Death, Consciousness, God, Time, Afterlife, and This Life: 

Death

When we consider the beyond, death is the most pressing mystery, for death comes for us all. None of us, even we who have deep religious faith, knows for certain what if anything follows death. Though some people may seem indifferent, at a fundamental level we all fear death.

If the atheists who rule the world are correct, oblivion follows death, and our existence is a mere fortuity of evolution. That we are conscious, that we experience time, that we feel pleasure, that we feel pain, that we laugh, that we cry, that we love, that we feel purpose, that is, all that constitutes you or me is mere accident. We are the product of natural selection, the final destination of molecules stumbling along a multibillion-year drunkard’s walk, combining into ever more complex forms, most of which die. But so long as there are enough complex forms, some will survive, replicate, and evolve in a cosmos where disintegration is the more likely path. The human body produced by this drunkard’s walk through the eons is unimaginably complex, consisting of trillions of exquisitely organized cells. 

Such complexity means that much can go wrong. A blood vessel in the brain bursts, and we quickly die of a stroke. A cancer cell in the pancreas begins to multiply, and before we know that we are ill, we are destined to die before our time. A lethal virus invades our lungs and kills us because it multiplies faster than our immune system or medication can kill it. That any of us survives the death risk of our body’s complexity seems to be a miracle. 

But for atheists there are no miracles, only matter-energy, chance, natural selection, and durations of time that are beyond our comprehension. Somehow, here we are in immensely complex bodies that are astoundingly reliable, despite their breathtaking intricacy and vulnerabilities. To modern people, the body’s complexity isn’t a miracle. It is a challenge to understand and control.

Whether a miracle or a challenge, the well-ordered complexity of our bodies will ultimately unravel, and we will die. How does this fact affect us, given that we instinctively want to live and cannot prove or disprove the existence of a God who may offer us eternal life?

Our atheist friends, for whom there is no inherent meaning in the world of atoms and the void, say that we must make the best of what we’ve got. We must begin by accepting that we are what evolution has made us and nothing more – social beings who have the desire to live and a capacity to enjoy the moments of our lives. 

According to our secular rulers, contemporary society represents the pinnacle of human social organization, the most stable and harmonious integration of social and personal needs that has ever existed. Our society maintains social stability by encouraging compliance and conformity, provides material comfort to virtually everybody on the planet, and offers an ever expanding menu of sensual, physical, esthetic, relational, imaginative, and intellectual pleasures to keep people happily distracted until the day oblivion engulfs them. In other words, if death is the end of our existence, the orderly world we have today is about as good as it will ever get. Skeptics like me are crackpots who should be marginalized, if not exterminated. 

But what if our rulers and the societies that they shape are wrong? What if death is not the end? That could change everything. Life after death might bear on how we ought to live. 

Over the centuries, religious thinkers and philosophers have addressed these questions by proposing diverse concepts about the nature of God, reality, and the afterlife.

Those of us who have studied intellectual history know about many of these different views because exceptional people left us written words or artistic creations. We tend mistakenly to imagine past eras according to this legacy. The deep thinkers of the past astonish us with their subtlety and depth. And our ancestors’ artistic and architectural creations inspire us. 

Our fascination with this intellectual and spiritual heritage, however, may cause us to forget that the overwhelming majority of human beings throughout history were illiterate and struggled to stay alive. They cared little for subtle ideas or beautiful creations. The 17th century philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, aptly described their lives as “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." Throughout human history, the religions that we know through art and writings provided solace to these weary and frightened humans.

Stone age tribes left no written records and few archaeological clues about their primal religions. However, the isolated tribes that survived into the 19th and 20th centuries taught us that stone age humans were helpless before and bewildered by the terrifying forces of nature. Dreams and altered states of consciousness produced by hallucinogenic plants made a spirit world seem real. Anthropomorphic stories of gods and spirits and myths and magic gave primitive people an illusion of at least partial control over a menacing world. Religion centered on propitiation of the gods, spirits, or  powers that at any moment could wreak havoc in the lives of humans. That is perhaps why child sacrifice occurred throughout the world. In desperate attempts to protect their communities, frightened tribes would sacrifice children, who were far more precious than animals, to mollify the anger of erratic and inscrutable gods who could unleash earthquakes, famine, disease, floods, hurricanes, war, and other calamities that made life precarious. Sacrifice is a tribute – a bribe – that the weak pay to the powerful in order to declare the former’s groveling subservience to the latter. Sacrificing children is the ultimate act of submission, the ultimate plea to nature’s gods to spare human collectives terrifying pain and suffering.

