The Illusion of Immortality

Anthropologists and archaelogists tell us that as soon as the human race achieved a measure of self-consciousness, death of their mate, parents, children and friends became a special occasion. In all cultures, burials are accompanied by special rites and often, special articles are buried with or burnt for the dead. This is evidence of some kind of belief that somehow, another kind of life awaits the dead. However, to me, all the evidence suggests that such beliefs are more likely to be illusory than otherwise.

There are a number of reasons why people of all different races, in different societies at different periods in history should all believe in some form of afterlife or other. All such reasons are psychological. I shall explain.

Death, whether violent, or due to disease or old age is never pleasant for the living. If the persons who died are close to us, like our mate, our father or mother, or grandfather or grandmother, brothers, sisters, and other relatives, work-mates or friends and we are emotionally attached to them, their departure will mean a permanent loss. It is an irreversible loss. They will never wake up again, ever. There is something absolute, something definitive, something relentless, something irrevocable about death. It cuts into our heart, like a dagger. It takes a long time for the wound to heal. It is not an enjoyable experience. If possible we like to turn the clock back. We would like to think that it is not true. Hence for the ease of our conscience, we need an emotional and social closure. It is love which drives us to demand for an afterlife. We demand it so that we may have the hope of rejoining our beloved departed somewhere in the future or in some other space. Where there is a demand, we can be sure that sooner or later, someone will think of a way of supplying that demand. That demand has been supplied. It was and still is supplied by magicians of the mind or the psyche. They are called shamans, witches, media, priests, elders, monks and nuns. And the institution supporting them and giving assistance to them is called religion.

In ancient times, people did not have any very clear ideas about what would happen to man after he died. The Greeks and Romans thought that the dead will pass through a river of forgetfulness, called Lethes. What happens beyond the river, no one knows. The Old Testament Jews thought that the dead would go to a gloomy, shadowy and unhappy place. Again, they had no clear ideas what would happen there either. The Red Indians think that their dead will go to a hunting ground far away. No matter what kind of place that is, no one is anxious to go there. The Hindus think that although a man is dead, his spirit will survive him and may be recycled many many times again on earth until it becomes sufficiently purified and in the meantime, depending on the nature and quantity of good deeds that he has done in each reincarnation, will move up the hierarchy of heavens. The Buddhists, a radical offshoot from Hinduism, preaching deliverance from suffering, not just to the Brahmins, but every one, seem divided on the issue with some believing in the Hindu theological cosmology and others undecided whether that would happen but in any event, believe that everyone can become a Buddha, or an enlightened one and reach nirvana, when the cycle of reincarnation will cease. Whatever the relevant religious beliefs may be and whatever the truth of such belief, there is little doubt that the majority would subjectively like all suffering to cease and become extinct, whether in this life or the next. In the same manner that Buddhism is a radical departure from Hinduism, Christianity is a radical offshoot and departure from Judaism, preaching the availability of heaven not only to the Jews but to all gentiles or heathen or non-Jews who are prepared to worship the Jewish God, called Jahweh. However, with time, more and more ingenious and more and more comprehensive explanations are developed in each religion and offered to those who need them. Atheists, those who do not believe in the existence of any God or god and agnostics, those whose minds are undecided whether there is or is not a God or gods, are a minority in any age. You need to be a thinker to become an atheist or agnostic. Not only that, you need to be emotionally strong enough to be one because atheistic thinking offers little or no consolation to the survivors and certainly not the kind of hope the greater part of humanity craves.

