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Religion and death [1]

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Date: 2023-12-16

Welcome to the Street Prophets Coffee Hour cleverly hidden at the intersection of religion and politics. This is an open thread where we can share our thoughts and comments about the day. Let’s talk about death and the idea of an afterlife.

Religion is a human universal: that is, some form of religion is found in all human cultures. In looking for possible reasons for this universality, one common hypothesis is that religion functions to: (1) explain death and (2) console the living. In doing this, many religious traditions, but not all, claim there is an afterlife of some type, that death is not the end but is rather a transition from one state of consciousness into another.

In some Native American cultures, there was traditionally little concern for an afterlife and emphasis was placing on living well today. There was an attitude that any afterlife would be revealed only after death. In a similar fashion, in China, the Daoist tradition emphasizes living life to the fullest. In his book God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World—And Why Their Differences Matter, Stephen Prothero writes:

“Daoists do not hope for (or fear) an afterlife.” He also writes: “…Daoists say that whatever immortality is available to us is to be found on earth and in this body.”

Stephen Prothero sums up the idea of life after death in Daoism this way:

“Whereas Christians and Muslims tend to view this world as a dress rehearsal for the world to come, ‘This is it!’ is the Daoist mantra.”

In cultures throughout the world, people often provide anecdotal evidence supporting their beliefs regarding the afterlife. These anecdotes include stories of near-death experiences, of prophets who claim to have visited the afterworld, of mediums who claim to be in communication with the dead, of visitations of ghosts of the dead, and of vivid dreams of the dead. In his book The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, Michael Shermer writes:

“Belief in the afterlife comes first; rational reasons for the belief come second.”

In other words, evidence for the afterlife is often a form of confirmation bias in which people seek out evidence which supports their pre-existing beliefs.

With regard for the actual evidence of an afterlife or some type of existence following death, Paul Kurtz, in his book The Transcendental Temptation, writes:

“Although the hope for life beyond the grave has been a profound source of religious and aesthetic inspiration, unfortunately the wish for it for outstrips the evidence.”

Paul Kurtz also writes:

“In the last analysis belief in immortality is only an article of faith, an inference from an unsubstantiated belief in a divine universe, not a scientifically demonstrated truth.”

From a Eurocentric viewpoint in which religion is defined primarily as the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and Asian traditions (Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Jainism) are not considered religions, British philosopher A.C. Grayling, in his book The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, writes:

“Most religions teach belief in an afterlife. Familiarly, what their votaries are taught to believe is that their posthumous existence begins with a judgement that results in punishment or reward, and for the vast majority it will be punishment, for sin lurks in every crease and fold of the moments of physical existence.”

With an emphasis on judgment, punishment, and reward as the essential features of the afterlife, many people have concluded that this is the basis of morality, of the concepts of right and wrong, and that people live moral lives because of their fear of judgment in the afterlife. However, many religious traditions do not have this concept of the afterlife and people still live moral lives.

Viewing the belief in an afterlife of some type from a psychological perspective, Jesse Bering, in the Scientific American’s The Secrets of Consciousness, writes:

“And yet people in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind after death. My psychological research has led me to believe that these irrational beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are an inevitable by-product of self-consciousness. Because we have never experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead. In fact, it won’t feel like anything—and therein lies the problem.”

Jesse Bering also writes:

“The common view of death as a great mystery is brushed aside as an emotionally fueled desire to believe that death isn’t the end of the road. And indeed, a prominent school of research in social psychology called terror management theory contends that afterlife beliefs, as well as less obvious beliefs, behaviors and attitudes, exist to assuage what would otherwise be crippling anxiety about the ego’s inexistence.”

If we expand the conceptualization of religion beyond the restrictive notion of the Abrahamic traditions defining religions, scholars of comparative religion and anthropology have pointed out that there are probably more than 6,000 religions and that many of these, but not all, have some concept of an afterlife. Many scholars and armchair philosophers have attempted to create hypotheses about why the belief in an afterlife is so common.

Open Thread

This is an open thread and, therefore, all topics are welcome.

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