Humanities desk
< June 11	<< May \| June \| Jul >>	June 13 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

June 12[edit]

African-American expatriates in Paris and Algerian independence[edit]

Just how did African-American expatriates in Paris feel about the Algerian independence movement in the 1950s and 1960s? Futurist110 (talk) 00:00, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

James Baldwin, who lived then in Paris, wrote (among many things) about the Algerian War in No Name on the Street (1972). I don't know if this dealt with the feelings of African-American expats in general. --Lambiam 06:34, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

William Gardner Smith wrote The Stone Face (1963) about the Paris massacre of 1961. A commentary is here.

Our African Americans in France article (Wikipedia has an article on everything) has a long list of black US expats that might be worth browsing. Alansplodge (talk) 10:53, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Southwest Airlines and the King Family[edit]

After Coretta Scott King died, how was Southwest Airlines involved with helping the King family?142.255.72.126 (talk) 01:12, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

What is your initial reason for thinking that there was such an involvement? The airline was founded by Rollin King, but the shared surname appears to be entirely coincidental, and any link between the family and the company has so far escaped my cursory investigations. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.200.41.14 (talk) 17:52, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Do any religions combine the afterlives have afterlives of Buddhism with the googolplex year long minds of Christianity?[edit]

Presumably they'd have to keep getting better if the new planes of existence aren't going to get monotonous after you've seen a few googolplex of them. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 01:48, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I don't understand your question. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:47, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

You don't remember your past life if you had one do you? You don't remember 1000 BC. That is the Buddhist way. In Christianity or Islam we're going to have to be a trillion years old at one point and remember back to the 20th century. I suppose the first heaven could just be slightly better than this life and we'll work ourselves up from there. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 03:06, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

An afterlife (if any) is purely hypothetical. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:43, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Of course. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 03:47, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I think the simple answer has to be No. Even the most developed religions are quite vague when it comes to heaven.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 10:10, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I'm also struggling to understand the question. Are you asking if there is a religion that says people are reincarnated with clear memories of their past lives? If that's your question, I think the answer is no. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 10:14, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Or perhaps you go to a different universe maybe in a young body but don't get new early lives and personalities and wombs and stuff. But Shantavira says details are hard to come by apparently. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 18:37, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Our Reincarnation article covers the main points and has links for further reading. Alansplodge (talk) 10:26, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Most Christian denominations, of course, do not feature a belief in reincarnation. Those who "go to heaven" after death are usually supposed to be eternally rapt in the contemplation of God, which (since God is infinite) is presumably infinitely satisfying. I don't think many Christians would subscribe to the notion of a series of improving "planes of existence" in the afterlife or suppose that the blessed will "remember back to the 20th century" in the way SMW implies. Deor (talk) 13:14, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Or whatever century was a few years after birth, for some of our readers that will be 21st. So when many of the Christians say things like they can meet X when they die they are ignorant of their theological details (not surprising) and really should be saying they'll be in eternal rapture at God, presumably the only way the heaven theologians could resolve paradoxes. Buddhist thinkers resolved with (near) complete replays and nirvana and karma to temper the resulting selfish hedonism, others just reason "worry about nonexistence wastes the nonrenewable resource of existing". Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 18:37, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Right. My gestalt as a Catholic (rather than any particular knowledge of theology) is that the idea of an afterlife where you’re essentially living an eternal human life with human consciousness isn’t exactly canonical. So the concern about boredom or living with an eternity of memories isn't really a problem. 199.66.69.67 (talk) 19:20, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Your question kind of already answers itself as the "afterlives" (as they were) in Buddhism can be incredibly long. Also, your question seems to take an oversimplified view of the afterlife in historical Christian thought. Within Buddhism, without nirvana, you're stuck with being reincarnated as either a human, an animal, or various spiritual beings -- or you might go to hell. If you reincarnate as a Deva or Asura, your lifespan can easily be billions of years (even longer than the current age of the observable universe). From a Buddhist perspective can be a bad thing, as you have less reason to seek nirvana. Buddhist hell isn't permanent but it can last for sextillions of years (10²¹ years... for a sense of scale, scientists expect that in 10¹⁴ years all stars will be either rather dim dwarf stars or black holes). There's also the Pure lands, which a Buddha or Bodhisattva has set aside so that devout followers can reincarnate there and stay there until they achieve nirvana. For the purposes of this question, Jainism and the various sects of Hinduism have comparable cosmologies where one might be reborn in a "higher" realm for an incredibly long period of time before reincarnating, with the goal of escaping this cycle of rebirth being ideal (though the exact details will vary). Tenrikyo is the only religion I can name where reincarnation is considered not as something to escape, nor even a part of nature to be accepted but as a divine blessing. I wouldn't be amazed if a new age or neopagan movement glorified reincarnation as a reaction against death but Tenrikyo starts out from the get-go with "existence is great so thank God for reincarnation" as a core doctrine.

