

I just like to think of Heaven as portrayed in "Defending Your Life." You get to spend a little time at a heavenly Club Med, prove your lived your life well and then go to Eternity. And if you botched it, you get another shot. Maybe that would cut down on the crowd a little.

As always, Roger, a wonderfully written post.

I never understood why people are convinced that humans have souls yet other species do not. It's very selfish to say such a thing because it seems to stem from other species lack of intelligence. One day I was alone with my dog in my backyard and as I looked in his eyes I thought "The only difference between us is our intelligence level and our psychical traits. If there is an after life why would I go and not you."

Nevertheless, If I get to heaven after I die I would like my recently deceased 87 year-old wife to look like Freida Pinto :)

I am a content agnostic with absolutely no clue as to what happens after, but if I could have my choice, I'd want it to look like "What Dreams May Come," where we don't necessarily recognize our loved ones at first because they are disguised as the people they most wanted to look like, or in the guise of a celestial guide to help you transition into the next life. And then, once you have achieved happiness in the hereafter, you have the choice of whether or not to go back to Earth and live again, without the knowledge of your previous lives, which you will achieve upon re-entry in the afterlife. That sounds lovely to me.

In regards to family trees, I did one for a freshman year psychology class and was stunned at how far back I was able to go, and what a miniscule leaf I was on the great tree.

I wonder in our age of Kinsey, sexual fluidity, and multiple partners, how the trees are going to morph. I'm gay and plan on using a surrogate mother if I ever plan to have children, which would then splinter two trees together, and if I have two surrogates, my partner will be the giver for the other child, and another tree would merge....It's all so delightfully confusing and fun to think about. But my question is this: Will we, as humans, ever evolve so homosexual couples have the ability to reproduce? It seems kinda silly now, but I can imagine a few thousand years down the line, we might have evolved to have this ability. I don't know how it would work, but hey, evolution gave us an appendix.

Ebert: I love that film. Regarding your question: A man did of course just give birth.

St. Thomas Aquinas said everyone would be 33 years old in heaven, the age Jesus was when he died.

Ebert: What do you think his reasoning was? Would that be confusing to a dead baby?

Roger:

If I do get to Heaven -- and it's still an "if" -- I really wouldn't mind the "Ultimate Family Reunion." If we exist without our bodies, merely as souls, I hope everybody has name tags.

But seriously, there are ancestors I would like to speak to, especially my great-great-grandfather, who was a well-respected pottery maker in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia in the years during and after the Civil War. His diaries indicate he was a very interesting man, and I'd like to get to know him.

By the way, you should read Italo Calvino's "Cosmicomics" -- a collection of comic stories about creatures who exist at the beginning of time, and their observations on what is happening. I recommend this book, Roger, because your musings on Heaven and evolution are starting to sound like Calvino's works.

Ebert: To quote David Mamet, "things happen."

to quote Forrest Gump "shit happens"

so if its all just a huge crapshoot with no destination, do you advocate hedonism?

Ebert: Just the opposite. If this is all there is, we have to live as fully and responsibly as we can. We can't pass Go and get out of Life free.

Your worry about whether or not people in heaven are eternally in the state they were nanoseconds before their deaths is probably unnecessary. I would think you would be at your life's peak, or better. My biggest fear is something Jesus alluded (is that the right word? Eluded? Should I Google it? Methinks no.) to, and that is that in Heaven we are all brother and sisters, no married couples. He said that when asked who's wife a woman would be in heaven if she were multiple men's wife (due to death, not bigamy) in life. Well nuts to that. Part of my attempting to be a good dude down here is my desire to get with Marilyn Monroe in the great hereafter. I mean, it's heaven right? So now Monroe is my sister? I have to assume incest, or equivalent thoughts thereof, are taboo in Heaven. Besides that, some religious thinking leaves us to believe the very THOUGHT of a sin is sinning. Bollocks, I just want my night with Marilyn Monroe, is that really so wrong?

"All I want is what I've got coming to me, all I want is my fair share." -Sally Brown, Charlie Brown Christmas

Ebert: If we are at our peak, do we know what's coming for us down the road?

Ebert: To quote David Mamet, "things happen."

Thanks for not using the Rumsfeldian variant of that, Roger.

With regard to the above poster's "inbreeding" calculations, it is pretty difficult to come up with exact figures, since there's no way of knowing how far back we have to go before our human intolerance for inbreeding is diluted.

However, the number of ancestors you have goes up "only" exponentially, not as you have put it.

So we'd have the sequenced

2
4
8
16
32
etc,. with each deeper generation being two times larger than in the past. If you want to figure out the ideal number of people in a given generation, just take 2 to the Nth power- "N" being the number of generations.

At some point, however, a few of the branches on your tree will begin to represent the same person. That is, there will be an ancestor for whom one daughter is, for (very arbitrary) instance, your mother's mother's father's mother's father's mother's father's father's mother, and son that will be your father's mother's mother's mother's father's mother's mother- or some other such combination.

In this way the "tree" becomes thinner at a certain point.

Consider that 2^32 power is roughly the current population of the Earth. If (and this is incorrect) you assume that the population of the Earth is constant, it would have to be that, at some point in the past, some of the branches of your family tree would represent the same person. Given the fact that the average human generation is about 25 years, the latest possible "no two branches are alike" point would represent less than a millennium of human history.

But, given that the population of Earth has never been as great as it is today, and the fact that populations of given regions tend to be somewhat inbreeding themselves (that is, Brits have tended to Marry Brits, Chinese have tended to marry Chinese etc,.) the "no two branches are alike" point is likely to be much, much earlier.

Ebert: Statistics baffle me. At least they get us talking. I learn from the comments.

Hello again Roger. Another lovely post.

I don't believe in life after death, heaven and all the other hopes that counter the fear of mortality.

I do, however, occasionally have a discussion about this with someone who does believe. In a way I envy them. I always get round to the same question and i've never had it satisfactorily answered. it goes something like this?

Rob - Do ants have a heaven and meet all their loved ones?
Other - of course not, that's stupid.
Rob - How about monkeys then?
Other - that's ridiculous Rob, you're making fun of my religion.
Rob - Since when did we become the only one of millions of species that gets a heaven then and when did the monkey's lose their because we were monkeys some time ago?
Other- You're clearly not a believer Rob.
Rob - I'm sorry, i just can't understand.
Other - You will, one day...

as for me, I discovered Buddhism 2 years ago and I'm just trying to be happy.
Thanks for helping me get there
Rob

Ebert: When someone tells me what they believe, I like to reply, "That's interesting from an autobiographical point of view."

Off topic, Roger, but I wanted to ask you about your "Elevation" Academy Award column on Heath Ledger.

In your memory, has there ever been a more favored nominee in any "comepetitive" category than Heath Ledger this year in Supporting Actor? It seems to me that the confluence of the movie's huge success, his riveting performance, and his untimely and tragically early death have pretty much sewn up the Oscar for him. Even if he hadn't died, I think he had a good chance (at both the nom and the win), but his death cinched it, I suspect. (Not to mention the fact that he didn't win for Brokeback...)

Ebert: I'm tempted to agree with you. And speaking of Oscars, "The Dark Night" was so much a better film than "Benjamin Button."

I was thinking about this topic today, wondering where will I go when I die. I used to think that a heaven existed beyond the universe. But I was at a small cell church group last night and they were talking about how when you die your spirit lives on. I heard that and kept thinking that after I die my spirit will rise out of my body, become part of a cloud and fall as rain upon the earth somewhere. I'll water the Amazon. And then I thought of the verse in Genesis where God tells Everyman (or Adam) that he came from dust and then he become dust when he dies and then I thought well maybe I'll just turn into soil and plants will grow out of me.

We have no empirical evidence of what happens after we die. Religion provides pat answers that comfort some people. Honestly if someone believes they will be reunited with their loved ones apres mort I will not say "you're foolish or selfish." Just as I can sort of understand why the origins of life is so important to some people but not something I would want to study. Too much detail.

But being descended from a female in Africa is interesting. Much more than Adam and Eve. Truth, I suppose, can be stranger than fiction.

Ebert: Every single human who has ever lived descended from Mitochondrial Eve. Her gene signature is in my DNA and yours. Someone reading this will answer my question: If that African female had not lived to reproduce, would there be humans at all?

For some reason, I am reminded of something Einstein said when he was close to death:

"I cannot conceive of, nor would I ever wish to meet, an individual who has survived his physical death. As for what is to come, I, for one, wish to remain a child of mystery..."

Please excuse me if the quote is not word-for-word, it's close, and it's been a long day. And oh do I look forward to reading these journals.

First time poster here. Having just lost my grandmother in November, I've been thinking a lot about whether she and I will see each other again. Your post didn't provide me with any real answers, but it did feel like a reminder to "lighten up", and I laughed aloud quite a few times while reading. Keep up the good work, Mr. Ebert!

Doesn't sound like much fun. Of course, heaven might be experienced differently by, say, Marty McFly and Dante Alighieri. Still, Marty's Beatific Vision, the young Elizabeth Shue!

I also wonder what deceased infants would be like in Heaven. Would they still be infants? The adult they would have grown to be? Is Elvis Presley hanging out with his twin brother?

Boy, look at this Ebert guy WRITE!

Ya know Rodge, it's an even guiltier pleasure than a big fat sizzly triple cheese, malt and side order o'fries a-slop with industrial strength ketchup when you write a bad movie review. We all agree, 'fess up. But this stuff is like a bad review turned to the good side of the Force, so it's even badder.

I've got it: EBERT UNCHAINED. Pulitzer Prize for sure. And that Dave Barry thinks he's so smart. He couldn't come up with better name for a rock band than that one for sure.

Della Duck, hmmm. I knew those evil misfit nephews came from some relative of Donald's, but I never thought about it too much. I watched those Disney cartoons religiously as a youth, Donald being my favorite, and I don't ever remember her being mentioned.

Perhaps fondness is an inherited trait, as my 4-year-old son uses YouTube to seek out Donald cartoons over all the other Disney notables.

Ebert: Your son has good taste. I've always found Mickey intensely boring. I loved the time when Scrooge sent Huey, Louie and Dewey to the bottom of the sea to raise a treasure ship by pumping it full of ping-pong balls.

Not to steal Toby's thunder or rain on your parade with annoying geek-speak, but the mathematics involved in calculating biological populations is pretty byzantine.

The best easy rule for population calculations is probably the Mathusian Growth Model, which incorporates as a ballpark estimator the "Rule of 70": If a population has a 1% growth rate, it will double in size about every 70 years. The doubling time will decrease by half, for every 1% increase in the growth rate (so a population with a 2% growth rate will double about every 35 years, and so on).

Of course this is an only slightly less horribly oversimplified description of biological population than the one you used, so I wouldn't sweat the details much here (not that I feared you would...)
Any serious population model has to include dozens of variables (genetic factors, climate factors, food supply/carrying capacity factors, predator/prey relationships, social, cultural, political, and economic factors, migration, birth rates, death rates, infant mortality rates, maternal mortality rates... just to scratch the surface).

As if that wasn't mind-bending enough, all of these items are inter-related to such a degree that even a small change to one number immediately alters the values for many of the other numbers in surprising (and largely unpredictable) ways. This gets us into all that Butterfly Effect/Chaos Theory stuff, which means that calculating populations a lot like predicting the weather: You can look outside and make a pretty good guess as to what things will be like a few miles away (or a few minutes in the future). With satellites and radar, you can look around even further and maybe stretch your forecast out to a few days with serviceable (although much less accurate) results. Unfortunately when it comes to knowing what will be going on in a month or a year from now, even the best models are only slightly more reliable than an outright guess.

Since no really reliable models exist that can give you useful estimates beyond a very limited local area in space (or a couple of decades in time), I suppose we'll just have to be surprised when we enter the pearly gates. I like a good surprise...

Ebert: These days when I don't really understand something like how populations go, I find it works to just go ahead and write about it it anyway, and trust to the comments to educate me.

The afterlife is bullshit.

Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.

This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.

At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.

Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.

Rabindranath Tagore
http://allspirit.co.uk/gitanjali.html

Oh Roger, if it were only that simple.

Apparently, Komodo dragons do have parthenogenesis, but unlike most animals that reproduce via this method, a Komodo female will produce MALE progeny. The evolutionary thinking behind this is that the female would then be able to single-handedly populate a virgin habitat (e.g. a remote island) where no males are present by making her own future mates.

I'd hate to imagine what an Oedipal nightmare their heavenly family reunion would be!

Ebert: And the male komodo with no mate does what...most males do?

Overpopulation is a frequently heard counter to reincarnation....maybe its a case of recycling....

With all these deep philosophical and scientific musings I still find myself puzzled by Scrooge McDuck. Scrooge McDuck was "Scrooge" in the Disney version of A Christmas Carol. So, was Scrooge McDuck playing a role or playing himself? If he was playing a role, I think it's a little too coincidental that he shares the name of the character he plays; if he was playing himself, I wonder why Disney feels it's necessary to keep him around as a character. I mean, we don't see that fox that played Robin Hood hanging out in other cartoons, do we?

Ebert: I wonder if Scrooge ever shares his memories of Donald's parents?

Ebert: "I won't even get into the issue of being reunited with very close friends, or pets, or people you love even though you haven't ever met them, like Garrison Keillor."

Am I wrong to assume the "Ebert-Keillor Meet 'N Greet" can happen now as opposed to the sweet bye-and-bye?

And isn't it obvious all your readers love you even though we haven't met you?

The concept of individual souls is - I don't find it to be true, I'm a mystic and believe in one all-encompassing over- (or under-) soul united not only all conscious beings but all living ones, and not only all living ones, but EVERYthing. But - if you're going to posit the existence of an immortal, personal soul, I can certainly understand people's leaving animals out. You know it's a pretty difference between even the smartest non-human animal, and the average man. Maybe not as big as that between Einstein and the average man, but pretty big. So, love animals tho I do, I could see leaving them out of the soul business.

Ebert: It's sort of necessary to leave them out. You can't sin if you don't know what sin is. Maybe there's a Doggie Limbo.

Do dogs know they've sinned, for that matter. Sometimes they cringe and look guilty. What's that about?

The concept of individual souls is - I don't find it to be true, I'm a mystic and believe in one all-encompassing over- (or under-) soul united not only all conscious beings but all living ones, and not only all living ones, but EVERYthing. But - if you're going to posit the existence of an immortal, personal soul, I can certainly understand people's leaving animals out. You know it's a pretty big difference between even the smartest non-human animal, and the average man. Maybe not as big as that between Einstein and the average man, but pretty big. So, love animals tho I do, I could see leaving them out of the soul business.

I like Rudy Rucker's version where you can look anyway you want. A lot of men tend to look like six-foot tall pe... Well, you get the picture.

Those calculatons must have been painful----yourself?

I agree that animals must have "souls" or some equivalent. I think we people are very me-centric, starting with our individual selves -- so difficult for us to see from another person's very different viewpoint, not to mention those of other species. Surely animal (or insect or whatever) existence is richer than we imagine. (I am discounting the anthropomorphic stories, much as I love Ratatouille and others, which are really about ourselves.)

What if alien visitors to Earth in "take me to your leader" mode approached deer, or penguins, or dolphins in their ignorance rather than us humans, and got a better response than we might have offered? (After all, who died and left us boss?) Might serve us right.

Ebert: If I can love a dog, and I can, it enriches my essence and we manifestly share similar feelings. But I agree with W. G. Sebold that animals and humans mostly regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. I can't think of an insect that I believe has much of a mental existence.

