Of life after death

We are born, we live and we die.  Is that it?  What is the point?  What happens next? Do we go to heaven?  Hell?  Do we reach Nirvana?  

These questions are the very core of human culture.  We have been asking these for millennia.  Every religion is concerned with answers to these questions. Every religion has come up with answers. I am very wary of the effect our desire for answers to these questions has on any results. I think the only answer we can truthfully have to these is another question. Why am I so sceptical of answers to questions on the afterlife?  

Firstly, because questions that could result in answers that we really fear historically make us invent the most amazingly imaginative answers.  Murderers fear the truth of their actions, and invent astoundingly intricate stories.  A similar thing happens to people who have suffered terrible tragedies. We naturally fear death, and fear of what happens to us after death seems to fit this pattern.  The likelihood that we will invent wonderful stories of what happens afterwards is very high.  It requires incredible bravado and strength to face a hard truth.

Secondly, because the answers available to us from many cultures consistently return to some theme of life after death.  Does that really mean we have a life after death?  Some would say so.  Does that mean that there is some truth there?  I doubt it.  I am sceptical because what happens to us is of such universal concern and not knowing induces such fear, that I strongly suspect that the consistency in the theme merely highlights the fear, not a truth in the answer.

Thirdly because some of us proselytize that we really know.  As if they’ve been there.  They are very convincing in their determination of the “truth”. Well the likelihood is they haven’t been there, and they don’t really know.  

There are people who say that the answers are in a holy book, and these books are right because through one way or another God spoke to people and they wrote it down, so it is the word of “God”.  Well, leaving aside the question of god, it is clear that people wrote these books, and people are fallible, often opinionated, and often wrong.  People once believed the earth to be flat, to be at the centre of the universe.  Now we know better.  

Lastly, because there is no real way we can know.  Really know.  

It would seem logical that if god is really there the answer to these questions will be around us. In “his” world and not in a book.  If he is not there, the world around us is all we have got to answers these questions, so it seems logical that we start there anyway.

So, there I will begin.  In nature.  On Earth.  In the sea.  Around us.