Historical Christian thought on the afterlife (indeed, western thought on the afterlife) is more complex than just being very long and the idea of being bored in heaven simply doesn't work in any of its schools of thought. The currently popular view of heaven as a continuation of our currently limited mortal consciousness but in a much nicer (but still physical) place is a later and oversimplified reading of the Church's acceptance of Neoplatonic doctrine of the immortality of the soul, later further muddled in popular culture by Spiritualism and Theosophy trying to appeal to audiences lacking the theological education necessary for mysticism. The western views can be broadly broken into four categories which I'll refer to as mortalism, divine ascent, perfectionism, and gilgul.

Mortalism: Second Temple Judaism (except maybe the Sadducees), Apostolic Christianity, and Zoroastrianism pretty clearly believed in what is now pejoratively called Soul sleep. All references to "the resurrection of the dead" only make sense within the context of this belief. You are dead or are trapped in Sheol/Hades (all the same thing) until the end of time, when God brings you back to a complete existence and you live outside of time (at which point, see "perfectionism"). Hekhalot literature make it abundantly clear that heaven is the realm of angels whose job is to block unjust prayers (c.f. the later Ephesians 6:12) so they don't reach overly-merciful God -- not an abode of the dead. In Jewish literature from this period, the only permanent human residents in heaven were Enoch and Elijah; anyone else was a guest or invader (c.f. the later 2nd Corinthians 12:2-4). Resurrection won't be in heaven but in the completed world of (earthly) paradise. Pre-modern Christianity jams this idea somewhat in the Harrowing of Hell, where even Abraham and Moses weren't allowed into heaven until after Christ was crucified (but were brought to heaven during the three days Jesus spent in the tomb). In Zoroastrianism, this resurrection pulls all that's good in this world into menog, the mental realm or the mind of God (menog is cognate with the English Mind and the the Latin Mens, from whence mental). In all cases, the end result is the same as Perfectionism, but happens after a much longer period of time.

Divine Ascent: During and before the Apostolic era, the view common to pagans (and eventually gentile Christians) of the time (as can be seen through Ancient Egyptian funerary texts, Hermeticism, Gnosticism, what we can gather of the Greco-Roman mysteries, and pagan Neoplatonic authors) was that when you die, your mind ("soul") goes to higher planes of existence (almost always identified with the Celestial spheres) to be tested by that sphere's ruler before one can move on. If you failed a test, you might be booted back down to earth with your memories wiped to try again or (especially in Christianity) you might be stuck there for some time before being allowed to move on. Egyptian burial texts, the Greco-Roman mysteries, and Gnosticism all claimed to provide the True names of the rulers of each heaven, which served as a cheat code to get past them. These groups charged a lot of time or money, required a lot of complex and special ceremonies, and would limit based on social class. One thing that helped Christianity spread is that the early Church gave potential converts a simple one-word cheat code following a simple ceremony -- all at no cost and with no regard for social status. It is possible that there was also a hybrid between this and Mortalism, with the celestial spheres and Sheol/Hades being the same thing: one pushes up as high as they can until they are stuck and remain dead, and that the Harrowing of Hell wasn't a descent into the underworld to fight Satan as much an invasion of heaven to overthrow the Divine Council (hence Jesus's words to the Penitent thief). The idea of a divine ascent was partially retained in Christianity as Purgatory and Aerial toll houses, appears in Dante's Divine Comedy, pulled down from heaven and into our hearts in The Interior Castle of Teresa of Ávila, simultaneously simplified and bloviated in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, and revived in Spiritualism and Theosophy. In all cases, the end goal is union with the Divine, for which continue on to Perfectionism.

Spiritualism and Theosophy combined ideas from this view with ideas from Hinduism and Buddhism. Spiritualism is generally non-dogmatic, so you might find a spiritualist who may as well join the Swedenborgian church, one who holds to the Buddhist cosmology I've already linked to, and plenty more who view both as tools to describe something ineffible. Theosophy is more dogmatic, with Helena Blavatsky presenting a synthesis of eastern and western cosmologies that none of her disciples dares contest but which they'll present and squabble over elaborations thereof. These originally had multiple levels, with the lower levels essentially being a para-Earth while the higher levels approach and eventually reach Perfectionism. To reach evangelical audiences retaining only vague memories of centuries of perfectionism and theologically uneducated people who just want distraction from their death anxiety, this was watered down to the popular notion of heaven we see today as "earth but nicer." Historical Divine Ascent cosmologies viewed the planes as increasingly alien (in the older sense of "unfamiliar," not physical little green men in flying metal discs).