I saw on "Virus Hunters" on National Geographic Channel last saturday about the theory of what kick started evolution. And the conclusion is that we are all viruses. Luis Villareal was the main voice for this theory. I think because it just premiered it's not on youtube, but it will be I suspect--wish I had the whole episode. Here are some pieces of that episode from "virus hunters". http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/explorer/3828/Overview#tab-Videos/06253_00 In the rodent video, they were demonstrating love.

The "Creationist Family Tree" is taken from one of my favorite books, Tom Weller's "Science Made Stupid (How to Discomprehend the World Around Us)." What is shown is actually a synthesis of the evolutionist and creationist models of the origins of man, purportedly to resolve major problems with each. In the evolutionary model it is the tremendous expansion of the brain, while in the creationist model it is the failure to account for the origins of Adam and Eve's daughters-in-law! Mr. Weller's witty and irreverant perspective on the issue is typical of his approach to other scientific matters in the rest of the book.

I assume you have a copy of your own. I'd encourage anybody else with an interest in science to look for it -- it's a great read!

Well, you know whether animals have souls was a popular issue in Samuel Johnson's time. Some parson had written a popular book about it. I thank the Lawd Above that He chose not to bestow Johnson with acquiescence to that recognition. A young man was trying to draw him into the conversation at a party.

Young Man: "After all, Doctor Johnson, when we see an exceptionally intelligent dog, we do not know what to think!"

Johnson: "True, sir! And when we see an exceptionally foolish young man, we also do not know what to think!"

Well, you know whether animals have souls was a popular issue in Samuel Johnson's time. Some parson had written a popular book about it. I thank the Lawd Above that He chose not to bestow Johnson with acquiescence to that recognition. A young man was trying to draw him into the conversation at a party.

Young Man: "After all, Doctor Johnson, when we see an exceptionally intelligent dog, we do not know what to think!"

Johnson: "True, sir! And when we see an exceptionally foolish young man, we also do not know what to think!"

im reminded of the introduction to kurt vonnegut's Jailbird, where Walter Starbuck imagines himself in heaven where everyone can pick what age they are, he chooses to be a respectable age in his 40's and then reunites with his father only to find that his father has chosen to be eight years old

Suppose reincarnation is the case; if the number of reincarnating souls is finite, everyone will eventually have sex with everyone else.

Living a normal life is such bullshit.

Hardly a day goes by that I don't read your brilliant Journal. So, try to imagine my mind bogglination when I see a reference to MYSELF at the top of today's entry!
Are you a fan of the Ducks of Carl Barks, the most popular storyteller of the 20th Century?!?! Grew up on them?!?! I can believe it -- that would explain why I've enjoyed all you've written for these past decades.

Are you aware of the connection you have to the History of the Duck Universe? I wrote to you in 1992 in hopes you could help me find a copy of a movie banned in America (as I understood it) due to copyright reasons, the Archers' "A Matter of Life and Death". I needed to see it again since many years earlier so that I could make one of my usual "classic movie homages" in the 5th chapter of "The Life and Times of $crooge McDuck". As I recall, you suggested that I could probably obtain a copy from a Canadian source, which I did. I, and all those Ducks in that Tree, thank you for that... and all the other enjoyment you've brought us for so long.

Ebert: Good gravy! To get a communication like this is awesome! I have always liked Donald and his relatives infinitely more than Mickey. In the process of trying to learn more French, I found that the fat quarterly Disney paperback magazines (page size of Reader's Digest) were very helpful. I love Oncle Picsou--he seems even more indignant in French. And Donald can be such a Romeo. To have participated, even in such a small way, with your creative process is a badge of honor.

Since we're talking numbers, let's expand the parameters a bit.

Life as we know it is all about procreation.

Why would you assume that stops at death?

Think of an organism that has no physical form, but was gestated inside a human host.

If they exist, they're all around us. Every time you fly from Chicago to New York, you would pass through millions of them.

And these "soul men" and "Soul women" have a nifty process of binary procreation.

One splits in half, and then you have two.

If you're speculating about some non-physical life-form that has no basis in TOE, then why not pretend they have the ability to multiply?

After you die, you retain your memories. Somehow your soul makes a copy of the memories, so you and your doppelganger start from being YOU, and go their separate ways. AFter a few thousands years, there are millions of "souls" who have every reason to believe they are YOU. Or, your ghost.

Makes more sense than the Catholic theology of being judged for "sin" - I mean, once they started selling absolution for specific sins, you have to realize what a con game it was?

Unfortunately, that Tree predates Darkwing Duck, so we'll never know where he fits in the equation...

Homer Simpson's experience in Heaven seems pleasant enough...

from Wikipedia:

Homer arrives in Heaven, where the tour guide dresses him despite Homer being comfortably naked ("because this is Heaven for 'everyone'"). They fly past several heavenly places including a waterslide which will not be available for another year (thanks to Heaven's using Leprechaun labor). The tour guide informs Homer that whatever he wishes for comes true, so he promptly makes the guide's head explode, causing the tour guide to put Homer next to the kiddie pool.

(and later...)

Homer: Lord, you got a first-class destination resort
here, really top notch, but I can't enjoy myself knowing my family is suffering.
God: Oh don't you talk about family suffering with me! My son went to Earth once. I don't know what you people did to him, but he hasn't been the same ever since. [shows Jesus sitting on a swing looking down and spinning really slow]
Homer: He'll be fine.

to see a picture of that Jesus
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d8/GABF14.jpg

I have zero% belief in the afterlife or the existence of eternal souls but if there were such things it seems supremely egotistical for humans to think they alone are the only species to be blessed (?) with them.
As much as I love my parents, the thought of spending eternity with them doesn't sound like my idea of heaven. Of course, if they were honest, most people's heaven would consist of activities considered sinful on Earth. Assuming such things are allowed in heaven then why are they sins on Earth? (I am reminded of the Muslim martyrs' 72 virgins).

While I'm being pedantic, I feel I must point out that 'One' was written by neither Aimee Mann nor Three Dog Night but Harry Nillson and if there is a heaven he will be somewhere up there singing.

The subject is fascinating. I'd never feel comfortable telling someone there isn't an afterlife if that's what they truly believe, but it must cause a person a lot of confusion late in life.

As for the confusion above over Scrooge McDuck, he wasn't a product of the animated film but a creation of Carl Barks the famous Disney cartoonist, and starred in many comics before appearing in the film.

Oh dear. Here you have gone and written a thoughtful essay about the afterlife and all I can think about is the awesomeness of that Duck Family Tree. My dad raised me on reprints of the Donald Duck/Scrooge McDuck series. He read the originals when he was growing up. Some of the most underrated, imaginative, and best comics ever written, bar none. Supposedly Barks, a science geek, even pioneered a number of scientific advances in his comics long before their time (the ping-pong ball ship-raising being one of them).

To Garry Evens:

Scrooge McDuck was "Scrooge" in the Disney version of A Christmas Carol. So, was Scrooge McDuck playing a role or playing himself? If he was playing a role, I think it's a little too coincidental that he shares the name of the character he plays; if he was playing himself, I wonder why Disney feels it's necessary to keep him around as a character.

Because Scrooge McDuck has a more extensive pedigree than you give him credit for. He was created by Carl Barks in the 1940s as the star of a long-running and timeless series of comic books, at which time he was obviously named after Ebeneezer Scrooge. 40 years later, Mickey's Christmas Carol was created basically as an excuse to give the beloved character his own feature film.

And for what it's worth, Disney does breathe new life into some of their older movie characters now and then. For instance, the cast of The Jungle Book was resurrected as 30s-era freight pilots for use in the '90s animated series TaleSpin. (Yeah, it's kind of weird, but it was a pretty good series.)

... in summary, yes, I'm sort of a geek.

I wish I could remember the name of this short story. It made a big impression on me when I read it.

A man works all his life, drudging away in a cubicle. He doesn't do anything remotely sinful--doesn't date, doesn't smoke, drink, or do drugs, doesn't break traffic laws--just follows the rules all his life--works in his cubicle like a worker drone and then goes home to watch TV.

After he dies, he goes up to the Pearly Gates and an angel leads him to his destination. They go in an office building...and go up to a cubicle. The angel says to the man, "Well, here you go, this is yours." The man is aghast and says, "Why am I here? What did I do to get sent into Hell?" The angel looks shocked and says, "This is not Hell, this is Heaven! You spent your whole life this way, we thought this is what you wanted!"

Hey there Roger.
I can always trust in you to strike a nerve.
You write about cool stuff and awesome Movie stuff and Steak 'N Shake stuff.
No matter what, you're always an interesting guy to read.
This latest post, though, sounds like a statement against faith.
I don't know.
I'm usually with you.
But you come across as though You Alone have come across the Secrets of the Universe.
(Quotes by you)
"You know I'm right."
"Develop a little Humility."
"...you Egomaniac..."

It's not necessarily what you say, but How you say it, my friend.
And I ain't even a religious dude.

I know nothing. I admit such.

You're so usually optimistic in your tone.
I hope this is a temporary lapse, 'cause you seemed kinda antogonstic and frustrated.
Towards people not as smart as you.
Which is most people.
No offense to Most People.

I thought I'd leave this post with a link.
It always reminds me of Good.
And in truth, it just makes me use my imagination.
Which is a good thing.
It's from a good man, Carl Sagan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M&feature=related

Take Care Roger.
And thank you very, very much for your blog.
(Not just for you, but for the quality of the comments which you've lured)

Ebert: I certainly didn't intend to come across that way. I'd say my tone was more affectionate and kidding. What often works in writing humorous pieces is to adopt a voice of which the writer is (apparently) unaware. I am playing the lecturer mired in my own logic. One reader was kind enough to be reminded of Robert Benchley, whose classic film shorts "The Treasurer's Report" and "The Sex Life of the Newt" are examples.

seems to me the nub of this matter is simply "cluster f@ck".

Given my gender is basically genetically programmed and socially conditioned to turn into the very thing that gave birth to us – a mother, I guess it makes me an odd duck so to speak, that I’ve never wanted to lay eggs myself. Oh by all means spread your genes around, as I do enjoy playing with kids; at least before they’ve been tricked into putting away their toys. But that aside, I have no interest in getting any closer than that, to motherhood.

I’m far too busy giving birth elsewhere. At least that’s how it feels for me to be an artist. You’re constantly having sex with inspiration and then getting pregnant. And here comes now the ordeal of it all, the late nights and moods shifts and cravings – mostly espresso related mind you, as you slave away in the delivery room that is your studio, pushing, pushing, pushing until finally – POP! Whew; the painting or drawing or cartoon of Roger Ebert is finally out. ;) At which point you’d think you’d relax, right? Take a break. But if you do, it won’t be for long.

The emptiest feeling in the world for me, is when I’m not doing something creative. Doesn’t matter what it is; I mean, not everything has to be a Canaletto. Taking a photo can be just as satisfying, or drawing doodles with your finger in fresh snow before some dog gets the chance to pee there. And Motherhood requires a certain amount of servitude that tends to get in the way of that. You have to want to be a mom if you hope to raise kids.

And what if you never have? If you’d quickly tossed aside your dolls along with their diapers in preference of reconstructing the universe in the guise of a big mud pie? And if as an adult, the opposite sex, while extremely appealing, still not quite enough to tempt you to go so far as to help them spread their genes. As again; already pregnant. Where does it leave you? Not driven by any genetic imperative to reproduce that’s for sure. Or viewing oneself as connected to others only by shared blood for that matter; you can’t draw someone’s portrait if you can’t see their soul. Nor did I ever see heaven through the eyes of a nun or priest despite a Catholic upbringing – as how narrow a concept is that, when you define it as a members only club, eh?

For better or worse, I’ve always seen the inside and the outside of everything and all at once, and in being able to, how I’m connected to it all; the cosmic Yin & Yang. I see the individual as a microcosm of God - and God as being the bigger picture of me and you and literally everything in-between. I think “soul” is simply another word for the threads connecting all of God’s parts. And that when people die, they lose the outer-shell that got in the way and distracted them from seeing that bigger picture.

When I was 15 and a prisoner of the Catholic School system, I read John Milton’s epic “Paradise Lost” which sought to justify the ways of God to man; concealing the massive poem behind some tedious piece of Canadian Literature. And it led me to wonder in part why we’re all here and why so many people suffer? I mean, wouldn’t it be simply easier to cut to the chase God, have life exist as pure spirit? Use the force Luke and all that…? Why even bother with physical forms? In the end and after much pondering, I concluded the following: all that is desirable and hoped for cannot exist if it doesn’t NEED to. And that the worse job in the universe – aside from Wal-Mart, is being responsible for providing that need; poor Lucifer, the measuring stick of good. And thanks to all his hard work, how we’re able to feel elevation - for having something to contrast happiness against.

I think life exists for a time in physical form, as that’s how God makes more from itself. And the minute there’s no more suffering, love soon dies out because it stopped needing create more. And because it sucks having to live with wars and icky crap in general, why we’re not supposed to fight the good fight forever but rather, just do our bit for the team. Like in a relay race, you run for a certain distance and then pass the baton. And to make sure things stay balanced so you’re not having to do more than your share, if you lived a good life – congratulations, you’re done; hello heaven and point me in the direction of the open bar! However - if you were bad or drove a Hummer, you have to go back now and run the relay again; but as someone on the receiving of what you once were.

Karma. What goes around comes around and what better punishment for evil than to be on the receiving of itself, eh? Or more fair a way to inspire good now with the suffering of another seemingly undeserving of their misery? At the very least, you gotta love the irony! And wouldn’t it be trippy if that’s really how it all works? If we’re designed the way we are to ensure there’s always going to be enough evil to inspire good; ie: via imperfect beings? And if the reason there’s a mystery in the first place is because if we knew for SURE why God seemingly does nothing in the wake of misery, we’d likely damn those who suffer for concluding it’s payback - “you deserve it for what you did in the past!” And then damn ourselves for failing to pass the baton in having chosen to ignore the pain of another, and when it was ironically in service of inspiring good and possibly even how evil is supposed to redeem itself; by inspiring it. Again; Yin & Yang. Not black and white. The Universe in gray.

That way, everything feeds into everything and gets recycled. And evil doesn’t simply sit there in a landfill called Hell. Instead, it goes right back into the garden to help fertilize the flowers. At least that makes more sense to me than religion. As it explains everything. Why God never seems to interfere, why evil exists in the first place, why I broke the handle on my Bialetti yesterday and now need to buy a new one, etc.

It’s all part of the cosmic master plan – a part of which is not knowing for sure what the plan is. Faith, the ability to believe there is one without proof as provided by burning bushes. And that heaven is where you see what’s been staring you in the face all along; and everyone you thought you’d lost after they died. Nope. They’re right there and laughing at an in-joke.

Ebert: Very few people achieve this much reasoned peace with themselves.

First of all, thank you very much for giving us an image from Tom Weller's Science Made Stupid. That book is a masterpiece. Oh my god, it's available online in an abridged form.

But what kind of mood were you in when you wrote this? You seemed to have taken it somewhat seriously, and yet you make some notable mistakes. For one, it is said that there are now more living human beings on earth than all deceased human beings combined. Maybe we get to 4,294,967,296, or maybe not, but we certainly don't get past it. You catch yourself afterward, but you do it wrong. It's 4,294,967,296 people, which is 32 generations. That's roughly 800 years, which we've certainly had. The reason the tree doesn't explode into several billion is because people share at least some common ancestors. By limiting the population of the afterlife to humans, you state a clear position on the Beasts That Perish.

