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November 11, 2001 |
Haunted By The Afterlife:A Modest Proposal (To Dump The Whole Concept) by Caron Cadle |
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Belief in the afterlife is the basis for the hatred of women
Mohammed Atta's last will and testament stipulates that no woman be allowed to mourn him, attend his funeral or even go near his grave. He disdained his own body so much that he stipulated that the man who was to wash his genitals after his death wear gloves, so his impure sexual parts would theoretically remain untouched.
The belief in an individual, personal, eternal ever-after, in either "heaven" or "hell," has been used for thousands of years by ruling classes of whatever ilk as a rationale for oppression and exploitation of the vast majority of people. |
Now, paradise or heaven has never appealed to me. From my childhood, I remember our Lutheran minister awkwardly trying to conjure up the delights of this place (Lutherans are better at duty and order than at poetic description). I also digested the more fluid prose of Catholic priests while staying with friends. However, and however well, it was described, paradise sounded dreadfully boring. Floating around playing harps and singing praises to God "up there," a never-ending so-called "life" without any of the delights of embodiment: nothing to tempt me. Hierarchy also holds no appeal for me; every mainstream afterlife concept features one with God (by whatever name) at the top, saints, cherubim and seraphim of whichever description near the top and, of course, the vast majority of folks (and just about all women) permanently at the bottom, and grateful for that. Thanks, but no thanks. Yet the Islamic notion of paradise, somewhat less ethereal than the Christian one and geared to satisfy the imaginations of hyper-patriarchal males, is a magnet for the terroristically inclined. In a September article in the online Asia Times, Arif Jamal, an expert on jihad or Islamic holy war, points out the incentives the Koran offers to men willing to be mujihadeen (holy warriors): "The mujahideen [are] assured of entering Paradise before the first drop of their blood [falls] to earth... The martyrs are promised 72 houris [each] in Paradise. These houris [perpetual virgins, black-eyed and nubile] are more beautiful than all the beauties of the world combined. I have studied more than 600 wills of mujahideen. . . There is hardly any will that escapes this concept. All the mujahideen have mentioned the houris as an important incentive for waging jihad. The Paradise with houris is the prime objective of these mujahideen. . . they refuse to get married because they want to get married in Paradise." In his final instructions to them, alleged September 11 hijacker-in-chief Mohammed Atta reassured his fellow fanatics, "You should feel complete tranquillity, because the time between you and your marriage in heaven is very short." When Palestinians commit a suicide bombing in Israel, their deaths are announced in Palestinian newspapers as weddings: "The Wedding of the Martyr Ali Khadr Al-Yassini to the Black-Eyed in Eternal Paradise." (NY Times Sunday Magazine 10/28/01, "What Makes a Suicide Bomber?" p. 51.) But these young men aren't committing murder-suicide simply to get sex. Certainly not sex as we know it. The 72 houris are part of a whole package promised to each [male] martyr, which includes guaranteed ever-lasting heaven, no pain, no death, no judgement day. The most important thing about the houris is that they are perpetual virgins. Flesh-and-blood women can never aspire to such purity: they are considered innately evil and seductive, permanently sullied by their menstrual bleeding and even more defiled and devalued once they have been sexually "used." By contrast, a man can have as much contact as he wants with a houri without being contaminated by the filth of mortal femaleness. It all hangs together: an obsession with impossible purity, hatred and fear of real women, of the dirt and imperfection of real life, even of one's own physicality, one's own body. Mohammed Atta's last will and testament stipulates that no woman be allowed to mourn him, attend his funeral or even go near his grave. He disdained his own body so much that he stipulated that the man who was to wash his genitals after his death wear gloves, so his impure sexual parts would theoretically remain untouched. But let's not kid ourselves that this thought complex is the exclusive property of Islamic fundamentalists. Consider orthodox Judaism, which demands that women cleanse themselves of their menstrual pollution each month, and be banned from synagogue for twice as long after the birth of a female child as after the birth of a male. Any man who touches a menstruating woman has to ritually purify himself and still remains unclean until sunset that day; if he has sex with a menstruating woman, he is unclean for a week. As for Christianity, early "church father" Tertullian (ca. AD 200) makes it clear: "[W]oman [is] the obstacle to purity, the temptress, the enemy. . . her body is the gate of hell." The all-male Catholic church hierarchy couldn't stand the thought that Mary, mother of Jesus, might be a normal, fleshly woman. So the New Testament mentions of Jesus's younger siblings are explained away, to make sure no-one dares think she actually had sex with her husband Joseph, and by the mid-19th century, she was declared a perpetual virgin. Just like the houris. It's a given in male-monotheist religions: the immaculate