The Eternal Nugget: Do Assholes Have Souls?

I'm kicking myself for having lived in Atlanta for as long as I have and not having checked out the Decatur Book Festival until this year.  In fact, I wish I'd set aside twice as much time as I had to roam around and shop; I earmarked most of my time to listen to scheduled talks by authors.  The pinnacle of the experience was 45 minutes by the satire author Christopher Moore, whose discussion was closer to stand-up than NPR, but part of what he had to say really got me thinking, and that was when he was speculating about the difference between our corporeal bodies and whatever exists of us that is more eternal.

Any religious person with an imagination must have bumped up against this question before - when you go to heaven, which "you" is it?  Is heaven filled with old people?  What happens when you run into your multiple deceased spouses?

Even for the religiously uninitiated, I sense that there is some hesitation to embrace pure materialism - that is, to go all-in on the idea that all that constitutes us disappears when our material bodies die.  Those without a religious framework for conceptualizing such ideas have to search for some kind of universal ethics or inherent value of living things to justify the undercurrents bubbling through our ids that tell us something about our sentient consciousness is special.

Well, maybe this is one more example of a valuable observation about the Universe that leads us to live better lives that can be better understood and enacted by those who have embraced a religious mode of thinking.  Anchoring that transcendental nature of life in the backs of our minds as we walk through life would probably make us act nicer to each other, or be more forgiving to those assholes that pile slights upon us every day.

John Rawls, a 20th century ethicist, proposed a concept called "The Veil of Ignorance"; the gist is that the only way to devise a set of rules for society that would be truly fair would be to write them all out assuming that when you were done, we'd all be reincarnated into society with no prior knowledge of what our gender, ethnicity or social standing would be.  I haven't put my finger on it yet, but there something in all this talk of souls that hearkens back to the veil of ignorance; a reminder that, but for a thin gossimer layer that separates us from the mysteries on the other side of birth and death, we're all just feeble material manifestations of something more beautiful and eternal.