But then you come to the question of what we're like in the afterlife. According to Teshigahara's Pitfall, we're all the way we were at the moment of our death. If we got maimed, we stay that way. If we were hungry when we died, we are hungry forever. The Mormons, on the other hand, believe that you get your body in its best original condition. I believe that all religion is nonsense, but if we have souls, we have to take a more poetic approach. None of this people dressed in white gowns business. We become all-knowing souls, with no form, which are either independent entities or join together to form a single entity. No anthropomorphic reunions with past relatives. We become united with all who have come before instantly and constantly. Time ceases to have meaning. The beasts do not perish; they're there too in some form. Bacteria? Protozoans? Plants? Hell if I know, but probably yes. Back into the sea of infinite potential with all of us.

Incidentally, I don't believe the Bible says that Adam and Eve were the first people. It says (I'm going by the ESV) that man and woman were created together on one of the original seven days; and it says that God, who is supposed to be omnipotent, required rest after creating the universe; and it says that Adam was created specially by God, who breathed into his nostrils and gave him life; but it does not say that Adam was the first human being. It seems to me that Adam was not meant to be seen as the first human being and people have been misreading this for over a thousand years. It certainly explains where all the other people Cain spoke of, and his wife, came from. Further incidentally, has there been a movie in which some people encountered the cherubim with the flaming sword who guards the entrance to the Garden of Eden? Or has a character at least been based on him? If not, why the hell not?

Ebert: I know the math is all screwed up. I'm set straight in several comments. It's more like, you know, symbolically accurate?

Hey, Rog:

Liked this post much more than the one excoriating that speech-writer/game show guy. I like the fact that you are willing to speak your mind on such things, consequences be damned. I keep thinking "ooh, now he'll be lambasted by the religioso and the comments will drip with scorn and the flame war will commence and I'll have to stop reading (the comments, that is)." But it doesn't seem to happen. Are you truly preaching to the choir here? Does everyone who reads (& comments) agree with you a priori? Or do the rightligious not come here, knowing you to be a l*b*r*l before they even click the link?

But, really, no body? What would that be like? How could we define heaven if it didn't include the pleasures afforded by the best foods, drinks, movies, skiing, and, and, sex even? Although it is in our minds (souls?) that we are happy and content, it is our bodies that feel the pleasure our minds are happy & content about.

My grandfather told me that heaven is "whatever and exactly what you want it to be", otherwise it's not perfect, and of course, heaven, by definition is perfect. Our definitions of heaven would differ; could we visit one another from our respective heavens? Suppose my definition of heaven is to be free of other people, and your definition of heaven was to meet me? One question leads to another.

As I wastefully click my way about the internet looking for diversion & entertainment, I visit various sites for mere seconds. Then I take a breath, click open your site, and prepare to think as I ponder the view through your window.

Ahhh.

Ebert: At least I have you guys doing the thinking! All I have to do is go off the deep end and you're inspired.

yes, ultimate selfishness to think everyone we know and loved and liked is sitting on a bench, elbows on knees, chin in cupped hands, waiting for our arrival on the 5:15.

but why do we think so? it's unfortunately simple. as kids, someone has your back. dad, mom, uncle frippy, aunt bill, somebody, usually. as we gain independence, you subconsciously (in south jersey it's unconsciously) don't want it. you strive to keep the thought that someone still has your back, but they're not around because you've up and moved out. so who's got your back? that's where a deity comes in.

you can't possibly go around thinking that you're "it." you're all there is. nobody's behind you now, they're all gone, and you've got to spiritually fend for yourself. so you follow the crowd every sunday or saturday night to the pretty building with the colorful windows. you sing along, read the impossible fairy tales, and toss a few bucks in the basket all to keep the idea of someone having your back. you still can't accept that you're actually the "big guy" the way dad, uncle frippy, or aunt bill used to call you.

and when you're on your way out, you can't believe you're on your way out unless you're on your way in somewhere else. you refuse, and it's understandable. you cling for that back-getting god or lieutenant god to be there waiting to escort you like james mason did for warren beatty in heaven can wait.

although i don't like it, i have to agree with howard stern: when we're done, we're just worm food.

drive safely. take care of your waitresses. two shows saturday.

Ebert: It's Cool Inside. Please turn off your cell phones. In Sight It Must Be Right.

to michael felong:

i'd settle for the current elizabeth shue.

Ebert: If we are at our peak, do we know what's coming for us down the road?

There's no down, only up and more up. It just continues. Our present life is also all ascent, is'nt it, bad times more so perhaps than good? Birth, sickness, old age, death, are natural phenomenon, peaks in an essentially joyful unending odyssey , not a downhill process. Isn't life being forged all the time? Is that abstruse?

"Even so
Doth valour's show and valour's worth divide
In storms of fortune; for in her ray and brightness
The herd hath more annoyance by the breeze
Than by the tiger; but when the splitting wind
Makes flexible the knees of knotted oaks,
And flies fled under shade, why, then the thing of courage
As roused with rage with rage doth sympathize,
And with an accent tuned in selfsame key
Retorts to chiding fortune."...Troilus and Cressida

I like the vision of heaven put forth by Hirokazu Koreeda in the film Afterlife. He posits an afterlife in which we get to pick our favorite memory from our mortal life and re-live it for eternity. Capricious, yes (aren't ALL speculations of an afterlife capricious?), but more importantly, it makes the viewer contemplate their life, and leads to great discussions. Rent it with friends!

I'd relive the day in kindergarten when Miss Renouf discovered I could already read at a Grade 4 level, and she took me from class to class to show me off like a show pony. And gave me a two dollar bill (I'm Canadian). I choose this in spite of having had sex since. (Oh, and now that I am 44, my reading level is that of a 48 year old)

Ebert: In less than 20 years, you'll be at my level!

All this piece made me think of was Robert Benchley. Truly brilliant prose.

"animals and humans mostly regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension". That is poppycock.

Dogs and hominid apes have been living together, protecting each other, hunting and feeding together for 20,000 years or more. Dogs are sentient beings and regard us as potential friends and family members.
Much of humanity regard dogs with the same familiarity.

If one is so bright as to think the concept of diety as intellectually bankrupt, yet still regard themselves as special and apart from those who share 98 percent of our dna - they have simply replaced one diety with another...themselves.

There is no great gulf of incomprehension among the higher mammals. We understand the dog, the dog understands us, and the love is mutual and genetically embedded.

So many people seem to know that we're apes, yet don't or won't comprehend what that means.

As Dr. Greg House said a few years ago "I choose to believe that this is not just a test".

However, If I die and I find myself surrounded by family, friends, and pets......how great would that be?? Pretty great I'd say.

Widowers who remarry must have quite the quandry in the afterlife. I always wondered this about a family member of mine who lost his wife and later remarried. Do you suppose it's first come, first served? A Sophie's choice situation? Or do they all live as one big happy triangle? Sure throws a wrench in that one-man-one-woman ideal.

Well entwined, again. A few thoughts. As you pointed out, thoughts of heaven are driven by ego. Hobnobing with your friends and relatives, as if you mattered. Well, you must have mattered to make it to heaven. What if instead, you were the manifestation of another's creation. Then your heaven would actually be 'his'. As an aside, the 'We're created in God's image' statement is used to assume that the Lord looks like us. I think it's more that we are created in His field of view, His image projected.

Besides, you've soaked up knowledge for life-many years. You know all that you needed to know to make it to life-many plus one. You get to retell this at the end and you become part of the knowledge ether. As much as you'd like to hang out with Plato (or Elizabeth Shue), there isn't much more use for you to know this. Understanding your age there shouldn't be a mystery either. I pretty much haven't radically changed since I was a teenager. I haven't gained any more morals or ethics than I had at 17. I just gained chances to display how true or bankrupt my values were.

Back in the '20s, Neil Bohr came up with the planetary model of atoms with electrons and all, orbiting the nucleus. This de-evolved into uncertainty and the probabilities of position. Even so, no one gave up on electrons and nuclei. One of the joys of my life is to stand on a high place and watch crowds below, as they wind their way from store to store, waiting at stoplights, all intent on their journey. They are their own nucleus of family and friends, while acting as electrons to other's nuclei. There are the magnets of culture to attract and repel, and still they do work and buy groceries. Even though we're highly evolved, we act no different that lower species or even sub-atomic particles.

Finally, whether dogs have souls, really only matters to the dog. Do you have license to behave differently if dogs did or didn't?

Ebert: So that's what dogs are always thinking.

Years ago I worked in a place that had two framed quotations on the wall above the desk where I worked.

The first one said:

"No man is poor who can do what he likes once in a while. I like to dive through my money like a porpoise and throw it up and let it hit me over the head." -Scrooge McDuck.

The other poster was Gordon Gekko's "greed" speech from "Wall Street."

I don't want to go anywhere for eternity if my dogs are going to be denied admission.

When my mom passed 4 years ago, I had these very vivid dreams where I conversed with her about the afterlife. Subconsciously, I absolutely knew my mother was deceased so I asked her a very real question that I think we would all like to ask our loved ones in the afterlife: Do you miss me?

My subconscious Mom answered me thusly: Where I am, I am only Beverly (her real name for clarification). She wasn’t the mother of, the wife of, the sister or daughter of. She was stripped of all conventions in Heaven.

If you were a fully conscious spirit, able to travel back from this world and beyond, how wonderful Heaven must be in order for us not to want to be with our loved ones. It doesn’t seem likely that we have the choice, and I certainly profess that Heaven would be more like Hell to me if I was taunted with the memories of my loved ones that I could not hold or touch or talk with or love.

Sure, it would be great to see your loved ones in Heaven, but I don’t think I would want to be standing in the waiting line waiting for my own progeny to join me there. I don’t mind standing in line for three hours for a Star Wars movie. But waiting on the inevitable in eternity would be an eternity. Seemingly, a damnable one.

Robert Frost said “Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it is likely to go better.” I believe that. Heaven may be great for love, too. But I think it can wait for awhile, God willing.

Ebert: Your mom seems to have been much wiser than most people in dreams.

Regarding:

" Every single human who has ever lived descended from Mitochondrial Eve. Her gene signature is in my DNA and yours. Someone reading this will answer my question: If that African female had not lived to reproduce, would there be humans at all?"

It's kind of hard to get your brain around, but the Mitochondrial Eve theory does not imply that there was somehow, a woman 40,000 years ago that was the single "mother of us all." What it suggests is that, as you go back in time and the overlap between our common family trees gets greater and greater, there comes a point at which there is one female that exists on all of our family trees and with whom we all have an unbroken matrilineal (motherly) line. (That is, this woman was our mother's, mother's, mother's... etc,. mother) The so-called Mitochondrial Eve is simply the most recent woman who fits this description. If we could somehow reconstruct human history, there would turn out to be an endless succession of Mitochondrial Eves who were that woman's female ancestors.

The theory most certainly does not imply that there was only one woman in the world at that time- moreover, it does not even imply that there were only a very few. If the current Mitochondrial Eve were to have not lived, the title of "most recent common matrilineal ancestor" would simply have shifted a bit further back in time to another woman, perhaps from another region on Earth or another branch of our tree.

We would all be a little bit different, but humanity would almost certainly still exist.

Ebert: Whew.

I'm not sure you were describing the "sweet" bye and bye. I believe it was Sartre who said, "Hell is other people."

Nevertheless, I am a Christian and believe in a Christian version of the afterlife. And because my son died at 16 (my autobiography is showing!), I believe my son is now without pain or care and surrounded in love. Will I see him or know him when I die? I'd love for things to be somewhat like "What Dreams May Come," but I think it will be that the love of God will be more important than individual loves and yet it will encompass them. I believe that loving God with all your heart and loving your neighbor will still be the two most important commandments. The heaven part is that we will be able to keep these commandments at last.

"What inspired this essay on the step beyond the world as we know it? A column about Heath Ledger?"

Of course. Isn't everything about Heath Ledger? Maybe it would've been inspired by an obituary on Paul Newman. Death is never well-timed.

If we are all to be reunited with loved ones in heaven, will Heath Ledger's daughter have to queue at the end of the line behind millions of superficial mourners to greet the suicidal soul of a man she can't remember except from photos of somebody in spooky make-up?

I am feeling magnanimous. My loved ones are off the hook. I will not blame them for, instead, wanting to spend their eternal days with the souls of their best friends and partners, even, pets. As long as they don't resent my spending mine secluded somewhere listening to Marvin Gaye sing.

A few stray thoughts:

Ebert on parthenogenesis: "when you masturbate, you fantasize about yourself."

Doesn't a Woody Allen character say somewhere (Annie Hall?), "Don't knock masturbation. It's sex with someone I really love"?

As far as heaven goes, I've always joked that for me Paradise would include bowling with, say, Ben Franklin and Marilyn Monroe. But a depressing thought struck me: What if that isn't their idea of heaven?

Also, we may be all souls "up" there, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed for those Shakespearean "cakes and ale."

Finally, as long as we're talking ducks (and the Groucho in me asks, wouldn't it be fun if we were?), Scrooge McDuck has it all figured out here on Earth: He amasses great wealth, but just so he can swim around in it and throw it in the air and let it bounce off his head. There's some kind of cock-eyed (duck-eyed?) virtue in that.

Ebert: I'm tempted to agree with you. And speaking of Oscars, "The Dark Night" was so much a better film than "Benjamin Button."

"The Dark Night," hm? Never heard of that one...is it anything like The Dark Knight? :D

I can't comment on Benjamin Button as I've yet to see it -- and probably won't (at the theater, anyway) -- but I agree that TDK was unfairly snubbed in the Picture noms.

Ebert: Every single human who has ever lived descended from Mitochondrial Eve. Her gene signature is in my DNA and yours. Someone reading this will answer my question: If that African female had not lived to reproduce, would there be humans at all?

Yes. There were plenty of other human females at the time, it's just that over the millenia her female-line descendents crowded out those of her contemporaries. If she'd died in childhood, some other female line would have won out. And eventually the crown will pass to one of her daughters, when her other daughters' female-line descendents die out.

As for the afterlife thing,
1) I don't believe in it (even after my own brush with death and the recent death of a very dear friend of mine at 33),
2) The idea that human beings have an afterlife and, say, wolves don't seems ludicrous to me. It reminds me of that wonderful vicious poem about the white woman who imagines that in heaven the little colored cherubs get up early to do the cleaning.
3) I have a half-written short story around here somewhere, based on a flaw in the usual afterlife schemes: if a man die, yet shall he live, fine. If a boy dies, all right, he lives on somehow too. But what if the boy lives? A wonderful boy turns into a bitter, vile man (as often happens) and what happens to the boy?
4) I'll bet there are plenty of people who would prefer not to continue forever, but would much rather be melted down and made into something better. Say, there's a good story there...

Ebert: I think there might be.

Some people wish to see their family when they die, some don't. Some want a perfect, healthy body, some want the body they've always had, some want no body at all. (But without a body, can there be any pleasure? Maybe they haven't thought this out well enough.)

Some people hope that heaven is like it was on the Simpsons – pleasant – others hope that it's like it was in Afterlife, and we can choose the moment of our lives that we most want to live in forever. (Which must be like choosing which child you love the most.)

Some want to disperse like a vapor over the earth, others want to finally finish remodeling the rec room.

I want to meet on a beautiful shore, with fifty miles of elbow room, where I'll never grow old and no storm clouds rise. It's how I was raised.

The afterlife is all about the hopes and wishes we have in the now life.