super-woman, a figment of the imagination, is set up as an impossible standard that we "standard-issue" women can never meet. This fills women with despair and self-hatred, while men may cultivate exaggerated expectations, sure to be disappointed. I could write a Ph.D. dissertation about how male-monotheist cultures associate women with the body, the emotions, what is "lower," and "nature," while men are associated with the soul, the intellect, what is "higher," and "culture." (If you want to read a really good feminist book on this subject, try Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, or Bram Dijkstra's Idols of Perversity.) Of course, all the dualistic nonsense about the desirability of a mind-body split and greater female fleshliness automatically conferring superiority on males is unadulterated baloney. Emotions and states of mind don't have a gender, and various quantities of all of them are parcelled out to every human being. As for the supposed ideals of pure mind and pure spirit, our marvelous brains are organs of the body, and if the rest of the body doesn't function, the brain is kaputt! Without the senses, we would be incapable of experiencing or learning anything. No emotion: no joy. About as appealing as the stereotypical heaven I heard about as a child. I wonder why so many men, and not a few women, presume to despise the miracle of our one life on this earth, and spend the precious days allotted to them bewailing having been born at all, focused monomaniacally on the supposed flaws of embodied living. Mohammed Atta is certainly not alone in his self-hatred, misogyny and contempt for all the world. Variants of that attitude are thickly strewn throughout all male-monotheist belief systems. Atta's will warned people (by which term he meant "men") not to be "distracted" by life, to fear God and not allow themselves to be "fooled" by the things life on earth offers. I am completely baffled by someone who thinks the emotion we should feel toward the source of all creation is fear. Of course, this whole line is easier to swallow if you are someone with few perceived options in life, or are unhappy or dissatisfied with your position in the hierarchy you believe the world should embody. That's why I feel haunted by the afterlife. The belief in an individual, personal, eternal ever-after, in either "heaven" or "hell," has been used for thousands of years by ruling classes of whatever ilk as a rationale for oppression and exploitation of the vast majority of people. If "the meek" -- read, the poor -- the disadvantaged, the oppressed really believe it will be "their turn" in some vague, glorious post-apocalyptic by-and-by, they are far more likely to resign themselves to the inferior, unpleasant place they occupy now. Karl Marx was right when he said that religion -- or at least the spectre of the afterlife -- is the opium of the people. Opium, carrot, and stick as well. A lot of folks believe we can't "be good" unless the carrot of "heaven" and the stick of "hell" are constantly dangled before our eyes. Now I don't think that we're all pre-programmed for some kind of saccharine-sweetness, but the vast majority of us can learn to view ourselves as okay individuals, treat others with basic courtesy and take responsibility for our own actions. As one clever T-shirt saying has it, "No child is born a bigot": instead, we absorb the plupart of our problematic thought patterns from our environment. For some reason, a number of folks think that if we allow ourselves to accept that we have just one life, we'll drown ourselves in heedless hedonism. Instead, that acceptance motivates me to try to be my best self, to want to make right what I've done wrong, make amends for my mistakes, and do all this with some consistency and promptitude. I still drop the ball quite regularly, but because I can draw strength and pleasure from my connection to everything around me, I stay pretty much on course. Some of us who are pagans and have studied the pagan path believe in the Summerland and/or in various forms of reincarnation. My thoughts run like this: when I die, my energy will get "recycled" into other forms of life. Maybe my ashes will fertilize some plants! But my common sense doesn't accept the idea that any entity recognizable as uniquely "me" will endure, or return. And I don't feel in any way disappointed or cheated by that. I must admit that it seems greedy to me to demand more than one lifespan, as if living in itself were not a treasure beyond price for those of us lucky enough to be living in relatively comfortable circumstances in relatively enlightened parts. Instead, we could be making the most of every moment we are given, dealing with our limitations, celebrating our possibilities, and fighting to improve everything we can. As the late great Margaret Mead put it, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever does." I suggest we stop betting our present lives on a non-existent future one. Let's not hate ourselves any longer. Let's not deny ourselves the beauty and happiness of mortal existence for fear of post-mortem punishment for being human. And let's not accept the unacceptable on the assumption that some pre-programmed variety of bliss lies beyond death's door. It's a bad bargain: for us, for the planet, for all the living beings that will be birthed in the time to come.
Caron Cadle has an MBA from Berkeley and has been working in the investment management field since 1983. "I came to (or returned to) paganism in 1991."
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