Perfectionism: The Church's acceptance of the Neoplatonic doctrine of the immortality of the soul isn't so much complete opposition of Mortalism or favoring of Divine Ascent as pushing both of them to to an identical (potential) logical conclusion for the sake of ecumenical convenience. Mortalism's "end of time" doesn't mean "end of this time and the start of another," it means no time; so the resurrected saints may as well exist "now" as they do in any other time. In the face of eternity in a perfected state, any time pushing through purgatory or aerial toll houses is a moot point. The "complete existence" of both Mortalism and Divine Ascent would mean that there's no existential angst, nagging desires, egoism, etc, so being static (in a world either like our own or completely different, either outside of time or eternal) would be a non-issue. Rather than squabble over the details that are seen (at best) as through a glass darkly, it's better to focus on the end goal. To worry over such matters is like complaining that one has to be born, live, and die to go to heaven. Christian authors like Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, and whoever wrote The Cloud of Unknowing present this as an absence of suffering, attachment, and egoism -- in ways that sometimes earn praise from Buddhist authors.

Gilgul: A less common view included only for the sake of completeness, held by some kabbalist and Sufi authors (and eventually some 19th century and modern Christian esotericists). This starts with the view that one's spirit and soul (i.e. lifeforce and identity) are two distinct things and not the same thing (which may also be held with the above views instead) but also asserts that while one's identity goes on to heaven or hell, one's lifeforce (which has been shaped by prior identities) is constantly re-used for new souls. This is a historically uncommon view held by some deep mystics (though noteworthy ones) instead of the masses (though it did radically influence Jewish exorcism and the Sufi terminology for these ideas was used by religions that neighbored Islam such as the Druze or Yazidism).

Ian.thomson (talk) 01:19, 13 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Sagittarian Milky Way - I am curious as to what you mean when you say " . . . eternal rapture at God, presumably the only way the heaven theologians could resolve paradoxes . . ." What is the paradox you are referring to? 76.71.159.244 (talk) 21:27, 16 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

See [1]. 92.19.168.81 (talk) 09:37, 17 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

From the physical meaning of "carried away" comes the figurative meaning "intense joy", anticipated by those who are carried away to heaven (per the link). There is a paradox, which St Paul addresses:

IV.13-18. The Condition of the Dead. - This paragraph is written to allay a misgiving which had arisen among the Thessalonian Christians that certain of their friends who had died would be deprived of their share in the glory of the promised Parousia. Paul dispels the doubt by asserting that the dead would be raised at the Parousia, and so would be at no disadvantage compared with the living. - Arthur S Peake (ed.), Peake's Commentary on the Bible, Edinburgh 1952, p 878.

Or as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 15⁵⁵:

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.19.168.81 (talk) 12:59, 18 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Location/name of thing[edit]

I remember hearing about this somewhere, and I'm going to paraphrase it here:
Somewhere in the American Southwest scientists were storing toxic waste from atomic bomb tests. The material would be highly toxic for thousands of years, so the scientists were thinking of ways to signify to future civilizations that they shouldn't enter. They thought of tall, ominous statues and making cats that would glow from the radiation, among other things.
Does anyone know what this place was called? I don't know how I would go about finding it because looking up "toxic waste southwest statues cats scientists" doesn't exactly direct you to an answer.
If anyone can help me, thanks so much.
Heyoostorm (talk) 13:13, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Some of what you're talking about is covered at Long-time nuclear waste warning messages (where the cats are mentioned, for instance). To the best of my knowledge, most of the speculation about messages isn't tied to any particular site in the Southwest, though you may be thinking of the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. Deor (talk) 13:30, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Search the archive of the Radiolab program for their episode on the radioactive cats etc--they have the answer you're looking for, and interviews with info that would be hard to find elsewhere. I don't remember if it was Yucca, it might have been. Temerarius (talk) 00:25, 13 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Poking around further, I happened on a lot of media coverage of plans to devise long-term markers for the WIPP facility in New Mexico—see Waste Isolation Pilot Plant#Warning messages for future humans and also this. That's more likely than Yucca Mountain to be what the OP was thinking of. Deor (talk) 18:25, 13 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not the first to point this out, but building a complex of ominous-looking architecture, and putting up signs saying (essentially) "This place is cursed. Go away. Don't dig here. I mean it" sounds like a really good way to get future archaeologists / treasure-hunters / tomb raiders to start digging there. Iapetus (talk) 08:23, 15 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks so much! I wasn't expecting to get any relevant information. I'm definitely going to go through the links you all provided. Heyoostorm (talk) 14:08, 15 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]