Limitedlessness

I was listening to the recent coverage on the Haitian earthquake. Some estimates put the dead at nearly a quarter of a million people. This staggers the mind.

One of the stress factors plaguing the survivors is concerns about the proper burial of the dead. Many Haitians practice the Vodou or Voodoo religion, which is a mixture of the beliefs of the West African slaves brought to Haiti, the original inhabitants of the island, and Catholicism. They believe that spirits reside in everything, not just people, and that when a person dies, you perform a ritual that releases their spirit, enabling it to move on to another existence. Otherwise, the soul becomes trapped in the body, and they view this as something like hell. The souls thus trapped become restless and the living see these entities as a threat.

So one of the stress factors of the Haitian survivors is the overwhelming fear that they are surrounded by thousands of lost souls that will not go away. This bad situation will linger forever.

It got me to thinking that the Haitian people are not the only ones that believe that the Soul has no limit. Even though Christian, Jewish, and Muslim worshippers believe that you only have one life on Earth, they agree with Hindu worshippers that the soul persists forever. The body may be destroyed or changed out for another, it has a limited life time, but the soul has no limit.

I've often considered this when thinking about religion and religious beliefs. Is the limitlessness of the human soul only one way? Where was the soul before the person was born? If it can last forever, why would it be limited to only a limitless future and not a limitless past? Where was your soul before you were born?

I think that most people have a hard time grasping the concepts of both limits and no limits. On one hand, they would not think to limit God or a person's soul.

If you teach a person about cosmology and start talking about the life and nature of the universe, people quickly start rejecting both limits and limitlessness. If you tell someone that the universe is infinite, they start asking what is outside of the universe, as if the universe has a fixed size and must reside in something bigger. If you tell someone that the universe originated in the big bang, they ask what was there before the big bang. Yet they can't conceive of a time when there was nothing, before the big bang, and they don't like to conceive of infinity where space goes on forever. If you explain the big bang as a very small universe expanding very quickly, people want to know what it is expanding into.

People have no problem defining their own limits, sometimes it is their abilities that are limited. They can't understand this or that, they can't do something that they feel is beyond their capabilities. People have a hard time understanding the limits of their own emotions. The saying that God doesn't give you more than you can handle, and the lament that "I can't take any more!" are completely at odds, yet easily believed by the same person. And there is also the nice sentiment that a human heart has no limit in it's capacity to love.

I think the common thread is that limits are an artificial construct in our heads. There are some ideas that limits do not really apply to.