A very big question.

I was raised as a Roman Catholic, by an Irish Catholic Mother and a atheist father, talk about mixed messages.

From the one hand I had the teachings of the church, the resurrection to life ever lasting, as long as you repent your sins. The iconography , the imagery of the church in this period of my life has cast a long shadow in my life.

On the one hand I followed my father down the path of material rationalism to a godless life, free of the constraints of religion, but on the other I find, particularly as I get older, that the idea of life after death resonates with me. 

But through a rather peculiar medium. I have not returned to the church, not even paying lip service to the ideas.

But through the Culture novels by fellow Scot, Iain M Banks.

Better living through science fiction? Can that be a thing?

The basic idea is that out in the universe is a dispersed group of peoples who live in a post want society, like some super charged anarcho syndicalistic group. Countless billions who need not work, as machines provide all, they need not suffer as there is no war, and need not die as their science has made this a thing of the past.

The Culture has no government, and all decisions are made collectively, by those who are so inclined to, or have been selected for their suitability to help. The selected are gathered by a collective of artificial intelligences, known as Minds. These inhabit impossibly massive ships all with self self selected names, such as “No More Mr Nice Guy” or “Prosthetic Conscience”.

The people are as diverse was any population, but they are free to indulge their interests as they please, be that wild hedonism or to live as an ascetic hermit.

The point of all of this is that despite the opportunity to give Methuselah a run for his only, many people opt for death, or at least its variants.

Some voluntarily accept death after a long life, whilst others opt for Storage.

Their consciousnesses are recorded and their bodies placed in a state of suspended animation, to await either a set period of time or for a set of conditions to be met where they feel they would be interested in resuming life.

I was hooked.

It sat somewhere between my formative exposure to the idea of life eternal, and my atheistic thinking.

The idea of this spoke to me at a fundamental level.  The idea of life ever lasting,  but free from the, to me, corrosive effects of religion, had me pining for this all to be real.

The long sleep until something interesting to me occurred was a salve to the tump of my religiosity.

One of the Minds that actually are the ships and rings of centrifugally contained atmosphere called Orbitals had a use for the stored.

The General Systems Vehicle “Sleeper Service” a 90x40x20 kilometre box has no living person aboard.

The ship had long since gone “Eccentric”, meaning it had become a hermit eschewing the company of fellow Culture citizens, be they biological or Artificial Intelligences, it drifts where it pleases doing what it likes.

And what it likes is making dioramas of famous battles.

Whole  mountains and river systems are built and populated with the plants, trees and grasses.

Then The Sleeper Service uses its cargo of sleeping humans to recreate the Battle Of Gettysburg in minute detail, a full scale perfect tableaux of the opening day, populated by slumbering Dead people, clothes as Conferderate or Yankee, static in their individual poses. 

Vaulting out of the trenches, running a bayonet into an enemy, cowering from the cannon.

It was life after death, but a death imitating life, both at once.

It has always touched that debris of my faith.