Sunday, June 5, 2011

It's A Crazy Afterlife

Here's a question you can pose to your pastor on this fine Sunday morning. Or you can wait until this coming Friday or Saturday, if that's when your holy day falls.
   Are crazy people crazy in the afterlife?
   The first assumption is that an afterlife exists, let's agree that's the case. Let's further agree that people made crazy at some point in their life - by brain injury, drugs, what have you - will be restored to their previous non-crazy status in the afterlife. That leaves people who are born crazy. And these people do exist, talk to any mental health professional. What happens to them? Their natural state is disordered, it's the way their brains were wired during fetal development, nothing happened to them to make them crazy, it's just the way the are. The way they were meant to be.
   Do they become non-crazy in the afterlife? If so, what was the point of them being crazy in this life? And don't spout me that 'God's ways are unknowable' stuff, if someone was naturally crazy in this life and they become non-crazy in the afterlife, there had to have been some point to it all, both to the being crazy and to the switch to non-crazy.
   Let's extend this a bit. So far you've probably assumed I've been talking about someone schizophrenic or psychotic or manic-depressive, something relatively benign, at least from a social perspective. What about someone psychopathic? If that's a natural condition, and we have no reason to believe it's not, are there psychopaths in the afterlife? Why wouldn't there be? And if being a psychopath is their natural state, and assuming they haven't transgressed or been absolved of their transgressions, they should be in paradise with everyone else. But if they were, would the afterlife be a paradise? It might be for them, but what about for everyone else?
   But let's assume that crazy people don't get into paradise. For some reason. Which would make paradise better for non-crazy people, but would automatically consign crazy people to damnation for no other offense than being true to their God-given nature. That hardly seems fair.
   Go on, ask your religious professional, I want to hear what they have to say. Go ahead, I'll wait right here.

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