Is it just a coincidence that we use the term "I" to refer to ourselves? I have a theory that you may need the use of complex numbers in your ancestral calculations. Bear with me here.

It makes sense to count ourselves as "one" when we denote ourselves as individual human beings. Population censuses are nothing more than a body count in that respect.

As individuals we often refer to ourselves as "I" ( I ate breakfast, I think Uwe Boll is a joke, etc ). Each "I", as such, is counted as "one", and then when we are matched with a significant other (another "I"), we are "two", then we have children, and they grow up pair off with other children to have their own children and on it goes.

If we are to speak in a more existential sense of spirits or "souls", perhaps it would be more appropriate to equate the "I" we speak of to the imaginary number "i". The number "i" is used to denote the square root of -1. This square root of -1, or "i" is used routinely in electrical engineering and quantum mechanics, and its use is essential un the description of the nature of the subatomic universe.

A complex number is a number that uses a combination of real numbers and imaginary numbers and is stated in the form of a + bi, where i is the imaginary number (root of -1) and a and b represent any real number. If we refer to ourselves as "i"s, then when we look at ourselves individually as the root(!) of an ancestral family tree that spans back to the beginning of time, i think we would have to use complex numbers to describe that tree.

(It seems symbolically fitting to me to use "complex" numbers to describe a family tree of souls...or "i"s, if you will.)

On the other hand, if we think of ourselves as "i" instead of "I", and that our souls are represented as the square root of -1, perhaps when we meet our soulmate (another "i", so to speak) it is only then that we as "i"s can leave the imaginary world and assume our rightful place in the "real" world. After all, i x i = (root of -1) x (root of -1) = -1. Then, if we want to remove our "negativeness". we need introduce others into the family unit. This can be a combination of children or pets (assuming that pets can be "i"s too!).

Two parents = i x i = -1
Two parents and one child = (i x i) x i = -1i
Two parents, one child and a dog = (i x i) x (i x i)
= -1 x -1 = 1
...and so on...

So perhaps in order to take ourselves out of the imaginary world of "i", it is necessary to find that special someone who completes us by removing our "imaginariness". We then need children and/or pets to remove our "negativeness". In that respect:

"i" is the loneliest number that you'll ever do....

Ebert: You've proven it to my satisfaction!

This is one of those questions resembling the 'Immovable Object meets Unstoppable Force' thought experiment... all it does is make your brain hurt, or gasp in delight, depending on how often you use that hunk of meat between the ears.

My take... is based in physics somewhat. There are many who think that there was a time when there WAS no time... everything was happening at the same time or nothing was happening at all. I think that the afterlife, if there is room for everybody, is like that. You get to enjoy everyone all at once, have all the conversations you want, love all the people you want to love, eat all the ice cream you can handle, and it's all happening at the same time.

Or maybe it's like memory: We die, and wake up with memories not only of our entire lives, but of all that has happened or will ever happen in Heaven, and we can go to any of those moments whenever we want. And those memories will never fade.

Or, maybe it's just turtles all the way down.

Roger,
I agree about Donald, he was always more fun to read. And the Beagle Brothers (or was it Beagle Boys?) were certainly a nefarious bunch. And speaking of heaven which, is really the sole purpose of my approach today's virtual backyard fence...I have known heaven on earth, at the birth of each child, holding each independent unique life in my arms and feeling my heart suddenly imbued with a greater capacity for love than what had previously been. Other moments in my life play out like a scene from "Our Town", simple interludes that did not seem special at the moment but I realize in hindsight, that each was a fleeting glimpse of goodness, of wholeness, of One both pure and complete...of Heaven, yes.
Heaven has been described "as a place of no more goodbyes." That appeals to me as I am a sentimental old hack, heck I get misty-eyed when the postman leaves.
May I suggest reading "The Sea Remains". This is a slender novel by Jean Sulivan, a French priest given special dispensation to devote his time to writing. He took his pen name "Sulivan" from the Preston Sturges film, Sullivan's Travels. "The Sea Remains" is a slender novel that contains prose of exquisite beauty.
Back to the Duck. One had to admire Donald. Mickey might choose a pair of shorts with buttons and Daisy a tutu kind of dress, but Donald went commando. Just a blue jacket, a sailor cap and nuttin else. What a guy!
Bye and bye
kerry

One of my favorite Heavens is in a book called "The World To Come," by Dara Horn. It follows a few generations of a Russian-Jewish family that emigrates to the US following the Cultural Revolution, and the original Chagall painting which is their heirloom. Doesn't sound like it should include the afterlife, but it does, delightfully so.
I admit to wanting to see my Dad, and meet my great-grandfather whenever I shuffle loose this mortal coil. After that, I guess I'll get on one of those buses in "Defending Your Life." Maybe.

Re Magpie...

I think, as I think your story was saying, that heaven and hell are places on earth (hey, just like that song by Belinda Carlisle) and the guy in the story obviously lived a life of hell--an "all work, no play" existence, which an office cubicle so aptly symbolizes. And I don't think anything happens after your brain is inactive, by the way. Those few minutes while it is active after "death" I guess maybe can be debated as to whether or not a kind of heaven or hell exists--it might seem like an eternity, after all--but that's as far as I would take it because it wouldn't be fair to people who die instantly who don't even realize they have died, like from a precise sniper shot to the brain, I guess? It's like saying to a blind person that when you die you see a light.

Sorry to darken the mood of your happy article, but i don't think the Catholic Church believes you can be damned for dying outside a state of grace. I believe they believe that the decision to go to heaven or hell is up to you. You either deny God completely and are thrown to the fiery depths, or go to heaven because you embrace him, or, if you're undecided on whether or not to "love" the big guy, you're thrown in Purgatory. And I believe this decision-making takes the form of an interview with Saint Peter three to five days after you die, depending on the influx of souls.

Ebert: Well, that's what they told us. There was the story about the guy who tempted a girl to commit the sin of lust. As they were driving back to town, she was killed in a crash, and he had to live with the knowledge he had sent his loved one to hell.

Never heard about the entrance interview. Why would God entrust that to a human?

In other words, what I was saying was that life isn't fair, but I think death is.

So, if I've been a bad girl and am not destined for Heaven, but someone who loves me wants to see me there, do I get to go? That would be grand.

I am also wondering what happens to those who love no one and whom no one loves. It's hard to imagine such a person, but I'm sure at least a few of them exist at any given moment. And they probably don't want to go to Heaven anyway.

"Ebert: I wonder if Scrooge ever shares his memories of Donald's parents?"

At what point in Scrooge's life are we talking here? If it's before The Great Christmas Transformation, I'd say he never shared the memories, as sharing was not in his nature.

I refuse to forget that Scrooge McDuck was an evil bastard. He'd have to watch a whole lot of Kirk Cameron movies to make up for those kinds of sins. Being visited by four ghosts (one of whom was a mouse for chrissakes) is not going to make amends. Not in this economy.

Heaven, for you Roger, will be a Steak n' Shake. Hell would be a Steak n' Shake that turns out to be a McDonald's on the inside...and plays "North" a lot. I'm talking constantly.

To "HipHopScotch," who writes, "i don't think the Catholic Church believes you can be damned for dying outside a state of grace."

Not to harsh your mellow, but, according to a Catholic Dogma website (http://www.theworkofgod.org/dogmas.htm#Dogma-XII-penance), the Catholic Church solemnly declares,

The Sacrament of Penance is necessary for salvation to those who, after Baptism, fall into grievous sin.

Not to mention ...

The souls of those who die in the condition of personal grievous sin enter Hell.

It appears Roger's lusty teen (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) is in deep. As in Pit.

But cheer up; if you're a Protestant (you know, a heretic), simply convert--or straighten up if you already are Catholic--and if you're an agnostic/atheist, get crackin'--and don't get sidetracked by slick Presbyterians, let alone Southern Baptists (noisy lot that they are)--and join The Fold. You get beautiful weddings, transsubstantiation, Jesuitical ruthlessness (and smarts), seven-count-'em-seven sacraments, Darwin and a personal Savior, handy Indulgences, a crystal-clear understanding of Scorsese's films, and, of course, heaven.

Uh-oh; this sounds like bragging. Pride. Better go to confession. I'd like to sign off with, "I'll see you in Hell!"--but I'm Catholic.

Ebert: You might even get, in the immortal words of Irv Kupcinet, an audition with the Pope.

Hey,

Per you:

"Get far enough along on the family tree, and somebody's eventually gonna tell you: "Sorry, I don't have time to be reunited right now.""

Sheesh, Roger, we're talking about eternity here! More probable - "Sorry, I never liked you all that much when we were living, what makes you think I have any more liking for you now?"

Besides, isn't heaven what you conceive it to be? As the "Traffic" tune tells us "heaven is in your mind". If true, why could heaven not be beyond the time-space continuum? Why should it not be a place to pick your compatriots be they human, animal or other? If heaven is the great reward certainly there are no earthly rules governing the nature of this reward (or are there?).

Paul J. Marasa: "As far as heaven goes, I've always joked that for me Paradise would include bowling with, say, Ben Franklin and Marilyn Monroe. But a depressing thought struck me: What if that isn't their idea of heaven?"

Cheer up, maybe it'll be their idea of hell.

Can I suggest subtitling your essay "All About Mitochondrial Eve", with the tagline - "Fasten you seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy 140,000 years"?

As far as the nuns in Catholic school and dying in a state of grace - I don't know how much of what they told us was true, but their words sure had a lasting impact. I went to 8 years of Catholic school and then 4 years of public high school and I remember being shocked as a freshman at how disrespectful the "public" kids were of the teachers. I think "Doubt" really captured the essence of how powerful and controlling the nuns were back in the 50's and 60's.

Great post. I prefer to think of "Heaven" or the afterlife or whatever happens next, as it appeared in Defending Your Life. THAT is how I think it should be.

Thanks, Mr. Ebert-- I've always enjoyed reading your reviews (sometimes, I find that the most entertaining thing that comes out of really bad movie is your review of it). Your blog is really something special-- your entries are often insightful and interesting.

For me, the idea of an afterlife always came across as way too esoteric. The more questions I have about it, some of which you brought up in today's entry, the less credible it seems. And in the end, wouldn't it get boring? Even a hundred virgins would get old after 1,000,000,000+ years, after getting to know their every thought, and becoming intimately acquainted with every pore on their skin.

Trying to come to terms with my mortality, I had an idea during a lunch break a few years ago: what if this life is eternal? Not in the sense of reincarnation, but rather that every moment we experience is eternal. If space is infinite, then the finite possibilities that can occur within it will happen over and over again. So, maybe you’ll not only be reading this entry again, maybe you’ve read it before, unaware of it until now? With faith that all your experiences are eternal and that every moment, in a sense, endures, every moment becomes sacred.

As one of the previous bloggers posted, the universe isn’t infinite (it’s like a bubble), and I think Stephen Hawkins stated that it’s possible that a wall could be surrounding the universe. Ok, fine— but there are two sides to every wall. And how many bubbles are there, and what’s stopping more bubbles from being formed?

I know, one can point out that bad things would also be eternal, but I’ll keep my response to such matters to myself, since this post has ranted on long enough.

Ebert: I was at a memorial for Studs Terkel last night. He was quoted: "This moment is the afterlife."

Alas, I have only so much Life, and all your Blogs, and all their Response, and my feeling that I have to Read Every Single One Not To Cheat, is eating me alive--

So, dear Roger, I herewith declare that I'm going to do some Skipping. I do and don't envy you your vast, logorrheic worldwide readership.

OK, I feel better. I've read every single one of THIS blog's responses-so-far, and here's what I have by way of new ground: Donald Duck, a subset of Disney, is part of a reverse-engineered Heaven, if "The Happiest Place On Earth" may be considered such. And certainly they've incorporated computer technology into their, sorry, Matrix of future intentions.

Plus, our current Administration is much less squeamish about forging forward with s*c*i*e*n*c*e.

Soon, I suspect they'll guess we're going about Artificial Intelligence backasswards, and ought instead strip nonessentials from advanced animal cortical tissue. Simultaneously, they may provide a sensorium in the form of wireless transfer of, for instance, bird-in-flight, that we IMAXers may "Be The Bird." (I know--you said "not in my brain, you don't"--but just imagine!)

Later, maybe in my daughter's lifetime, sensorial transfer will extend to reasoning and memory--an effective Eternity While Earth Abides for them what signs up.

And who wouldn't, if they know they're close to on their way out? Especially the non-believers (sidebar: I've never been prouder to be an American; my President acknowledged me and mine for the first time in Presidential history!)

I left a lot out, so as not to further enbaggage your discussion, but what I say boils down to a possible Heaven On Earth, with endless possibilities.

Sorry if I confused!

Ebert: We don't want no skippers from Phoenix.

Dear Roger,

I must state, I await your blogs with great anticipation,and take my time as I read, and soak in your words, and thoughts.

Its' a joy, how your mind goes from one topic to another,and you offer us each, a time to travel with you, as we make 'discussion' about your chosen topic.

I suppose if I must have a 'tag' to explain my choice of a religious belief,I must call myself a small 'c' christian.

I kinda believe in a 'sky daddy' because I do actually pray often,especially when I have no answer for whatever question, or problem, is threatening me at the time. This praying seems to offer one some solace, some sort of peace to one's heart and soul..

In my comings and goings, I really try to live by the "Golden Rule"..it seems the decent way to get along in this world.

I attend church once in a while,and do enjoy singing along with the old hymns.There is something assuring,and quieting, with these old spiritual pieces.

Then again I used to watch "Jimmy Swaggart" often on Sunday mornings,because I liked his preachin',and his singin'.

Even watching Tammy Faye Baker,and Jim some twenty years ago;they often seemed to really believe,before they got swallowed up,in their big television business. Tammy, especially seemed true to herself.

I have read many books by C.S.Lewis, a wonderful thinker,and writer. Mere Christianity, a favourite of mine by the author mentioned.

"We have to live as fully and responsibly as we can.We can't pass Go and get out of Life free."

Ain't that the truth,Roger. Only someone who has had the realization, of what life is about, can make such an honest statement.

I don't like crowds, so I guess 'heaven' is out for me, although being there, in another form,and living in a heavenly state,is a tempting thought. I could meet up with Elvis, and Lanza, and enjoy their great singing.

"If an erection lasts more than 40,000 years, call your doctor." Now, that's good advice!

Many thanks, for another terrific blog.

Gary

When I was young, I was too dumb to appreciate my grandparents. Once I was old enough to realize what a treasure they were, they were gone. It would be nice if heaven involved me getting to know them better. As far as dogs having souls... All I know is, there are times when I look into my pups' beautiful faces and my heart swells so large that my eyes leak water. Then they spoil the mood by licking their butts.

I hope that hell is like Niven and Pournelle's Inferno. Then, since I read the book, I may have a better chance of getting out.

When I was in college we had Philosophy prof who came into class one day and looked at the ceiling and said "Well, that's all she wrote" and walked out.

I had the same feeling then as I do after reading this.

:D

Which reminds me.

Many years ago, in San Francisco, I made the first of what proved to be a few very bad decisions. To set the scene: This happened on the first night of the first paid vacation I ever earned. I had gone to the grocery store, rejoicing in the sense that right at this moment in time I had options. I planned to spend the week job hunting.

Walking home, two attractive people talked to me. They invited me to their "home," where a talk was being given that night. Theirs was a large home, they explained, and when I got there (Why not go? I was on vacation!) I found it filled with lots of what, at my present age, I would call "young people" (mid-20s, give or take). I enjoyed the talk. The couple lavished attention on me. I accepted their invitation to climb aboard their converted bus and travel with them into the Mendocino Hills for the weekend. They never left me alone. In an instant I had found constant company and attention after spending a lonely year with very little money in a city I didn't know. I joined in. I sang songs around campfires and did some light manual labor, nothing more onerous than spreading mustard on a zillion pieces of bread.

