I started reading this on a recommendation i found in Derek Sivers' blog. It's really not about the "afterlife", but a series of meditations on what makes our lives worth, through the device of imaginary "afterlives". Each chapter then is a sketch, or story idea, which could have been developed into a book. Some of them are brilliant, others not quite so, but overall, the effect is kaleidoscopic.
Quotes:
The missing crowds make you lonely.
The Communists are baffled and irritated, because they have finally achieved their perfect society, but only by the help of a God in whom they don't want to believe. The meritocrats are abashed that they're stuck for eternity in an incentiveless system with a bunch of pinkos. The conservatives have no penniless to disparage; the liberals have no downtrodden to promote. So God sits on the edge of Her bed and weeps at night, because the only thing everyone can agree upon is that they're all in Hell.
In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.
you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives
you discover that God's favorite book is Shelley's Frankenstein
He tried to make good things come to good people, and bad to bad, but He didn't have the technology to implement it.
Both sides were supplied with weapons ranging from sarcasm to tanks.
They don't guess that we have no answers for them. They don't guess that our main priority is to answer these questions for ourselves.
“It is not the brave who can handle the big face, it is the brave who can handle its absence.”
“The Company offered you no evidence that it would work; why did you believe them?” Although He doesn't say it, everyone knows what He's thinking when He retires to His bed at night: that one of His best gifts—the ability to have faith in an unseen hereafter—has backfired.
Without the benefit of filtration, you see yourself clearly for the first time. And that is what finally kills you.
In truth, God lives a life very much like ours—we were created not only in His image but in His social situation as well.
At the beginning of the computer era, people died with passwords in their heads and no one could access their files. When access to these files was critical, companies could grind to a halt. That's when programmers invented death switches.
they come to realize that the name that existed on Earth, the you that moved serially through these different identities, was like a bundle of sticks from different trees. They come to understand, with awe, the complexity of the compound identity that existed on the Earth.
There is always disputed territory. It is the interaction within this substantial administration that determines the random walk of the world: everything interesting happens at the borders between domains of power.
This is how the world will close, not with a bang but a yawn: sleepy and contented, our own falling eyelids serving as the curtain for the play's end.
He realizes that everyone is knocking over dominoes willy-nilly: no one knows where it leads.
In the afterlife, in the warm company of His accidental subjects, God now settles in comfortably, like a grandfather who looks down the long holiday table at his progeny, feeling proud, somehow responsible, and a little surprised.
In the afterlife you meet God. To your surprise and delight, She is like no god that humans have conceived. She shares qualities with all religions’ descriptions, but commands a deific grandeur that was captured in the net of none. She is the elephant described by blind men: all partial descriptions with no understanding of the whole.
If you assumed that God is fond of those who hold loyally to their religions, you were right—but probably for the wrong reasons. She likes them only because they are intellectually nonadven-turous and will be sure to get the answer just a bit wrong.
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