The Brand New Testament and the moment we die

“God exists. He lives in Belgium.” This is the tagline of a delightful Belgian movie entitled The Brand New Testament. They could have added: and he’s an asshole.

Turns out, God lives with his wife and daughter (his famous son appears to be gone…) in a small apartment from where, lounging around unshaven and in pajamas, he makes up new arbitrary rules about how the world works, implementing them via a computer terminal. One such rule says that the telephone will always ring just seconds after you entered your hot bath. Another one that the right amount of sleep is always going to be “ten more minutes” after the alarm clock goes off. You get the picture.

But God’s teenage daughter, Ea, has had enough and escapes the apartment, wondering around town for the first time in her life. The movie, featuring among others Catherine Deneuve, has an interesting and happy ending, which I will not spoil for you. Instead, we are going to talk about one feature that picked my philosophical interest.

Ea realizes that a lot of her father’s power derives from fear of death in humans. Because we don’t know when we’ll die, it is easy to manipulate and cow us, particularly, of course, by dangling in front of us the promise of an afterlife. But as Ea says at one point, that’s a fantasy. There is no afterlife. The Stoic philosopher Seneca agreed:

“Death is non-existence, and I know already what that means. What was before me will happen again after me. If there is any suffering in this state, there must have been such suffering also in the past, before we entered the light of day. As a matter of fact, however, we felt no discomfort then.” (Letter 54.4)

Since there will be no consciousness after death — as there was none before we were born — then there will be no harm either. And therefore we should have no fear:

“First of all, free yourself from the fear of death, for death puts the yoke about our necks.” (Letter 80.5)

In order to help lift that yoke, Ea defies her father in a rather drastic fashion: she gets hold…