Richard Hooper
Want immortality? Go Plastinate yourself
Richard Hooper
March 8, 2007
Religion recently seems to be under attack from all sides, no more so than in the media. Last night on the boob tube, Bill Maher noted the continuing New Age war against the age-old faith of Christians by trashing everything they consider holy. A couple of days ago, the Discovery Channel comes along with a program claiming that the tomb of Jesus has been discovered, with bones. There goes Christianity's belief in the physical resurrection. This last Sunday's New York Times Magazine featured an article titled "Why we believe." Turns out it's just a coping mechanism.
Scientists are mounting an attack on religion with books like "The God Delusion," which proposes, as you might expect, that God doesn't exist. Likewise, science articles seem to be popping up everywhere claiming that religion is nothing more than humanity's way of not dealing with mortality. Religion is comfort food. The soul? Eternal life? Nothing but wishful thinking.
Then you've got traitors within the ranks of religion itself. In one corner are the death-of-God theologians trying to shake people up. In the other corner we have New Testament scholars (and the people like me, whom they've trained) doing their level best to convince Christians and New Agers alike that just about everything they think is true about the Gospels' stories of Jesus is not. And let's not leave out Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, who are doing their best to trash science, create theocratic states, and usher in the apocalypse.
What's going on here? Why all of this religious and anti-religious fervor? And why now? I don't have the answers, but maybe the apocalypse thing is a clue. Fundamentalist Christians aren't the only ones who are considering the possibility that this new century will be humanity's last. Perhaps we are all intuiting that there's not much time left to figure things out. And if we intend to save souls, we'd best get on with it.
Al Gore's global warming film might have won an Oscar, but what we've already done to this planet, and what we will surely continue to do to it, makes our extinction as a species a real possibility in the not so distant future. Homo Sapiens? Interesting experiment; didn't work out. The end is near, folks, and this time we're not kidding.
After all, what can you say for a species that would stand in line for hours, then pay 18 bucks apiece to see real dead bodies without their skins on? No kidding. This past weekend my wife and I went to see "Body Worlds — The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies" at Phoenix's Arizona Science Center, and that's exactly what we saw: formerly living human bodies sliced and diced for our viewing pleasure. Muscle and bone, organs, arteries, veins, capillaries, nerves, and oh so much more — all of it quite real.
When I first read about this exhibit, I couldn't believe my eyes. Are you kidding me? They're actually exhibiting dead bodies? Has humanity gone completely insane? My wife, spreading rumors, didn't help ("Psst ... they're the bodies of Chinese prisoners"). I didn't want to, but I knew I had to see this for myself.
Actually, the bodies are donated to Gunther von Hagens (be sure to read the fine print), the inventor of the process of Plastination that halts decomposition of the body after death, preserving it for "didactic eternity." The bodies are then "posed for optimal teaching value" and hardened with light, heat and gasses. Hey, what do you expect, this guy's a German medical doctor, and they've always had strange hobbies.
With proper care and dusting, the (literal) stiffs can last, well, forever. Let's take a look: Here's a human head with the skull removed. All that remains is a web of red capillaries. Pretty cool. Over in that display case is a smoker's black lung sliced up into nice little resin serving trays. Back of that is a body that's beside itself — sawed into thirds from head to toe.
The essential purpose of Plastination is to provide real specimens of the human body for doctors-to-be to study in medical schools. The means to make this possible may be relatively new, but the desire to pick apart the human form is not. Leonardo "Igor" Da Vinci admitted to robbing at least 10 graves for this very purpose. Now, for 18 bucks, anyone can see that beauty is not just skin deep.
There they were: skinless, muscled once-a-persons, throwing javelins, jumping over hurdles, hanging upside down. Honest to God, one was even doing a flip on a skateboard! Plasticized ex-people exposed: every tendon, sinew and nerve ending of the human body — in action. Macabre? Well, it takes getting used to, that's for sure.
Certainly it was amazing to really see inside the human body. But, come on, wouldn't models have done just as well? I couldn't help feeling a certain amount of revulsion, knowing that these art/science "displays" were once living, breathing human beings. And that recognition made me depressed. Is this all we are, I wondered? In one exhibit, von Hagens offers his opinion: "The human soul is made conspicuous by its complete absence." He says he wants viewers "to transcend their fundamental beliefs and convictions about our joint and inescapable fate." Now there's a happy thought.
What once housed a mind, and perhaps a soul, is now an anonymous but immortal piece of scientific art, skillfully designed and displayed for the amazement and edification of all. Here was death staring me right in the face, and I was staring right back. Here was the age-old question posed in a new way: Is becoming a fantastic plastic muscular museum attraction the closest we can ever come to immortality? Religion answers no. It says that we are much more these bodies. Science begs to differ and asks us to grow up and smell the daisies.
What to do? What to do? Timothy Leary's dead, but he hedged his bets. He got himself frozen like a sack of peas, then sealed up in a cold case, where he waits patiently (one supposes) for the day when doctors can cure him of death.
This is one option I can't afford, so harden my arteries, get out the chain saw and slice me into two equal slabs. If I can't go to heaven, then I want to be a coffee table forever.
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Richard Hooper is a former Lutheran pastor and the author of "The Crucifixion of Mary Magdalene" and "The Gospel of the Unknown Jesus." His email is Richard@sanctuarypublications.com © copyright 2007 by Richard Hooper. This article originally appeared in religionandspirituality.com. It is posted here with the author's permission