The ancient polytheistic religions, such as those of Greece and Rome, were merely more sophisticated and literary versions of primal religions. These anthropomorphic systems of belief also reflected the precarious, death-filled lives that were the norm throughout most of human history. Even among the Roman aristocracy, half of all children did not live to adulthood. The average person regularly slaughtered animals for food. War was common. So many people died young from disease and so many others were adept at killing, whether in warfare or the slaughter of animals, that nearly all people were intimate with death. For them, life was fragile and full of disappointment and pain. All that weak, chronically frightened mortals could do was petition the gods for mercy and favor. To expect more was hubris, which the gods would punish. The purpose of life was to survive. Worshiping the capricious gods was believed, perhaps out of desperation, to enhance survival. If magically transported to our world, these traumatized ancestors would in all likelihood embrace the stability, prosperity, and pleasure that critics like me denounce. 

Eastern religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, took religious thought to abstract heights. These religions cleverly integrated the mysteries of suffering, death, and morality through the concepts of reincarnation and karma. Reincarnation says that the human soul migrates from body to body until after countless reincarnations it ultimately attains release from the cycle of birth and death, from the illusory material world of maya. Karma says that we reap what we sow, though the reaping for evil or good deeds may not occur during the lifetime in which the deed is committed. Good karma comes from following the moral rules, such as Buddhism’s eightfold path. Bad karma comes from breaking those rules

Thus, reincarnation-karma resolves the problem of evil, which has unsettled so many religious thinkers. Why, for example, do innocent babies die in earthquakes? According to religions of reincarnation, dying in an earthquake may be the reaping of evil deeds committed in a previous life and the prelude to a happier future life. 

In these religious systems, the problem is attachment or desire, and the solution is to achieve serenity by detaching from desire. In some eastern systems, when a soul breaks free of the cycle of birth and death, it merges into the godhead. The illusion of self-other is shattered and the soul realizes itself as God, who, being pure consciousness, is an impersonal beyond, and therefore not within or subordinate to the illusory world of matter-energy and spacetime. Thus, in these systems, our end is not the oblivion of atheists, but it is nonetheless the termination of any sense of separate, personal existence. 

For the religions of the book - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - God is immanent in the world He created, but also transcendent and separate from humans, who have only one life. The purpose of that life is not escape or self-dissolving merger with the godhead, but the establishment of proper relationships with God and our fellow creatures. God reveals Himself and the relationships he expects from us through scripture, prophets, and, in the case of Christianity, through God incarnate, Jesus Christ. 

These three religions affirm an afterlife. Though the conceptions of the afterlife vary markedly between and within the religions, most have affirmed a heaven for the good and a hell for the wicked. As in eastern religions, the good follow the moral rules, e.g., the Ten Commandments. The bad do not. For these religions, however, action alone does not forge one’s post-death destiny. Turning toward a merciful God may bring salvation, even to those who have committed much evil. For these religions, relationship to God is paramount. Faith in, or trust in, God is vital. Good deeds may reflect the faith that ultimately relies on the grace of God, especially in the case of Christianity. But good deeds alone are not sufficient for salvation. Trust in God is paramount.

In this and subsequent essays, when I use the term “God” I will refer to the Christian conception of a God who is personal, immanent, and transcendent, and whose love grants us free will.

A touchy problem for Christianity is the existence of evil. Moral evil, i.e., sin, results when humans misuse their free will by disobeying God’s laws and seeking to use, rather than love, their fellow humans. Thus, freely chosen sinful acts may cause bad things to happen to good people. Bad things may also happen to good people because of natural evil, such as the classic example of babies dying in earthquakes. The challenge for Christians is explaining why a loving God would permit moral and natural evil.

Moral evil is a consequence of the loving God’s gift of free will to humans. God could have made robots who would always act according to His will. But God chose to endow humans with free will, with agency, i.e., the capacity to choose between good and evil. God does not want us to love him because we are compelled to do so, but because we choose to do so. If, however, we are morally free, some of us will choose evil, and sometimes our evil choices will hurt good people. Thus, free will – a gift God gives out of love for us – enables moral evil.

God’s permitting natural evil is more difficult to explain than moral evil. Often, natural evil is interpreted as part of God’s mysterious providential plan to redeem a fallen world. God permits natural and moral evil because he sees a greater good that will ensue and because in some supernatural way he redeems the victims of evil.  

Though I do not reject this common view of natural evil, I have a theory about natural evil that some Christians may consider heretical, though to me it seems logical. Natural evil reflects the operation of chance in the world. I propose that God built this randomness into the structure of what we call the material world to limit the destructiveness of those people who choose evil rather than good. 

I propose that God put chance in our world because His merciful wisdom could foresee that other alternatives would not realize as well His will that humans would freely strive for a loving relationship with their creator and their fellows, even as other humans would freely choose to turn away from Him and spurn, dominate, and harm others. With this implicit conflict between good and evil in mind, let us try to follow God’s “logic.”