There is another reason why various people find it more satisfactory to have a belief in an afterlife. Life on earth at the best of times is full of pain and suffering. We face all kinds of natural disasters like storms, floods, droughts, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and epidemics and all kinds of diseases and illnesses and making a living whether as a hunter or farmer or a fisherman or a petty shopkeeper or craftsman or a clerk etc. for the greater part of humanity thoughout human history has never been easy. In addition, even if not, life is full of all kinds of risks and uncertainties and all forms of injustices which will continue to plague us until we die. And then, on top of all the uncertanties, all the anxieties and all the inevitable pain and suffering, we know that whether our life here on earth is more or less happy or unhappy, we shall all have to die. If our life is happy, we will like to live longer, albeit in another form. If our life is unhappy, we will like to have a second bite of the cherry, in our next life. This is the positive side. On the negative side, we would like all our enemies, and our oppressors in this life to suffer and be punished for their actual or imagined crimes and wrongs and injustices which we believe they have committed against us and thus be rectified.or justified or avenged if not in this life, then in the next. If there were no afterlife, then there will be absolutely no possibility of this psychological imbalance being redressed.

For the oppressed, the Christian religion certainly offers a very attractive hope of eternal happiness for themselves and eternal punishment for their enemies and oppressors. Did Jesus not say that his religion is for the weak, the sick, the weary, the poor, the widow, the downtrodden and that in his kingdom, the last here on earth shall be the first in the next, and the first shall be the last? 

The orthodox religions all tend to side with the dominant classes in society. The hope of a reversal of fortune is psychologically a very attractive belief for the lower classes, which in any society must mean the majority. It will certainly be in the interest of those in control of political power to encourage such beliefs because such beliefs will make their otherwise intolerable living conditions more tolerable in that they know that it will not last forever. When compared with an eternity, our misery on earth may be like a flash in the pan, no matter how scorching. Some of such people living in extreme misery may even long to be rejoined to their Lord in heaven for eternal bliss and happiness as soon as possible! That may be why Marx, an atheist,  said religion is the "opium" of the masses. Freud, another atheist, also proposed his own theory of relgious beliefs as illusion from the psycho-analytic point of view, which I do not propose to elaborate here.

The prevalence of religion-based beliefs in the afterlife has received powerful reinforcement in the popular mind from painters and sculptors who have painted scenes of heaven and hell and angels and demons and done vivid frescos and sculptures depicting various biblical stories adorning the ceilings and walls of numerous churches and chapels and poets like Dante and Milton have given us poetry depicting scenes in heaven and hell in lurid details.

To Jerome W Elbert, author of  Are Souls Real (2000), "our properties and abilities as persons are entirely natural in origin. We possess these properties and abilities because of our evolutionary background. Humans tend to have these characteristics because they have survival value. By accident and natural seleciton, our speicies acquired the characteristics that we bundle into the idea of a "persons"". Since does not suggest that humans are immortal but science supports the view that the bunlde of ordinary human abilities such as consciousness, will, conscience, feelings and emotions are "natural souls" which die with our bodies, in particular with our nervous system.

But to explain why people hold beliefs about an afterlife will not necessarily explain afterlife away. The crucial question is whether we have evidence of the existence of afterlife. We certainly have evidence of people everywhere believing in one form or another of afterlife. But belief in afterlife is not proof of its actual objective existence. All we have are "assertions" or "claims" about afterlife. Before we have made advances in psychology, many people thought that their deceased ancestors talking to them in their dreams constituted evidence of afterlife. We no longer think so. We know better. Certainly, there is no evidence of anyone returning from the realm of the dead to tell us how it is. Those who claim to have seen either heaven or hell or saints in visions, trances, and dreams are not saying that they have been there in person. They saw what they saw in dreams, visions. Dreams and visions are subjective and their "truth" ( except emotional reality) cannot be objectively verified. Then there are those who claim to have seen their ancestors or their spouses or their children in trances or even talked to them in seances.  All we have to rely on is their honesty. We know that honest people can make mistakes just like dishonest ones and strong motives in wanting to speak to or meet with those we love can produce self-generated delusions in our brain. The same consideration will apply to those who claim to have been able to regress to their own past lives in hypnotic sessions. So we are back to square one: no reliable and objectively verifiable evidence!