A week later, having quit my job and moved into their home, I learned I was now a Moonie. From having little money, I now had none. From having few possessions, none. Contact with people? Moonies, all Moonies.

Long story short: because I left the Moonies (it wasn't easy, it took walking away from everything I possessed [again] with the help of a total stranger somewhere in Texas many months later), the Moonies would have me believe that not only I, but every single one of my ancestors is doomed to Hell. Moonie Hell.

Plot complication: But one of my uncles is a Mormon and according to my (extremely limited) understanding of his faith, the mere fact that he possesses the faith he does will be sufficient to get me into some level of Mormon Heaven.

I've wondered for all this time: What happens in the afterlife when you're clearly headed two different directions? Do you just sit in an anteroom with everybody else who had a sloppy life and wait for your number to be called? Is Moonie Hell and Mormon Heaven the same place? And what about my cat? If I don't get to see him again, I'm just not goin'.

Ebert: If I were you, I'd stick with your cat.

Reply to: i don't think the Catholic Church believes you can be damned for dying outside a state of grace. They believe...You either deny God completely and are thrown to the fiery depths, or go to heaven...

Reply to: according to theworkofgod dot org the Catholic Church solemnly declares...The souls of those who die in the condition of personal grievous sin enter Hell.

I don't understand why anyone should consider the Catholic Church a source of authority on this subject, or even bother to look up what the Catholic Church declares.

You've got to understand what "resurrection cult" means. For two centuries before Jesus was born, a group called the Pharisees werre trying to have the concept of resurrection added to official Jewish beliefs. A poem called "The Valley of Dry Bones" says that the Hebrew God will put flesh onto dry bones, and bring it back to life, clearly a reference to the nation of Israel and NOT an individual.

About 70 AD, when the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed by a future Roman Emperor, the possibility of a Day of Judgment at the End of the World made sense to a lot of Jews. Why had YHWH allowed his Temple to be destroyed in such an offensive manner (smeared with pigs' blood)? So, a cult started telling a new story, IF you accept Christ, you will sleep in the dust of the earth until the Day of Judgment, and then you will be resurrected. Your bones will be used to create a replacement person that will live "as the angels without marriage."

At this Day of Judgment, all the dead will be resurrected, and those who reject Christ will be condemned into a fiery pit for the rest of eternity, a pit created to punish the angels who rebelled against God in heaven.

Confused? The story is NOT consistent, and that's because the Gospel was a document written to be read aloud during recruitment meetings, to impress the audience with how close the End of the World was. In order to prove resurrection, they said Jesus had brought Lazarus back to life. Then they said the women found an Empty Tomb with an angel outside. Oh, wait, they said Jesus himself came back to life, and ten people saw him. Oh, wait, five hundred witnesses sound so much better, let's change it.

In other words, Christian dogma is whatever they thought would sell. It's a sales pitch. And nothing... I repeat, nothing... in the words, beliefs or declarations of the Catholic Church should be considered "authoritative" or even "honest." Especially the part about those who reject Christ being condemned to eternal torment.

But yes, let's get the Christian view on record. When you die, you go into a dark, silent place. There you remain until the return of Jesus, the Day of Judgment, and your resurrection into a new, perfect, spiritual body (according to Paul) which will rise up into the air to meet Jesus on the way down. Until then, there's no Heaven. And there's no Hell, there's only a Waiting Room which shows re-runs of "Laverne & Shirley" and "The Star Wars Christmas Special" 24/7. It might seem like forever...

From an evolutionary perspective, let's look at single-cell organisms. If they have no intelligence, how can they possess a soul that survives death? Then, at what point in our history did ourancestors make the switch from "no souls" to having souls?

A very interesting entry, as usual.

As a Unitarian, I like to think that, one way or another, we return to God. The reunion is not merely with family members but with God, who to me, is everyone and everything (and a bit more). Whether this is experienced as Paradise or merely recycling within Emerson's universal Oversoul is unknown to any living person.

In a sense, I don't believe anything ever really dies. It just changes into something else. Change is not just a fundamental property of the universe - it is THE fundamental property. Existence is an ongoing process (Alfred North Whitehead would call it "a succession of experiences") that constantly reshapes itself. Whatever may come in the hereafter, I cannot possibly know, any more than I can know what it is like to be a dog or a thermostat.

I try not to think about it. I'm far too young to worry myself with such things. I'm 20 years old, for crying out loud. Rather than heaven, I prefer to focus on making the most of the experience of NOW. Instead of a metaphysical hell, I concern myself with avoiding Hell on Earth. And this, I think, is how God would want us to live.

I used to picture the afterlife as having a 'Defending Your Life' type review of your life before getting a passing (or failing) grade. But to protect the innocent or the undead, the film of our life unspools with all context removed - other people, settings, etc. Kind of like watching Marcel Marceau. And boy, would we look stupid during nookie.

I can't recommend Don Rosa's Life & Times of Scrooge McDuck and Life & Times Companion enough. A beautiful love letter to the work of Carl Barks, and a great story in its own right. (Roger, Rosa is a big film buff, and works in lots of film references into his work.)

The Companion volume does, in fact, have a story where Scrooge shares a tale in which Donald's mother, Hortense, plays a role. Donald is quite proud of her efforts on Scrooge's behalf (I won't spoil exactly what it is, because it's a great gag).

In case anyone wondered, Donald and (the presumably late) Della are twins.

Man, what a group cosmogony. Everything from Primeval Pea Soup to Malthus and mystics to Artists and Aquinas to dogs and Darwin and Donald Duck and DNA. Mr. Ebert is absorbing all of this, in detail, it is plain. In this way his consciousness expands, we hope not to sinister purpose; we already have enough contenders for the leader of the Ominous One World Government. He would make too good a candidate, it could succeed. We would all happily wear a one-size-fits-all smock and rubber shoes, supplying cheap labor for the Hooded Ones in the Himalayas, just because ol' Rodge can tell what we're thinking and head off our negative thoughts about it, before a single grumble of recognition escapes an educated asphalt-shoveler's lips.

Let's clear up what reincarnation really is: everybody gets a chance to be everybody else. That's what we need eternity for, owing to certain reluctant people especially. Dogs don't mind which dog they turn into next.

Physicists know that eternity, and the tiny chunks of time within it that we call "life", exist simultaneously (so say all the ancient religious texts too, including Christianity), so we can all reincarnate in any direction we like, even sideways. As to you bean-counting objectors to reincarnation, astronomers have begrudgingly allowed that the odds confirm that this galaxy alone must have megagigagoogol-perplex tons of populated planets. So, just like at the movies, people will squeeze into a too-small place and overpopulate when it's gonna be a whopper of a show. Then back to more reasonable planets when it's over.

Don Rosa has provided us with as good an example as we'll ever need about reincarnation. He now plays the roles of Donald Duck and friends, where before, Carl Barks played them. And say, Don, you've fooled me more than once that this wasn't Carl Barks himself writing and drawing a given story. You know that's deep kudos. Unca Scrooge and all are part of America's DNA, mine included. Dreams get shaped through DNA.

I like the guy with the dream, above. Who here has had a dream about Roger Ebert? I did some years ago, after years of devotion to Siskel & Ebert and his columns.

I didn't get it. Rodge was driving an old VW Microbus (something I've never owned); I was in the passenger seat and we were careening down an avenue of a college campus. Whoa, Rodge, there's a speed limit here and you have to take a quick left into that particular complex. Screeeeech, eeek, look out, you'll lose a tire, you'll break a leg! I stuck my foot out to steady the van. We made it and I woke up.

We don't usually agree with Rodge's reviews unanimously -- unless he is here absorbing our minds so that eventually we will -- but the mark of a true critic is that thumbs up or down, you can tell whether you'll like it. He's never reviewed a film that would have made me think his opinion had careened out of control. So the orange VW Bus would be the only clue as to what this dream meant. All the other symbols were familiar. So. Maybe I'd be reluctant to reincarnate into a guy who drives like that. Otherwise, got me.

Who else here has dreamed about Roger Ebert?

".....that animals and humans mostly regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension."

Jung believes in the collective unconscious that everybody has recorded somewhere on his life memories of everybody or everything that ever lived.....all our ancestors, the apes,the ferns.....one hears of people....Gandhi could be close.....who experience such identification {I'm not aspiring)....

The gulf of incomprehension exists between husband and wife,father and son,......its the Gulf we are fighting against...

"I am playing the lecturer mired in my own logic."

Thank god and wish you good gravy.

About Heaven: All dead things change into something else. After death, we decompose - a corpse breaks down into building blocks for another living creature. Nothing is wasted. All that lives gets reused after it dies, and we know that's true or else we'd be knee deep in corpses that didn't rot.

So, why would our spirits meet a different fate in death? When does anything in this world get put away, never to be used again? It doesn't. Yet isn't that what Heaven would be, a "dead-end", a stuffing of formerly living energy into a drawer and never using it again? Who came up with that idea?

Damnit Roger,

I can't keep up with your mind. I was just about getting my mind around the Komodo Dragons and you were off to barbershop mirrors. Slow down so mere mortals can follow you.

And why am I having even more fun reading this blog than your movie reviews? Well, not that I'm not still reading your movie reviews. But could they make a movie of your thought processes? Maybe a next project for the Coen Brothers?

Ebert: "If that African female ["mitochondrial Eve"] had not lived to reproduce, would there be humans at all?"

No one will answer that question. There are too many theories to evolution, extinction, probability and (my favortite because of its pop culture characteristics)"the butterfly effect", that we might have evolved into a totally different species.

At any rate, our species must have evolved into our present "human nature" before many of us left for Europe during the ice age, for the simple reason that so many of us stayed in Africa and no evidence ever existed to imply that one strand of ancestors has "evolved" muchy differently than another. It takes tens of thousands of generations for that (which has come no where close to occurring since the dawn of state societies).

The only reason why I bring any of this up is to ask the question: If this "mitochondrial Eve" had NOT reproduced, would I ever have grown into the bottomless Judy Garland fan that I am?

So, to add on to my last post, people seem to perceive the act of death as an event when it could very well happen without your knowing like a sniper shot to the brain or maybe dying in your sleep. Does going to heaven or hell require you to be conscious in the event of your death? It's like when people perceive heaven or hell they are going to see their relatives and say "car crash, eh?...heart attack right here buddy" and high five eachother. Judgement doesn't have to let you know it's coming, so how can you say it comes at all?

If you can figure out if a tree makes a sound or not when no one is around to hear it, then you can figure out if there is a heaven or hell. If you die in your asleep (don't know you die) then I guess, no, the tree doesn't make a sound. If you are conscious of your death, then I guess the tree does make a sound. Heaven or hell depends on how much you like the trees.

"The idea that human beings have an afterlife and, say, wolves don't seems ludicrous to me. It reminds me of that wonderful vicious poem about the white woman who imagines that in heaven the little colored cherubs get up early to do the cleaning."

I hate to keep coming back to this, but this is a persistant strain in PC culture (ie, saying that making a distinction between humans and animals, with humans deemed higher or better, is somehow comparable to making racist distinctions between different kinds of humans), and it's unreasonable, and as such, annoys me. Actually if we're going to be really PC, or reasonable, or both (rare combo), your comparing the exclusion of animals/wolves from Heaven to that poem, is pretty racist. The difference, obviously, is that black people are PEOPLE, while wolves, white or black, are wolves. Not people. Getting this?

Ok. Here's the thing. Say wolves get a Heaven. Ok? I'm being generous, I'm granting wolves a Heaven. What will they do there? You see, you encounter a problem at this point, and highlighting this problem goes a long way (not the whole way, and, as I'll show, not without exceptions) towards explaining the distinction people make between themselves and other animals. The entire life of the average (non-human - tho, unfortunately, this goes for many humans, as well) animal is spent surviving. Just, simply, surviving. There is no art. There is no thought. There is rest, but not leisure. And on and on. So I imagine a Heaven featuring a bunch of animals that spent their entire lives struggling for survival would be kind of dull, or confusing - would they know what to do? I bet they'd be bored. "Animals play." They do. But art and thought and the higher things in man are not merely play, even when they're playful. And it is a difference.

But again this is all silly, I recommend the Upanishads and bow out. Good discussion though. I also promise to adopt a manatee to make amends for my seeming animal-bashing in this discussion.

My novel ends:

She whispered to me: - ‘I am now a ghost of thirteen, my hand on your shoulder.’

“Very few people achieve this much reasoned peace with themselves.” – Roger Ebert

A peace sorely tested when I broke my beloved Bialetti, Roger! And if God didn’t know my name before, he knows it now - for having heard me curse his from one end of the universe to the other!

“My 3-shot BIALETTI! Noooooooooo….!!!” (insert colorful stream of profanity.) Seriously; it totally bummed out my Zen.

“Jeesh, what did I do?! I mean, I don’t think I’ve done anything icky – like Hitler or that whole Spanish Inquisition thingy - so why did fate decide it was time for me to break my espresso maker, dammit!”

My dear friend Marta, born in Canada to parents originally from Italy, upon learning of my bummed out Zen, offered to replace said Bialetti with one that her mom wasn’t using anymore. And it wasn’t just any old Bialetti. No sir! It was a rare, vintage stainless steel Bialetti the likes of which I’d never seen before! Here, see for yourself…

http://www3.telus.net/thiliasspace/Marie/jpegs/bialetti.jpg

How cool is that, eh? With the lid channeling “Lord of the Rings” hello precious! Stamped on the bottom is the little dude with a moustache, followed by MOD DEP and Bialetti-Crusinallo, Made in Italy, Acciaio Inox 18/10 – Per Alimenti. All I know is that the logo wasn’t designed until 1953 and since it says “Made in Italy” (English) ergo was purchased here. Marta and me are the same age: both born in 1964. Beyond that it’s a mystery as to what specific model this is or when it was made. It also turns out that it’s 2-shot.

Yup. And I’ve already got a 2-cup electric Bialetti. Meaning the Gods have presented me with a piece of art incapable of producing my much-preferred buzz! Or have they..? For upon noting it to Marta she smiled, “ah, but you can use both now and make yourself a “4-shot” cappuccino.” At which point, a giant penny dropped.

The unseen force at work in the universe was not dishing out bad karma! For I’d recently learned the fate of my favorite haunt, the Irish Heather Pub; no longer residing where it did and thus having loss much of its appeal, more attractive now to yuppies. And many a sigh had floated up to heaven because of it. Sigh, sigh, sigh! Where clearly, the Espresso Gods heard them. And while they’re not empowered to do anything about the Heather – that’s under the control of the Irish, they can break my Bialetti so I’ll have to get a replacement and of course they know that I know Marta and… well, there ya go! “We’re sorry about the Heather, we know how much you love your Kilkenny, but if you’re looking for a buzz…TA DA! Shoot this – and while you’re at it, enjoy the art.” Smile.

Heaven is where you see what’s been staring you in the face all along – I knew it! And I can only imagine now how hard they were all laughing when I swore for having dropped my Bialetti. For it having been part of the greater cosmic master plan. Unless… has anyone here ever had a 4-shot cappuccino? Oh I’m sure it’s safe – God can’t be so bored he’s looking to amuse himself at my expense for having cursed him.

Pause.

Note to self: buy more milk and a bigger mug.