Suppose God made a world in which nothing could kill us, a world where there was no pain and much pleasure. What would stop the unwise, fallible people of this seemingly paradisiacal world from saying to God, “Thanks for eternal life, sucker!  Now, I’m going to party!” Though not all would so crassly reject the God that gave them eternal life, over time – and there would be a lot of time without death – increasing numbers of weak humans would succumb to the temptations of a life of pleasure, a life focused on gratification of the self. God’s will for a loving relationship not only would be thwarted, it would be mocked by what we could call “spoiled children.”

That is why God had to put death in the world. Death reminds us that we are mere creatures, and that our actions have consequences.

Suppose, then, that God made a world in which natural evil, i.e., chance misfortune, did not occur. Suppose that nothing in nature could harm or kill us except the actions of our fellow human beings exercising their free will to do evil. Such a state of affairs would confer enormous power on evil people, for we could live forever unless our brother murdered us. And we could experience never-ending pleasure unless our sister inflicted pain on us. In such a situation, evil, physically strong people would make physically weak, good people submissive, ultimately forcing them to commit evil: “Obey me or suffer. Obey me or die.”

One might argue that this would not happen if there were strong, good people to protect the weak. There are two problems with this argument. First, evil people could organize and use deceit to kill the good people who are strong. Second, when fallible human beings have power over others, that power tends to corrupt. How long would it take before the champion of good used his power to make the prettiest woman in the tribe come to his bed or ensure that the best food went to his children? Ultimately, many good people who are strong would become evil, few evil people would become good, and evil would triumph. 

Suppose, then, that God permitted only predictable natural evil: all floods, earthquakes, and forest fires, for example, occurred according to certain schedules and no disease could kill us until we were 100 years old. The predictability of these natural evils would not prevent evil people from hurting good people. On the contrary, the existence of predictability would incentivize evil people to discover the patterns of predictability so that they could coerce others into obedience and subservience: “If you want to escape the flood, obey me. If you want to live until 100, serve me.”

I believe that God’s wisdom permits an optimum level of random natural evil, in part, to thwart the intentions of evil people. Unpredictable misfortune will affect good and evil alike, so the latter would be less able to exploit predictability to control the former. The ever-present possibility of random natural evil and the inevitability of death would also induce good people who believe in a good God to cultivate courage, trust in God, and problem-solving creativity to soldier through each day, when any day could bring calamity. Moreover, if they believed in a loving God and an afterlife, good people, with death constantly at their side (which was the situation for most people throughout most of history), could muster the courage to resist evil people. Why surrender to evil people when there is no guarantee that surrender will extend or improve our lives? If plague or famine or accident or war may bring death tomorrow, good people may find the courage to resist evil today. 

Thus, natural evil is part of God’s redemptive plan, not only because it may hide a secret meaning (God’s providence), but also because it motivates people to be faithful, courageous, and creative in the enduring struggle to overcome all forms of evil. 

God permits evil in order to manifest his loving gift of free will. God’s love and justice, however, demand that He not abandon us at death, that he not allow irredeemable injustice to be perpetrated on good people.  There must, then, be an afterlife in which God reveals His love to the innocent victims of moral and natural evil. 

But why was religion necessary? Could not God have simply balanced accounts, so to speak, after people died? 

Consider first that the majority of people, who lived Hobbesian lives that were “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short,” were repeatedly tempted to cheat, rob, and kill in order to reduce personal suffering, prolong life, and increase personal pleasure. Genetically based social attachment bonds, strengthened by social structures, weakened these selfish impulses, as they do in some social animals. The human ability to reason, however, can override emotional bonds and genetic predispositions. In extreme situations, individuals driven by logical self-interest will do what they must to survive, regardless of how their action will affect the group. Attachment and social feeling alone cannot prevent the emergence of selfishness.

I propose that religion fortifies the genetically based attachment bonds by providing a transcendent rationale for altruistic behavior, resistance to evil, and conditional obedience to those in charge (which is why kingship is often associated with divinity). Transcendent, supernatural beliefs generate a sense of the holy that inoculates moral beliefs against rational selfishness. Reason cannot challenge things that are “sacred,” “taboo,” or “from the gods.” Religion, then, provides not-to-be questioned justifications for stifling and punishing selfishness and for combating evil. That is, perhaps, why religion was ubiquitous until the modern era.

My atheist friends would say that I am making their argument. Religion may have been necessary to hold precarious societies together in the past. Contemporary civilization, however, does not need religion because our intelligence and technology enable us to sustain a level of social stability, economic prosperity, and personal pleasure that results in more happiness and less crime than any civilization in history. We don’t fear death because we are so satisfyingly engaged with our successive presents that we don’t think about death except in fleeting and inconsequential ways. Moreover, the very old or very ill, for whom death is imminent, have a multitude of drugs and virtual fantasies that can comfort them as they slide into oblivion. Death has lost its sting because the average human life is no longer Hobbesian. Life is social, prosperous, pleasant, humane, and, compared to prior eras, long.

