Well, I don’t know about you but I can certainly rest easier now that one of the questions for the ages has been answered. You know, about Ricky Martin’s sexuality. The muscle shirt, so tight, so come-hither. Please. The babies born from artificial insemination. Get real; women would have paid him to have sex with them. Fact is, this was the biggest non-surprise coming out since Clay Aiken’s. Let’s hear it for living la vida open.

However, there are, as the song goes, more questions than answers. And since it seems the Manatt, Phelps & Phillips puzzler won’t be elucidated anytime soon, let’s just say Ricky Martin is one down, 999,999 more to go.

It’s the Easter season, and as so often happens during this time of year, I find myself pondering another mystery of life. No, it’s not whether or not the Catholic Church can be delisted like companies from the Stock Exchange. This Easter season I’m contemplating something I wonder about during the course of the year, but particularly in April: Is there an Afterlife? Not an original thought, I’ll give you; people have been wondering about it longer than they have the Ricky Martin thing; Plato, for example, considered it in his ruminations way back when. Enquiring minds still want to know.

It’s as good a time as any for spiritual questions. Indeed, the story of Easter itself, the centre of the Christian faith, provides an opportunity to think about what it is we believe. And the Easter strains our credulity, doesn’t it? I mean, a man sheds his divinity and is brought into the world, is crucified to atone for the sins of humanity, then is raised from the dead after three days in a tomb, then ascends into the heavens, never to be seen again. And we’re expected to believe this if we hope to have eternal life. I just don’t know if I buy it. Reincarnation, for example, seems a more viable option. In 2010, are we still expected to believe such a fantastical story? To, you know, accept as fact someone simply vanishing into thin air and going to a better place? And where, exactly, is this place anyway? Where the hell is heaven? When we were children, we saw the brochures of Disney World; that’s why we determined to pass the Common Entrance and win that trip our parents so shamelessly dangled on a string in front of us. What motivation is there for anybody to want to go this heaven noone has ever seen before? Admittedly, life here on Earth is shit, and becoming more so every day. (Am I the only one who worries piped water will become extinct like the dinosaurs?) But what guarantee does any of us have that life in heaven wouldn’t deteriorate when the former Earth inhabitants all get there? I’ve spent a lot of my early life in the company of church people, and I say this without effrontery: I don’t necessarily want to spend eternity anywhere near them.

And yet. Life irrevocably ending after we die — is this all there is?

The number of Americans who say they believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ has dropped significantly since 2003 to 70 per cent, according to a recent poll. I don’t suppose the statistics would be comparable for Jamaicans who are well known to be a very fanatical and religious bunch. And yet I wonder. Do we Jamaicans really believe the story of the Resurrection, especially in light of how sophisticated and world-weary we’ve become? Do we even reflect on that story anymore? Once we’ve digested all the bun and cheese, that is?

Scholars believe that the rise in cremation (long thought of as the ultimate act of desecration of the human body) is linked to a growing disregard for the doctrine of resurrection. Considering that cremation statistics are much higher today than they were, say 40 years ago, doesn’t this seem to suggest that we in Jamaica do have second thoughts, or at the very least a healthy scepticism?

And if we still believe in the Resurrection, then does it naturally follow that we believe in the Afterlife, as well? In other words, if we believe that Jesus came to Earth, died and rose again, will his followers do the same? Is there really an immortality of the soul? Does death bring about, as Bible scholars suggest, a liberation or separation of the so-called soul from its fleshly remains, which are left to rot and decay?

I can see why believing in heaven brings comfort to believers. It sucks, thinking that our existence on Earth is all there is. But, really, heaven? Or, well, hell? Because if I accept that there’s a heaven that the good will be rewarded and sent to after they die, then I would have to believe that there’s also a hell. Who gets to go where? Because the many different religions all advance various theories. In the end, it all seems so arbitrary, so, you know, pointless. But then so is life, isn’t it?

Weirdly, I take comfort in my agnosticism; it makes me feel more alive than the idea of an afterlife does. Most Christians don’t dare admit theirs. Why, then, do they go, kicking and screaming, towards that good night? What exactly was the late evangelist Oral Roberts saying about his faith, some years ago, when he appealed to believers to donate money to his ministry or else face the wrath of a blackmailing God who would punish him for his apparently waning fund-raising abilities by striking him dead? Forgive me, but isn’t the idea of the great hereafter the narrative zenith for believers? Absent from the body, present with the Lord and all that. Why wasn’t his possible death simply seen as sweet release?

Maybe the answers to these questions will never be known on this mortal plane. Maybe Plato was right and bodily existence is less perfect than disembodied existence and so the goal of life is for the soul to permanently escape the body. In that case, maybe I should move on to number 999,998 on my list of pressing questions I need answered before I die. I’ve lost a lot of sleep trying to figure out this one. It’s been out there in the cosmos for almost 40 years, and quite solvable, actually. If Carly Simon would just finally, finally — please, Carly — reveal the identity of that egocentric schmuck in her song You’re So Vain? It’s not a big thing, but like Ricky Martin’s confession, it would make me sleep better at night.