PS: in my quest to learn more about this Bialetti, I’ve been asking friends for help. One reply:

I think the only way you're going to find the exact same one, is to check out estate sales. People don't usually give these things up until they well...need an estate sale if you catch my drift. To paraphrase the old NRA slogan; "You can pry my espresso pot from my cold dead hands".

Oh and hey, didn’t Charlton Heston play God? It’s all connected. Grin.

Ebert: Hopefully the pot would keep your hands warm, at least for awhile.

I enjoy commenting on your posts, and some bring easy memories that I'm glad to muse on again. But some - such as being seen as a monster after cancer surgeries, or movies that hurt too much to watch again (for me, "Wit")- strike so close to my soul's current home that I often cannot say anything at all, can't even touch those emotions until well after the moment. Those posts say all the words that no one around me understands, and remind me of pain I never thought I'd know and that I don't want someone else to make me face. And now here is one about the nature of the hereafter.

I've considered and studied on and thought about religion since I was a child of 5 and understood the injustice of my church slighting me because of the accident of gender. I have long weighed the evidence (or lack) of whether or not reincarnation was true or not, and what form it might take. (If we are only reincarnated into part of the beings that consume us, so much compost as it were, then what happens to the personality, the intangible but recognizable and solid-feeling part that is ME? and so on.) I also believe in evolution. And I like to look at religious debate logically. But I never once in all my thinking considered the possibility of ALL my ancestors, from apes down to plankton, being at a heavenly family reunion. I certainly never before considered the implications of this.

Your post has shaken what little religious foundation I had left. I'm not sure that this close to mortality, I want to look at it any more than I want to look at the other things, but thank you all the same. It is interesting, and my mind enjoys being engaged. And even shaken, I realize it doesn't matter what I believe, because one day I'm going to die anyway, whatever my belief is, and what happens after that will happen.

I lean a little more toward a hope for reincarnation, in one way or another, more having read this post. All this writing about a seemingly endless parade of people you don't really care about amid the few you do reminds me of something my mother once said about a pastor's sermon. He said a parishoner had asked him what one would do with a heavenly eternity at their disposal. He said he picked up a stone, and told her to imagine studying that stone in every way, meditating on it, and really learning all there was to know about it. And having the time to do that for every stone and thing and creature that God had made.

My mother concluded, "And I'm sitting there thinking, yeah - and when you're all done looking at and learning about everything, you've STILL got eternity left!"

Ebert: Then you could start playing every possible chess game. After that, it's said Go is a very deep game...

But don't get too depressed. I don't know any more about the afterlife than anybody else does. Be wary of those who claim they do. Remember, all of their information comes from this side of the grave.

I always find it odd that people who believe in an afterlife spend so much time debating what heaven is (or looks like), rather than what they plan on doing for infinity. Because, man, that's a long time. Even playing ping pong with Jimi Hendrix would lose its appeal after a while....

Ebert: Maybe not if he had the pong.

I think the latest thinking is that heaven is a state outside of time.

Another good blog post. You wrote that you didn't want to go there regarding zero being a number but it is an interesting quick story. Mathematicians and logicians who study the foundations of mathematics have distilled and codified the essential properties of the "counting numbers" down to a small set of rules called the "Peano Axioms". In mathematics an "axiom" is basically something that is assumed to be true. The axiom that "0 is a number" is frequently given as the very first Peano Axiom; so, in this sense, zero being a number is the absolute most fundamental concept regarding quantity and it would be hard to state a more basic mathematical concept. It seems that the question if zero is a number is both "deep" and very simple.

Wikipedia has an article for the Peano axioms and there are several other websites about them. On Wikipedia, zero being a number is listed as the fifth axiom and the first four axioms are used to describe the "successor function" which can be thought of as a thing that "adds one to a number to produce another number". Anybody who enjoys puzzles would find it a rewarding exercise to figure out what the remaining Peano axioms do and why they are needed. It does not require much mathematical background and would probably only require a few hours thought. (My tip is to think graphically and treat numbers as dots and the successor function as an arrow that points from one dot to another on a sheet of paper.)

Ebert: I've tried, but when I connect my dots it's always the Big Dipper.

Maybe there's another existence, an afterlife if you will, that is like Vincent Ward's "What Dreams May Come" except with an ending that can only be described BY those who are there TO those who are there.

"The collective unconscious, which forms the deepest stratum of each human life, also forms a foundation common to all mankind. It is said that the entire spiritual heritage of man, gathered over two million years, flows within this deepest stratum. One of Jung's followers, C. S. Hall, analyzed man's fear of snakes and darkness, and concluded that such fears could not be fully explained by the experiences of a single lifetime. Personal experiences only seem to strengthen and reaffirm the inborn fear. We have inherited a fear of snakes and darkness from ancestors back in the unknown past. This is, then, a hereditary fear, according to Hall, which proves that ancestral experience is an engrained memory living in the deepest stratum of human life.

The unconscious contains not only all the experiences of our human ancestors; it also contains the experiences of our pre-human predecessors as well. The footprints of each change in the course of our development are etched into the deepest stratum of each human life, reflecting in some way the vicissitudes of the universe. I suspect that Jung conceived of some four billion human beings on the earth living as one being, and the great universe as a huge living existence. Each human being perhaps seemed like a cell which absorbs vital energy from the original force --- universal life itself. This, I think, is the reality that Jung tried to articulate by his concept of the collective unconscious."

Daisaku Ikeda

Ebert: We don't want no skippers from Phoenix.
Bowers: Free at last--free at last--Thank GOD ALMIGHTY, we are Free At Last!!!

I trust we're both kidding . . . ?

what an odd and facinating peek into your mind Roger!

When I was in high school someone once said to me in jest "You know what Scorp? You're nothing but a big O, a big fat ZERO".
I have never forgotten that as it sums up the way I have always felt about myself deep inside. It doesn't matter that I am a great artist and musician, the tag fits.
Therefore I don't expect too much of a crowd in my Heaven ...just a few dust motes milling around. How do you extrapolate on nada?

Ebert: You know what, Scorp? That little weenie head was an enormous minus.

If Heaven was one infinitely large family reunion, then I think I'd rather be alone in Hell.

Proof positive from Marie Haws that Bialettis reincarnate. Mine came back as a porcelain French press with Van Gogh designs on it. The evil power of my java will now get me into hell much quicker than my little espresso gizmo ever could.

I really like the idea of being a Shriner in the midst of this procession of souls and animated flotsam coming and going. I've wanted one of those little go-carts since I was a kid.

But evolution makes less sense at its foundations than Bob and Ray's Komodo Dragon bit. Nobody's here to meticulously observe tens of thousands of generations of anything, and like that guy said about how we can't even predict the weather accurately for a month, how can we pretend to know what happened "bullions and bullions" of years ago? Unfortunately, nobody remembers past lives well enough to recall noticing a fruit fly suddenly growing a left wing after bullions of years doodling around a rotting apple with just a right one.

Science, like Religion, is a product of the imagination that works until it doesn't. I wish somebody famous would come up with that saying.

Numbers can be very revealing. I use them to deflate the design argument on a weekly basis. If the universe is intelligently designed, how come 99.9% of all living things are extinct? How come every living thing on earth has been wiped out at least 5 times? Did the designer have a lab like Menlo Park, and just tried out all these organisms until one worked well enough to worship him?
What about cell membrane-less "living" species that only serve to harm humans? Are they evil? Consider the evolution (there's that word again) of the AIDS virus.

My suspicion (and it both scares and pains me to write this) is that Bill Hays is right. There is so much suffering in the world on so many levels. An omnipotent creator who holds a paradise for his believers after death just seems so...appealing. The idea of seeing those we have lost again is so comforting, but its probably not true.

Perhaps Bill is just braver than I am in his certainty that God (and the organizations that follow Her) is a con game.

One more thing: (SPOILER ALERT!) Your review of Gran Torino doesn't include information that Clint Eastwood dies at the end of the movie. You and I both threw a fit when Michael Medved revealed a character dies in another one of Eastwood's movies. So how come the following was posted while Gran Torino is still in wide release?

Ebert's little movie glossary
He Was Dying, Anyway
Many lead characters who martyr themselves for a cause or someone they love are shown to be dying from cancer in order to ease the blow of their death. Audience members will be heard to say, "Well, he was dying, anyway" as they leave the theater. Key clues will be the "coughing up blood" and "your test results came back" scenes. See Clint Eastwood in "Gran Torino" and Tommy Lee Jones in "Space Cowboys." Also known as the "Altruism Is Dangerous to Your Health Rule."
Fred Decker, Apex, N.C.

Ebert: It was a Great Big Mistake.

At Studs' memorial last night, his son Dan said, "Like my father, I am an agnostic. Studs defined that as "a cowardly atheist."

Even though I consider myself an atheist, I haven't ruled out the possibility of consciousness after death. I hope that there is.

We are, after all, the recombination of ancient star particles. Who's to say our ancient particles won't one day reformulate themselves into new sentient beings? Instincts, which every animal is born with to differing degrees, suggest that some degree of knowledge is transmitted on the cellular level. The electrical energy that some call "the soul" could well transcend our bodies.

Should my consciousness ever be released from it's fleshy prison, I would have little interest in Earthly matters. I would want to explore the whole of the Cosmos.

Great post, Mr. Ebert!

On a completely unrelated topic however, I was just wondering why you think Gran Torino and The Dark Knight got such underwhelming recognition by the Academy this year. I can't understand it. Benjamin Button gets the nom but these two films get snubbed? What's up with that?

Ebert: Mysterious are the ways of the Academy.

If you want all your questions answered about before here ; here ; and the here after you need only to ask any member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints ( Mormons ). I could if you like, please respond.

Ebert: Then you could start playing every possible chess game. After that, it's said Go is a very deep game...

But don't get too depressed. I don't know any more about the afterlife than anybody else does. Be wary of those who claim they do. Remember, all of their information comes from this side of the grave.

Yep, if you look at all my comments carefully (as if you really do), they only comment on the body part (what happens physically), not the spirit part (?). I was just thinking out loud, seeing where the writing would take me. But to quote Ingmar Bergman (well, paraphrase) "If you don't have a life, then you can have no death". It's interesting, and seems to say something that I think is more constructive--kind of saying that death is a privelage only to those who have courage in life...or death is something you earn. In other words, if you earn your death, then you get to feel the spiritual benefits, but if you don't you only get to feel the physical punishment of death, like something of an animal (well, that's my interpretation of his words). Or maybe God is fair, and forgives all (I'd like to think so)--Jesus forgives all...but he's Jesus, right? But are we not animals? I'm native american (well 1/4 Apache) and I prayed to the animals (well, birds) to give me a miracle --a very solemn promise--instead of praying in a church (and I don't think we should be wearing our faith like an advertisement--or wear t-shirts as advertisements, for that matter) and well, my promise is still in the making--not quite there yet--so, I started a side miracle or benefit: to have all birds greet me, and now everywhere I go all the species of birds come to me and give me a hello--road runners , ducks, eagles--all of them--yes, I started it with food by feeding them, but I think I've become brothers with all them and all animals--a coyote just walked right by me the other day and I consider that a greeting. If I have a bad day, a bird comes right up to me and sings me a song which makes let's me see how they get along in life because I felt energized from it. I plan on going to Europe to see if all the way on other parts of the world, I get greetings from the birds and perhaps other animals. And I'm confident they will. And hey, it's a reason to go travel. "We're going to need a bigger bag...of bird food". I hope to earn my death, too.

I've always liked Albert Brooks' take on the afterlife in "Defending Your Life".

In his movie, Humans were simple-minded, consumed by fear and filled with hate. Only those few souls who managed to overcome their human faults were allowed to transcend to the next level of knowledge.

In an age where people are free to worship and believe whatever and however they like, I consider myself a Brooksian. Now, how do I get myself ordained?

Studs Terkel died? Another part of America's DNA that'll live in all of us. The Great Whatchamacallit bless you for representing the lot of us at the ceremony, Roger, even if you didn't quite mean to.

I'll enter my crystal Aztec skull portal, seek him out, and advise against any of those planets of Mormon Heaven. They're as bad as falling asleep for 30 years, waking up, going to a Motel 6 and discovering it's $58.95 for a single now. And Mark Twain was right about that book and "and so it came to pass." You'd think they were just trying to jack up the cover price on that, too.

Reading this article, there's one thing that resonates for me -

Komodo dragons are goddamned evil. Komodo vs. Cobra established that fact (have you seen that film, Roger? I recommend it, it's marvelously schlocky), and you just drove it home.

On two other notes -

1. I agree with the Donald Duck sentiments. Mickey was always so bland and kiddy-friendly, and Goofy and Pluto always felt forced. With Donald and his compatriots, I always felt at home as a child. Back at my parents' house, they have on tape an old Scrooge McDuck movie in which Huey, Dewie and Louie get a genie after some raid on an Arabian cave. It was one of my favourite movies as a kid, as it wasn't afraid to be dark and it was just so much fun.

2. One thing that's always struck me about the Creationist theory of life - Adam and Eve were the first humans. All humans descend from Adam & Eve. This therefore makes everyone blood relatives. Incest is a sin. Does this mean the only people in heaven are Adam, Eve & God? For that matter, in Tom Weller's diagram above, it has Cain and Seth fornicating with women and reproducing. Given Eve's status as the only woman on Earth at the time, does this mean what I think it means, or did the Almighty Creator make Seth and Cain more women?

This is what happens to pets (and, eventually, their owners)...

RAINBOW BRIDGE

Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge.

When an animal dies that has been especially close to someone here, that pet goes to Rainbow Bridge.
There are meadows and hills for all of our special friends so they can run and play together.
There is plenty of food, water and sunshine, and our friends are warm and comfortable.

All the animals who had been ill and old are restored to health and vigor; those who were hurt or maimed are made whole and strong again, just as we remember them in our dreams of days and times gone by.
The animals are happy and content, except for one small thing; they each miss someone very special to them, who had to be left behind.

They all run and play together, but the day comes when one suddenly stops and looks into the distance. His bright eyes are intent; His eager body quivers. Suddenly he begins to run from the group, flying over the green grass, his legs carrying him faster and faster.

You have been spotted, and when you and your special friend finally meet, you cling together in joyous reunion, never to be parted again. The happy kisses rain upon your face; your hands again caress the beloved head, and you look once more into the trusting eyes of your pet, so long gone from your life but never absent from your heart.

Then you cross Rainbow Bridge together....

Author unknown...

Upon reading this post and the discussion thread, I could not help but be reminded of Kurt Vonnegut's vision of the afterlife. I am paraphrasing because I can't locate the book (or even remember which one he wrote it in), but anyway:

Vonnegut had an idea for a short story in which he dies and learns that all souls in Heaven spend eternity with their loved ones at the age where they felt they were at their peak. So Vonnegut chooses his early forties, when he was experienced and wise but still virile. He is then reunited with his father who has chosen to be an eight-year-old child. And so Vonnegut is forced to look after his father forever, apologizing to family and friends when Kurt Sr behaves childishly while Kurt Jr is trying to make a good impression.

Doubtlessly, someone will read this and tell me which book I'm thinking of.

Roger, I haven't been able to get your latest blog out of my mind all day!

I tend to be a bit cynical about all things religious. However if there is a Heaven I would hope that nothing as hard as numbers would be involved. Numbers are the things we humans have become, kudoos to Mr.Orwell for forecasting this.