If our society is correct and nothingness follows death, then, how I spend my life is no better or worse than how VROWs spend their lives. (Editor’s note: A virtual reality cow - VROW - is a person who spends life yoked to computerized virtual reality fantasies, like a cow at a trough.) As one man in a VROW cooperative told me, “Life is a dream, and VR fantasy is a wonderful dream.” He has the comforting illusions of an ever-expanding menu of virtual fantasies. Maybe my religious faith is my illusion. I’m not an unhappy person; neither did he seem unhappy. I don’t suffer; I don’t think that man suffers. I derive pleasure from intellectual work; he derives pleasure from VR fantasies. My religious faith and my criticisms of society give me a sense of meaning; he derives meaning from VR fantasies. When death is near, he’ll gladly opt for a VR termination fantasy. I hope that I will have sufficient confidence in my faith to face death with the expectation that it will not be the end. 

Confidence about one’s expectation is key. When Roman Catholicism dominated Europe, it was common for people who had lived immoral lives to cry out for a priest on their deathbed because their looming demise terrified them into repentance. Today, it is not uncommon for religious folk confronting imminent death to cry out in dread for drugs and/or a VR termination fantasy, perhaps one that produces sublime religious feelings. The common denominator in these two situations is fear of death and the degree of confidence in the person’s belief about what follows death. If the person in the former example were confident that there is nothing after death, he would not call for a priest. If the person in the latter example were confident in her religious faith, she would meet death prayerfully instead of fleeing to VR. 

Because few of us are psychologically certain about what if anything follows death, we necessarily place a bet about death, whether we realize it or not. We all gamble on an answer to the death mystery, not by uttering a proposition, but in how we live our lives and how we behave when death approaches. Today’s society has successfully indoctrinated a large majority of people to believe that nothing follows death. Thus, given this assumption, it is logical to pursue a life of stability, comfort, and pleasure and to seek psychic relief when death is at hand. If your confidence in that faith is strong, you probably are not reading my essays. If your confidence is weak, your doubts may frighten you. If death is not oblivion, there may be a God. And if God exists, perhaps He expects things from us. If so, what does He expect? And what happens if we ignore His call? 

If you are reading this essay, you are most likely skeptical about the ruling faith in oblivion. Please, have courage. You are not alone in your doubt. It may seem that way to you because our sham democracy intentionally exaggerates the degree of unanimity in society. But the number of dissidents, skeptics, and rebels in our ersatz utopia is much greater than the state-controlled information industry suggests. Take heart. That oblivion follows death is not the unassailable proposition that its proponents paint it out to be.

Subsequent essays will explore consciousness, God, and time. I’ll argue against oblivion. Then I’ll return to the question of death by discussing different views of the afterlife and this life, not with a definitive answer, but with hope. 

Hope is religion’s gift to humankind, especially in the case of Christianity. Our “enlightened” world gives us security, comfort, and pleasure, but it has taken away the hope that there is more to life than a series of experiences, however pleasant, with no objective meaning or value and an ineluctable termination.

Some people in the god-free world may indirectly seek hope by vague talk about love or spirituality. However, “love” and “spirituality” in the modern, atheistic world are merely transient  experiences that give us the pleasure of feeling elevated or full of meaning. If, however, only atoms and the void exist, then such experiences are illusions that give us temporary pleasure or relief and make death more palatable, much like a virtual reality termination fantasy. So long as feelings of love or spirituality rest on the atoms-and-the-void axiom, hope is a mirage.

If you reject or question society’s atoms-and-the-void faith and perceive, however dimly, a deeper, more hopeful truth, find others who seek such truth. Meet and talk in private, where our surveillance states cannot observe you. Remember the verse from the Christian scripture: “Where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”  Study together the Bible and other classic texts of religion, literature, and philosophy, texts that our technological societies have neglected for many decades. Find or print paper copies, for if this dissident movement threatens our rulers, they will expunge these texts from the Internet cloud. And then they will do more. 

They will do whatever they must to retain power, for the exercise of power is the abiding pleasure of those who rule. Their claim that they care for others is at best a delusion, at worst a strategic lie. For them, human interactions are negotiations in which the currency is pleasure. Maximum pleasure for the maximum number is their putative first principle. Those of us who reject that currency threaten their system. And though their system claims to be good, it will not hesitate to commit evil to sustain itself. This is why we must resist. 

Let your sense of the beyond, however obscure, brace you. You are not alone. There is more to this world than atoms and the void.

Next Essay: Consciousness