Tough Sell

I have sometimes wondered about the poor chap that took up the job of telephone salesman to sell the first telephones. I mean think about the sort of conversations he would have had.

“Good Morning Lord Meldue, I would like to interest you in the very latest technology, the Telephone, it will revolutionise all aspects of commerce and social discourse”

“Well that sounds exciting what does it do?”

“Well you simply pick up this part and you can talk to anyone you like without leaving your house”

“Marvelous old chap, let’s talk to Lord Budgie I need to send word to him about lunch”

“Ah, well you can’t actually do that yet”

“Why not?”

“Well Lord Budgie would need one too and then we, the telephone company need to run a wire from your house to his house”

“I see, well who can I speak with?”

“Well currently no one because you will be the first”

“So I should buy this thing, so that it should do nothing until such time as my friends buy one, also to do nothing, until after you have run wires to and from all of their houses to mine, and then the thing will work”

“Exactly sir you have it now”

“Thank you but goodbye to you”

When you think about how did this system ever get going, the very idea of running wire from every house to a central exchange seems extraordinary but that is how it works after all.

And there is a lot of this stuff when you start thinking about it, Sir Walter Raleigh who brought tobacco back to England. “well you take these leaves place them inside a paper roll put one end in your mouth and set light to the end” or “you take this powder of ground up leaves and shove it up your nose” You really do have to admire the salespeople who pulled off getting tobacco off the ground.

But the tough sell I was really thinking about was God, without Heaven. Is there a religion that does not promise an afterlife which is as far as I can tell an improvement on the current state? So why do all religions have a heaven?

There is no automatic connection between the existence of God and the existence of an afterlife, apparently according to most religious traditions this is exactly the proposition that holds for all creatures on earth except us of course. Dogs don’t go to heaven according to any priest of minister I have ever spoken to, which in my mind is a yawning gap in the system as I like my dogs a lot more than most people I know.

I reckon you don’t find a God without a heaven because it would be a tough sell. It would be similar to the conversation above wouldn’t it. “you should worship God and do as he says” “and if I don’t” “well he will be really grumpy with you”, “umm I’ll get back to you”

So it seems potentially that Heaven may potentially be nothing more than an air points scheme dreamed up by religious advertisers to encourage people to join their team. As a scheme of course it is perfect because the liability to deliver is placed on someone else and only after the customer is dead and effectively worthless from a mortal bound churches point of view.

Based on my scant understanding of Buddhism this appears to be a system of Heaven but no God which may be a step in the right direction, also dogs presumably are part of the cycle of life they seem to believe in. Not sure if the orange robes would come in my size and then there is the whole don’t eat meat thing... Hmm it’s a hard road finding the perfect religion.