I was recently diagnosed as having ocular cancer and told the odds of getting it are one in a million. The chances of an artist getting it are about one in five million. Why couldn't it have been the lottery? I ask. I tell you this as I now do wonder about such things as Heaven. Maybe it will have nothing to do with numbers at all rather how each of us envisions it to be?

This is my vision. I am in a movie theater. Not one of those modern ones with everyone packed in like sardines but a real movie theater with statues, grand staircases and beautiful draperies on the stage. There will be ushers in red coats and funny hats and girls in cute uniforms with a tray hanging from their neck with all sorts of goodies in it. I will sit in one of the heavily cushioned seats and get ready for the curtain to open,first on the shorts and trailers and finally on the greatest film ever made. It will star all my favourites from the past and maybe a few newcomers who never made it in life but deserved to.
"Ah Heaven". I'll save you a seat if you like.

Ebert: Regarding the odds on your cancer, when my salivary cancer first appeared in 1987 and was (seemingly) removed by surgery, the specialist at Northwestern Memorial said it was so rare that, at age 62, it was the first he'd seen. He was proud that a slide of the tissue made the cover of the Walter Reade medical journal.

Now it is not so rare, and there is an epidemic of thyroid cancer, all caused by childhood radiation treatments common in the early 1950s. If I had been born 10 years either side of my birthdate, I would not have developed this cancer.

Of course, think of the odds against me being born at all. As people who play the lottery tell one another, somebody has to win.

Wow. What a topic. Life, the universe and everything.

Stephen Jay Gould was always informative and entertaining on this topic too. “Follow our particular branch of the evolutionary tree back a few million years”, he said, “and we encounter a long extinct relative that links us to chimpanzees. Go back even further, say 800 million or so years, and we find a remote ancestor that links us to cabbages”. And there is a report in the press this week that an ancient sea sponge may represent the form of life from which all living things on earth can track their heritage. I’ve known a few sponges.

But why stop there? What if we venture back even earlier before life or the earth itself came into being? What if we trace back to one of the critical events in our prehistory - the long forgotten supernova explosion that caused a seemingly unobtrusive expanse of hydrogen, helium, carbon, and a few other exceedingly rare but vital atoms, to coalesce into what would become our solar system, our planet and, ultimately, ourselves? And if we wish to go back further we may ask: “Where did the atoms come from”? That’s a good question. And it has taken four billion years of evolution to give rise to the astrophysicist (an inquisitive being), who explain to us that every atom in the universe heavier than hydrogen (except for a few stray helium and lithium atoms) was forged in the interior of a star - many stars, actually. Imagine: all of the atoms (except perhaps the hydrogen, of course) that makes up you, me, your family, your friends, your house and the track lighting in it, even the celluloid that was used to fabricate your favourite film, was once, a very, very, very long time ago, in the core of a star that blew itself apart. You’re a lot older than you think.

And here’s another concept to ponder. Atoms are fantastically small and the numbers required to make a human being (or any form of life for that matter) are fantastically large. Given this fact, it’s exceedingly likely that at least one (but almost certainly many more) of, say the carbon atoms, that once gave form to a brontosaurus, the Cedars of Lebanon, Leonardo da Vinci, or even your great-great-great grand parents has, since their demise, wandered the carbon cycle to find itself perhaps in your left index finger or potentially anywhere among your anatomical regions. In away, it’s like a chemical bridge that links each of us to each other and to everything.

To expand the tree of life concept, hydrogen can, in a way, be thought of as the trunk of the “tree of atoms”, as it were. This begs the question: where did the hydrogen come from? For a long time Homo sapiens lacked the tools to answer this question (and the crucial corollary, where do we come from?). And so it was for many cultures a matter left to the minds of the mystics and myth makers. But this changed less than a century ago when the American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered the nature of the universe (others had predicted it but it was Hubble who painstakingly uncovered the physical evidence). What he discovered was that the universe, indeed space itself, was expanding, and had been expanding for a very long time. And this discovery has an unavoidable implication: if the universe is expanding it must have had a beginning. And indeed, most cosmologists agree that this beginning happened about 15 billion years ago when a mysterious kernel of something infinitely tiny and infinitely dense, and for some as yet inexplicable reason, burst suddenly and violently into being. And it’s a very good thing that it did as it was this event that created all of the hydrogen in the universe which would – at some remote time in the future – alchemize into us and into all that we know.

Whew.

Ebert: The more you think, the more you boggle.

Mark Twain on the afterlife: "Heaven for climate, Hell for society."

Bruce Springsteen was on TV talking about his new album, and he offered a characteristic image of a person's life: You're in a car, and all the passengers are you at every age--good, bad, and ugly--and you can't kick anyone out, and you all ride together until they put you in a box. All you can try to control is who's driving.

So, if Springsteen is right--and he always is--each of us reproduces as individuals the collective life of our DNA, together in the Big Car: Komodo dragons, Mitochondrial Eve, every person commenting on your blog--and you, too, Roger. Eternity yesterday, today and tomorrow. The Big Family (Re)union, the Communion of Souls, all of us taking turns at the wheel. Drive, they said.

Ebert: "I am large, I contain multitudes," he said.

Ed Fugg posted on January 31, 2009 12:08 PM…. “Proof positive from Marie Haws that Bialettis reincarnate. Mine came back as a porcelain French press with Van Gogh designs on it. The evil power of my java will now get me into hell much quicker than my little espresso gizmo ever could.”

Sigh of exasperation! As how typical; I was able to find that Van Gogh Porcelain French Press in just 5 minutes! There’s one for sale on eBay (I was curious to see it.) But can I find mine? NO.

Mind you, I confess there’s a perverse pleasure to be had in that. I love a challenging mystery! There’s nothing quite so much fun as spelunking the depths of a puzzle refusing to be easily solved; as the greater the effort required, the greater the satisfaction in the end if you succeed, eh? And isn’t that why souls gather on a muddy pitch to do battle for the Holy Grail that is the World Cup? And why the minute the pitch is empty and there’s no goalkeeper blocking the net, everyone leaves and goes home? Life is meaningless unless on some level there’s pain and red cards involved. What sucks is that life has to - in order “not to”. Ahh, the ironic paradox of it all. Which strikes me as the very essence of Yin & Yang.

And I think being able to laugh both with and at God, is how you make peace with it and the cosmic master plan; assuming there is one. And why religion was never able to hold me and I quickly wriggled out of its grasp. Imo, it takes God too seriously for seeing God as someone who does. Seemingly contradicting the very notion of him as this omnipotent & omnipresent being. As really? God is ALL things, everywhere and all at once? Then where’s his sense of humor? Not anywhere I could to find it in the various dogmas one might look. Nope; I found his humor instead in the world beyond religion and as embodied by the collection of spare parts that is the platypus. Proof that God does indeed laugh. As come on – what the heck is that?! How drunk were you, Mr. Know-it-All?? Chuckle!

“Hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time...”
“Dude – it’s a duck-billed, egg-laying, lactating, otter-footed, beaver-tailed, venomous…”
“I may have had a Kilkenny or two...”
“Oh! Say no more.”

All of that is gleefully irreverent of me I know, and for want of being able to resist such things, one of the reasons the Vatican and I parted ways. As I believe in a God I “can” openly tease without it being disrespectful. Only fair; he’s constantly taunting me!

Ever go Himalayan blackberry picking? Seriously look it up; it’s an invasive species in BC. Giant, plump, juicy berries just waiting to be turned into yummy jam – and all growing on massive vines covered in razor sharp thorns worthy of a crown and guarded by the sentinels; spiders & bees. Ever reach for the BIGGEST berry despite the danger – only to then lose your balance and fall face first into the bush where much screaming ensued? Don’t tell me that wasn’t by design. Though not to be cruel, rather, so that I can be like a triumphant warrior now returning home from some epic battle with a great story to tell, and the scars to prove I was there; smile. Thus does God elevate an otherwise lowly little jar of jam into something full of meaning. And increase the pleasure of enjoying said jam on toast while drinking a 4-shot cappuccino; which I’ve since had and did not kill me.

Although perhaps Charlton Heston is trying to now, from his grave. I wonder if he was buried with a gun..? If so, maybe in retrospect he’d have opted for a hand-warming Bialetti.

Speaking of the dead, I’ve noticed mention of Heath Ledger. The Dark Knight is near and dear to my heart for being what I consider the best adaptation yet and for basing the characters on the more adult-minded graphic novels. Specifically, Alan Moore’s masterpiece “The Killing Joke” – a first edition copy of which I own and treasure as a work of art. I understand Heath read it while preparing for his role; it shows. He got under the make-up and into the pathology of what makes the Joker “tick” and why and in doing so, helped to immortalize one of the greatest hero/anti-protagonist dynamics ever created. The Killing Joke ends with a joke still hotly contested to this day inside geek forums: should Batman have laughed with the Joker?

I mention it because I suspect the difference between sanity and madness is being able to laugh at the very thing threatening to make you crazy; as opposed to laughing because you are. Which is the saving grace of humor, no? And isn’t that the point behind Eco’s “The Name of the Rose”? The subversive power of laughter. And if I’m grateful for anything in life, it’s that God and I can sit down and laugh at ourselves while trying to crack each other up. At least I heard him laughing when I fell into the blackberry bush.

P.S. congratulations on being the first film critic to ever receive an Honorary Lifetime Membership in the Directors Guild of America. It couldn’t have been bestowed upon a more worthy one.

I love the duck family tree. Maybe Launchpad McQuack was Huey, Louie and Dewey's real father and they kept it a secret. He lived Dangerously and women love that.

Beautiful, touching writing on your remarks at the DGA's. And I think the last lines fit your work perfectly: You expand, improve and ennoble movie-going, and for that gift we are very grateful.

"Ebert: Then you could start playing every possible chess game. After that, it's said Go is a very deep game...

But don't get too depressed. I don't know any more about the afterlife than anybody else does. Be wary of those who claim they do. Remember, all of their information comes from this side of the grave"

a)Stefan Zweig wrote the novel Royal Game which was made into a Gerald Oswald film " Brainwashed " and another Czech one. It's about a person who retains his sanity during imprisonment by Nazis by studying a book of chess games. Totally consumed by the game,his mind is totally chess poisoned eventually splitting into two--Mr Black and Mr White.

b)I dont see how your quite innocent article could disturb anybodys faith in anything. I agree that from this side of the grave one could never know---- either way. but knowing is so dull like 2+2=4---faith is exciting, faith is a challenge,faith is rational, faith is reason extended.

Congrats on the DGA honors, Mr Ebert. Well deserved. Altho honesty compels me to point out that you are not a film director. Nonetheless! you deserved it.

Ebert: Honesty compels me to point out that I am an honorary member.

Oh my, barbershop mirrors! I don't remember at what point in my math education I was introduced to the concept of infinity (it was in my personal great long ago), but I recall the "Eureka"!! that struck when I sat shortly thereafter in my local tonsorial parlor and while Caesar plied his trade I realized I was viewing "infinity."

Studs -- "This moment is the afterlife."

Indeed. How does one arrive at a place that one never left? And so finally, after much knocking, pleading for entrance, the door opens in rather than out. You've been inside all along. As for Studs, sounds like a remarkable being. Never read him though. Where should I start?

Ebert: First tell me what you're most interested in: Working, race, the afterlife, the Second World War, politics, or people's lifetimes?

To Bruce Burns: Replier Nick has mentioned that Vonnegut book already. It was Jailbird. You wouldn't be a . . . skipper . . . would you?

:o)

G

If history is any guide, the biggest upset on Oscar night will be Robert Downey Jr. beating out Heath Ledger for Best Supporting Actor. Why? Because the comedic role ALWAYS wins in the supporting category.

Ebert: Don't bet your house on it.

Not all Bialettis wish to reincarnate "upward," Mar, that's just a hindoo myth. Some are content even to return as an antiquated copper coffee grinder from a stinky pre-WWI Turkish coffee shop suitable for holding paper flowers. We have one here and I'm sure that's what it used to be. Why a Zabar's roasted bean would want to reincarnate as 200 lowly Starbuck's not-quite-French-Roast is above my pay-grade for mystical explanation.

Bruce Burns made a fine supposition. JAILBIRD. Where Vonnegut's dad was permanently 8 years old and God smashed Einstein's beloved violin for asking too many smartaleck questions.

Paul: "...saying that making a distinction between humans and animals, with humans deemed higher or better, is somehow comparable to making racist distinctions between different kinds of humans [is] unreasonable, and as such, annoys me. Actually if we're going to be really PC, or reasonable, or both (rare combo), your comparing the exclusion of animals/wolves from Heaven to that poem, is pretty racist. The difference, obviously, is that black people are PEOPLE, while wolves, white or black, are wolves. Not people. Getting this?"

Yes, I'm getting it, but perhaps you're not. The difference between human beings and wolves is indeed bigger than that between black and white human beings; I am indeed comparing an attitude toward a larger difference to an attitude toward a smaller one. And it's an apt comparison because the attitude is exactly the same: "we're better than they are by our standards and of course the universe will reflect that." We are talking about somebody creating a whole other universe (or something) for mortals to live in after they leave this one, and any being who was in a position to do that would need a microscope and a very steady hand to draw a line between Homo Sapiens and Canis Lupus. (And the idea of such discrimination occurring naturally is just laugh-out-loud ridiculous.)

As for your suggestion that I'm racist, all I can say is that if that's what passes for racism these days, then racism is truly dead. So bite me with your pathetic little human teeth.

P.S. quote from memory:
Lister : "Hang on, is Silicon Heaven the same as human heaven?"
KRYTEN-2X4B : "Don't be silly. Humans don't go to heaven, they just die."

A bit off topic, but congratulations on your DGA honor! I read your speech and it was every bit as good as we, your loyal readers, have come to expect from you. I imagine it was thrilling, and maybe a bit surreal, to get a standing ovation from a room full of such Hollywood greats, some of whose films you have written less than positive things about! But they obviously respect you and recognize your contributions to the world of film. I'm glad they can see that you are so much more than just a critic. Again, congratulations!

Ebert: They put together a wicked montage showing me praising a movie by each of the named directors, then the voice-over "That didn't hurt his chances," then running a video of them welcoming me to the guild, then a clip showing me attacking one of their movies, and the vocie over, "That didn't help his chances."

With all due respect to Donald Duck, please check out paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould's book "The Panda's Thumb." In the Chapter "Homage to Mickey Mouse", Gould charts, with drawings, the evolution of America's fav rodent. Early Mickey of Steamboat Willie fame bears little resemblence to today's Mickey. As far as I know, no such scientific research has been done on D. Duck. In your face, Donald!

In science we have conservation of mass,energy,mass-energy,momentum,angular momentum etc.---things which cant be created or destroyed------maybe life is like that too,immortal as the atoms which fly out of the great bang?? The numbers !,2,3,....go on for ever....immortality, in a form of one's choice is certainly concievable.....reincarnation has the advantage of erasing the memory so one will not have to complain of boredom and excessive aging....I wouldn't like to miss out on what becomes of movies in say the coming fifty years!

"Even in the Valley of the Shadow of Death 2+2 makes 4 "

Never three, except in that novel by Isaac Asimov.

BTW, I'm a long-time watcher (since your days with Siskel on PBS) and reader, first-time poster.

Ebert: I'm thinking of Asimov's "The Gods Themselves." Serialized in Galaxy.

Roger

I simply love the shot of you, Chaz and your family at the DGA's
Congratulations, it has strangely made me very happy

Rob

For more on ancestry in a humorous vein, here's a link to a Straight Dope column. The Master speaks: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/412/2-4-8-16-how-can-you-always-have-more-ancestors-as-you-go-back-in-time

By Trevor Chandler on January 31, 2009 10:43 PM

I’ve known a few sponges.

