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What do you think "The Good Place" will be like?
This week's Spiritual Newsletter is all about the afterlife.
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I’ve recently watched the first two seasons of a TV show called The Good Place. If you haven’t watched it, I don’t want to give away too many spoilers. Instead, I will give you a brief summary of the plot – in the series, the afterlife consists of the Good Place and the Bad Place. A person’s each and every action is given either a positive or a negative score. In order to secure a spot in the Good Place, one needs to accumulate a pretty high positive score.
A woman arrives in the Good Place and learns that where she will spend eternity is a neighbourhood of 320 people – there are many such neighbourhoods, each perfectly balanced for the people within them. She also gets introduced to her soulmate. Perfect, you’d think, except... she knows that a mistake has been made. She doesn’t belong in the Good Place. If she gets discovered, however, she will be sent to the Bad Place, and the Bad Place truly is very bad.
I like the series. It’s pretty original. Along the way, various philosophical concepts are introduced which, as a philosophy student, I enjoyed. It also made me think of what the afterlife really will be like, and how do you know whether you belong in the Good Place or the Bad Place?
Different religious and spiritual paths hold different views on this. In some, all you need to experience a good afterlife is to be a good person. In others, you need to hold certain beliefs. I personally object to the notion of a Bad Place – it doesn’t make sense to me, not even for those people who have committed the very worst crimes imaginable, because torture for eternity feels like a wrong that’s far, far beyond any horrors that any human could possibly commit. I also don’t think that, when you get right down to it, people in the Good Place would be able to enjoy their time there in the knowledge that those horrors were going on elsewhere. I know that I couldn’t, anyway.
But what is a good person? What makes someone worthy of a spot in the Good Place? I don’t believe there are many people who are completely and utterly bad. I’d like to think that even those who do truly bad things have it in them to redeem themselves. Going with the notion of there being a Good Place and a Bad Place, however, let’s say that you need to have done more good than bad in life. That your actions, overall, must have affected people in a positive way, rather than a negative one. To calculate this seems to be more difficult than you’d think.
Back in primary school, teachers mentioned to my parents that I was too nice. The word “angelic” was used, and not in a good way. I was too quiet, faded into the background. My memories of those days are different – I did do some things that were morally questionable.
I remember being very rude to my PE teacher. The parents of one of my classmates were both profoundly hearing impaired, and the teacher saw it fit to mock them in front of all of us. His actions went against my sense of dignity. I recall feeling extremely indignant, so I had a verbal go at him. I was sent to the headmaster’s office for that.
Was I right in standing up for my classmate and his parents, or should I have remained respectful towards my teacher? I probably should have resolved the situation in a different manner – tell my parents and have them contact the headmaster, for example. I think I was about 9 or 10 years old at the time, and it was the first incident where I remember losing my temper.
Life can be like that. We take action, often on the spot, when in hindsight there would have been a better solution. We can hurt others without ever intending to. Small actions we never give a second thought to can have effects both good and bad that we’ll never know about – not in this lifetime, anyway.
Reflection on this can make it difficult to make decisions. For example, when voting in an election. You can read the manifestos, do as much research as you can, yet still, if your party or candidate wins, hundreds, thousands, even millions of people might be negatively affected by one policy or another and as someone who voted in support of this party or candidate, you’re partly responsible. How will that affect your score?
Yet, indecision can harm those around you as well. And anyway, thinking about scores, about building up credit in the afterlife, can affect your motivations for doing good... I guess that the best way to live life is to simply live it, and to try be as good a person as possible, regardless of what the afterlife may be like.
As for my ideal afterlife, I hope that I will be surrounded by beautiful nature, and that I will meet once more all those who passed before me. I hope my pets will be there, too. There will be peace and happiness, I will be able to run with wolves and swim with whales and study everything I want to study. That’d be nice. What do you hope for?
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Spiritual: September 05, 2018 Issue [#9106]
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