One just moved out of the White House. :D

"Dr. Arnold Toynbee once said that he believed death to be a return to "the ultimate spiritual reality" underlying the universe, the sea of immortality. As a scholar, he sought his answer to the question of life and death in higher religions, especially in the Buddhist concept of ku. He said:

I conclude that the phenomenon of death, followed by the disorganization of the physical aspect of a personality that we encounter as a psychosomatic unity, is, in terms of reality-in-itself, an illusion arising from the limitations of the human mind's conceptual capacity.... I believe that reality itself is timeless and spaceless but that it does not exist in isolation from our time-and-space-bound world....

Does life persist after death? And where does the soul go when the body goes back into the inorganic section of physical matter? To sum up, I believe that these questions can be answered in terms of ku or of eternity, but not in terms of space-time. [Arnold Toynbee and Daisaku Ikeda, Choose Life (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 259-60.]"

Daisaku Ikeda

theres somethlng you havent considered; cryogenics

in the next few decades theres going to be people who die; then are frozen to be thawed later. what happens to those souls? i wrote a short story about this' i could print it here i youd like

Responding to:
Bill Hays: "I don't understand why anyone should consider the Catholic Church a source of authority on this subject, or even bother to look up what the Catholic Church declares. You've got to understand what 'resurrection cult' means"

Look, I was just putting up what I thought was a sound (later unproven by a thoughtful fellow blogger) protest to one of Mr. Ebert's comments. I added a small joke about St. Peter at the end that was meant to be sarcastic, but ended up terribly delivered. I am not a Catholic. But to try and impose (NOT suggest), but impose an atheistic bias upon your readers through very weak arguments of taking the Church teachings very literally from just a few parts of the Bible is offensive to my intelligence. I am all for intelligent debates, but they are impossible to have if we follow your advice: don't "even bother to look up what the Catholic Church declares." Obviously you did at some point, so why not let others do it, instead of using the same technique the Catholic Church does to ingrain their religion into children's heads, "This is it, take it or leave it. But if you leave it you'll go to Hell." Your type of argumentation makes me want to actually read more on "what the Catholic Church declares" so I can either support an atheistic view or a monotheistic view of religion. Your point is clear, so why don't you jump in the bandwagon of ignorance, put your index fingers to your ears, and hum the ABC's?

Ebert: Take that, Hays!

By seth

"theres somethlng you havent considered; cryogenics

in the next few decades there's going to be people who die; then are frozen to be thawed later. what happens to those souls?"

According to John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone) in Demolition Man, you are still awake even though you are in a cryogenic state.

Now, when Han Solo was frozen in carbonite, he didn't know where he was, but it looked like his eyes were frozen so he couldn't see. But apparently he was in hibernation, so that would account for the difference between Solo and Spartan.

Ebert: I'd rather be Solo. Spartan's plight is tragic: Alive and conscious forever, in an icebox.

Soory about the dupe, Roger; I neglected to check my HTML tags. Feel free to cover my mistake by deleting the earlier post and this sentence. ;)

By Poephile on February 1, 2009 10:04 PM

"Even in the Valley of the Shadow of Death 2+2 makes 4"

Not according to Radiohead: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000SXHEOE/ref=dm_mu_dp_trk1?ie=UTF8&qid=1233595846&sr=1-1

In response to believers who would call my views of agnosticism a "cop out", I put my own little spin on my non-beliefs. I tell them I subscribe to an equal blend of agnosticism and narcissism. Meaning, I refuse to acknowledge or rule out the possibility of God, while at the same time leaving open the potential that He is Me.

If it shakes out for the latter, allow me to take the opportunity to say that I'm glad you inhabit My Universe, Mr. Ebert.

Ebert: Thy comment be printed.

Most days, I'm able to ignore this subject. Other days, I cling, surprisingly confidently, to an expectation of happy reunion. Other, other days, I seek diversion.

The side discussion on Dog Souls reminded me of a Twilight Zone episode that's rarely mentioned (at least to me.) A hillbilly type takes his beloved hounddog to go coon hunting and manages to slip the surly bonds of earth and time. He wanders back to town, sees his friends and widow, and gradually accepts that he's dead now, all the time followed by his faithful friend. For lack of anything else to do (nobody's told him what's supposed to happen to him now) he and his dog start walking down the road.

After a while they come to a gate, watched over by a hail-fellow-well-met type. He tells the man that he's found his way to the Elysian fields and to come on in for his reward. The dog's not having it and keeps trying to drag the guy away. The man decides to go in, but is told by the gatekeeper that dogs aren't allowed: "just tie him to the fence and he'll be taken care of."

The man hesitates and tells the gatekeeper he'll have to think about it. No problem, says the gatekeeper, come back anytime.

The man walks away with his dog, and tells the animal he doesn't want to go to any kind of reward, no matter how great, without his pal. He's promptly met by a handsome youth who congratulates him on avoiding hell ("They don't let dogs in--those noses can sniff out the brimstone no matter how many humans they fool") and saying his loyalty has been rewarded--he's to go to heaven. It's right over there--no gate, no barrier, he just walks into a lovely sunset going down behind the willow trees.

Whether dogs have souls or not is important to the dog, but how you regard your dog's loyalty and love is important to yours.

The following article from the Straight Dope is somewhat related to your question:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/412/2-4-8-16-how-can-you-always-have-more-ancestors-as-you-go-back-in-time

The math almost works backward to Adam and Eve, but I didn't know that I probably have kissed my cousin(s).

Also, if you like this topic (as you apparently do) and you've never read Guns, Germs, and Steel, I would strongly recommend it.

I'll take "people's lifetimes" for five hundred please, Roger.

MLK's last speech, the day before the assasination----"I've been to the mountaintop" and "I've seen the promised land" .....the courage and passion could have originated nowhere but in the logic of faith......in a principle,in eternity.....MLK and MKG are rightly regarded as co-equal. MLK has come alive for me in a couuple of documentaries and You tubes.

http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=x1L8y-MX3pg

http://www.ikedabooks.org/dialogue/choose_life.html

To Trevor Chandler and all

I think we live in a multiverse. I'm fascinated with the idea that time can go backwards. Here is an article I don't quite understand, but it sounded like something I want to know more about. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-cosmic-origins-of-times-arrow

Here's my first comment on evolution

By Keith Carrizosa on January 29, 2009 10:27 PM
I saw on "Virus Hunters" on National Geographic Channel last saturday about the theory of what kick started evolution. And the conclusion is that we are all viruses. Luis Villareal was the main voice for this theory. I think because it just premiered it's not on youtube, but it will be I suspect--wish I had the whole episode. Here are some pieces of that episode from "virus hunters". http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/explorer/3828/Overview#tab-Videos/06253_00 In the rodent video, they were demonstrating love.

Gotta quote the end of Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop: "Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems—vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful." (pg. 363)

According to Hofstadter, our "soul", what he also calls our "I", exists primarily inside our own brain, but also can find its way into the brains of friends and loved ones on occasion (usually in the form of a "coarse-grained pattern"). But it's important to realize that, for Hofstadter, that pattern actually IS our soul or "I" (Consciousness is made out of astoundingly complex patterns of the same particles, neurons, and molecules as everything else). So, for him, our souls do in a sense live on after the death of our body, mainly in the minds of those closest to us, but also potentially in the impact we make on the world, (art, writings, organizations, etc.)

I visualize our souls as kind of a wound-up ball or knot of desires. Usually things get twisted up somewhere, but on occasion beautiful patterns emerge.

The soul, a wound up knot of desires? Google or YouTube James B. Clark. Also "Platonic Meditation" on YouTube. This guy's so far smashed 27 world athletic records. Two more on the same day on TV in Twin Cities, Minnesota -- he's 45 years old. He says he learned how to do it from reading Plato's version of the soul. That's one wound-up knot all right. He's not even selling anything.

In response to Trevor Chandler’s post Roger Ebert wrote “The more you think, the more you boggle”– indeed; talk about going down a rabbit hole with a lit bong, eh? Note: how you doing Trevor, everything okay? Grin.

I just came back from one myself, having marathoned Joseph Cambell’s “The Power and the Myth” on DVD; the renowned 6-part PBS documentary he made with Bill Moyers in 1987.

There are certain seminal works you encounter in life which if nothing else, embody the essence of “trippy” and this is one of them - ‘cause boy, does it ever take you somewhere! From Buddha to the Big Bang, Star Wars to the monstrous as sublime, Joseph Campbell knew how to ride the mystic surf without falling off his board. And you weren’t worth talking to in the late 80’s if you hadn’t seen it. I suppose for another generation it was beat writer Jack Kerouac, his “howl” and all that inspired Hunter S. Thompson, but for those on the West Coast and huddled with me under the umbrella known as “the arts” – it was Campbell and “follow your bliss”.

Although and to a lesser degree “The Elegant Universe: String Theory” on PBS back in 2003 was also pretty trippy. It actually made me laugh so hard at times, that I had to clap a hand over my less I wake-up the house! But only for thinking that the space between science and religion is occupied by artists; for whom none this stuff strikes us as odd. Of course the Universe is probably made of music aka: strings! Music is the only language you don’t need to translate – and I suspect were you to politely ask, any Humpback whale would tell you there’s a link. It’s why animals and bugs and stuff don’t need to ponder the mysteries of the universe and ergo, have no religion. They already know and so focus on more important things – like finding lunch. Or avoid becoming it.

I suppose the closest people get to Joseph Campbell these days is an episode of “Lost”. Which has no more idea of what it’s about than “Last Year at Marienbad” – THE quintessential art house film and as incomprehensible to me as Dobermans or a car chase in Venice but, and to quote Roger: “The fun is in asking questions. Answers are a form of defeat.”

Yes, exactly! I don’t think you’re supposed to get any it so much try. And for the fun of chewing it; existential brain candy. Which is basically what this delightful tread is all about; taking the little gray cells out for a walk so as to see where they end up taking YOU.

And so far, I’ve been taken to heaven and Paradise Lost, pondered the cosmic master plan, had a conversation with a drunken God over a vintage Bialetti while enjoying hard-earned blackberry jam, and wondered if Charlton Heston sleeps in his gun in his grave. Good times. :)

Way back up there somewhere someone mentioned "Benchley" and I concur and add "Thurber" (without the spare cartoons of course).....and, of course, all dogs go to heaven, cats too where they resolve their "issues" with one another. Does an after life exist? Why not? The avid, and angry it seems, deny any possibility and in the process cut off further personal debate. Funny, we will argue politics forever, but stop all investigation of this possibility.....as a defense against being disappointed i suppose. Well, I hope we will hear your voice again Roger, perhaps singing, no-matter how off-key, 16 bars of "Over the rainbow". love from this Oz!

Ebert: That might be the song I'd sing. Or "We Shall Overcome."

Reply to: Your type of argumentation makes me want to actually read more on "what the Catholic Church declares" so I can either support an atheistic view or a monotheistic view of religion. Your point is clear, so why don't you jump in the bandwagon of ignorance, put your index fingers to your ears, and hum the ABC's?

Ebert: Take that, Hays!

Bandwagon of ignorance? Yes, indeed, Ignorance does come with a bandwagon. And a marching band, and three jugglers, and a Fool in a tri-corner hat. They call it the Catholic Church, and throw a fit when you don't respect them.

I attacked a very specific idea: Hell. The idea that, after you die, you will wake up in a place of punishment. The idea that a supernatural agency is going to punish you for sinful behavior, which often means you had sex in a way they didn't approve. Any sex outside of marriage is a sin, etc., etc.

I never asked anyone NOT to read the Bible. In a previous blog, the one on "Expelled," I took the opposite position. Every word in the Bible has a history, and a reason for being there, and you can't understand the evil nature of the book if you ignore ten percent or thirty percent of the words.

I haven't found many people who have figured out the Truth. They read the Bible and think, "There must be a reason why so many people consider it a Holy Book." And the reason is, it was written by scam artists to fool people. I'm not asking you to ignore anything. I'm giving you the Explanation, so you can understand what it is.

Romans 1:18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven and all unrighteous of men, who suppress the truth.. because, although they knew God, they did not glorify as God... God gave them over to a debased mind, being filled with sexual immorality..those who practice such things are worthy of death

Anyone can prattle on about "the wrath of God" coming from heaven to punish anyone who believes the wrong way, or thinks the wrong way, or belongs to the wrong church... and it's ALL nonsense.

There's no hell. There's no eternal damnation. There's no wrath of God. It's fun to use the phrases, because they add weight and help to get your point across... but you've got to understand where the idea of "hell" came from. People who wanted to fool you into thinking God was going to punish you for having sex with the wrong people.. but not until the Day of Judgment. You can laugh it off as a joke, because the whole thing is a joke. Religion is a joke.

Glad I checked in.

Marie, Alan Ginsberg, not Kerouac, wrote "Howl," a big long poem, 1957 or so. I read it out loud to a bunch of kids at a coffeeshop a couple years back and they got bored halfway through. So did I. It's not the emotional nuke it once was. But these kids are still reading Kerouac's ON THE ROAD. Coppola still has plans to make it into a movie, but as this has been going on a few years, I bet they're having trouble translating it entertainingly onto film. After all it's just some guys driving around stoned and being jerks to women. I'll wait to see what Roger thinks before I see it.

Ed Fugg! I KNOW this guy James Clark. How'd you run across him?
He is downright amazing. Yep, he read Plato when he was in a Navy brig when he was 24. He took Plato's (or was that Socrates') allegory of the cave literally, and thought, since physical reality is an illusion, he can do any physical feat he thinks of. So. He pulled a 15,000 pound pontoon boat full of men, 3 miles across a freezing Minnesota Lake, swimming, the rope tied around his waist.

He was a big hero in Ecuador, where he taught University, for cleaning out a park full of banditos single-handedly after they robbed his wife and threatened his kids. This guy's story might make a better film than ON THE ROAD.

To Bill Hays:

Bill, I have to confess to a huge curiosity. You've been vehement in denouncing religion, and I don't disagree with you in principle. I think the difference between your attitude and my attitude is that I'm less militant against religion. I perceive that there have actually been good things come out of religion.

For example, Mother Teresa. Also, many churchmen in South America in the 70s and 80s took stands against the totalitarian regimes of the day, and sheltered individuals who were on the run from the authorities. Some were even disappeared themselves.

There are those who have cynically and correctly pointed out that those church members who accomplish these things are usually the bottom of the heirarchical ladder in their faith. They never rise above parish priest or similar level, mostly because they don't have the political acumen to wangle the higher office, or suffer from too much idealism to make the attempt. Anything they do get is an honorary title to recognize their achievement - sort of the "life achievement oscar" of the ecclesiastical world.

In any case, my attitude has, of late, been more of a philosophical "willingness to allow others to be wrong". I did go through a period where I was more militant in my heart, but perhaps less vocal than you.

So...on to my curiosity. What are the milestones in your life that led you to this position? What event, or events, made you decide that religion is not only wrong, but must be confronted and eradicated wherever it is found?

Feel free to tell me it's none of my business - I realize this may be highly personal. I just always get curious about why people act, talk and believe as they do (at least, if the person is interesting).

Thanks.

What novel by Isaac Asimov are you talking about where it takes three to tango?

Ebert: The Gods Themselves.

Dang you Roger Ebert. Now you made me spend 15 minutes finding that silly photo of the just to see how you spelled it.

Komodo.

But, I still think you are very smart even if you only spelled it one way. :)