Posted on 08 April 2024, 15:17

Easter 2024 is behind us. I hope all readers of this blog had a good Easter. However, it seems clear to me that the meaning of Easter has been completely lost in our hedonistic world.  USA Today kicked off its Easter coverage on “Holy Thursday” with a front-page article on the cost of eggs. There was not a single mention of what was being celebrated. There was nothing on Friday and the paper does not publish on weekends. My local paper had an article on page 4 about the pope being well enough to celebrate Easter by discussing peace in Israel and Ukraine.  I admit that I saw only a small fraction of the various media during the week, but I would bet that what I saw was representative of all of it.

Maybe if I were a church-going person, I would have sensed it on Easter Sunday, but my best guess is that the message would have been as imprecise, elusive, ambiguous, distorted and otherwise as vague as it was during my church-going years. It would have dealt with the resurrection of Christ’s physical body rather than his spirit body and not even mention spirit bodies we all have in common with him. And it would be a very humdrum heaven for which we are striving. Many say that they prefer total extinction to such an afterlife.   

If I were a roving television reporter and stopped a number of people on the street, asking them what Easter is all about, I suspect that not one in 50 would agree with my understanding of what is celebrated on Easter. I imagined myself as a pastor of some church and made an attempt to write a sermon for Easter Sunday. This is what I came up with, minus the salutations and gestures that go with a speech. Pardon me for using some of the same quotes as in recent blogs, but I feel that they need to be heard and stressed over and over again. 

The Easter Message

“If man believes in nothing but the material world, he becomes a victim of the narrowness of his own consciousness.  He is trapped in triviality.”  So said Emanuel Swedenborg, the renowned Swedish scientist and polymath. As Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the famous Russian author (Crime & Punishment, etc.) put it: “Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea. And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other ‘higher’ ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.” 

If I am properly remembering what I was taught in my Catholic school religious studies, Jesus came at a time when the world had lost sight of that “higher idea.” I’ve wondered who did a survey to determine the worldview at the time, but, if such was the case, Jesus’s primary mission was to reestablish a conviction that consciousness survives death in a larger life. As I still understand it, that’s what Easter is supposed to be about.  It’s not about eggs and bunnies, nor is it about God, original sin, atonement, peace or worship. They all follow the acceptance of consciousness surviving death.
   
During the mid-1800s, Science began impeaching Religion, reaching its peak around 1870, a decade after “Darwinism” was introduced to the world by scientists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. ”We were all in the first flush of triumphant Darwinism, when terrene evolution had explained so much that men hardly cared to look beyond,” wrote Frederic W.H. Myers, one of the pioneers of psychical research, in explaining why he began searching for evidence of the soul. As Myers saw it, the old-world sustenance was too unsubstantial for the modern cravings, the result being that advances in science and technology were leading to the unprecedented prosperity, but at the same time, this prosperity brought a decline in the dignity of life.  It was suddenly life without meaning. In effect, the advances in science and technology outpaced man’s ability to mentally and morally adjust to them, thereby creating an emotional void, one referred to as “soul sickness.”

The ”death of God,” as decreed by Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882, the same year that Myers helped co-found the Society for Psychical Research, resulted in despair and hopelessness for many, especially the intelligentsia of the civilized world.  There were some who repressed the idea of Nietzsche’s “nothingness” by escaping into mundane earthly activities but there were others who could not completely repress it or relieve their minds of this soul sickness.  A melancholy mood prevailed among them, one that often turned to anxious trembling and fear as life’s end approached. 

Humbug

In addition to Myers, a number of other scholars and scientists searched for the “larger life” in order to restore the meaning that had been lost. They included psychologist William James, astronomer Camille Flammarion, chemist William Crookes, and physicists William Barrett and Oliver Lodge.  They attempted to reconcile the teachings of science with those of religion by studying various psychic phenomena which suggested a spirit world. As Professor James put it: “Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow ‘scientific’ bounds.”

Wallace, who it is said persuaded Darwin to accept the “survival of the fittest” concept, was among those more open-minded scientists who became convinced that a spirit world exists and that consciousness survives in that larger world.  As he saw it, the evidence for survival from the phenomena studied and validated as genuine was as good, if not better, than the evidence for evolution. Moreover, the two did not conflict with each other, as many believed.  Others, such as famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, joined in.  “A man should be able to say he has done his best to form a conception of life after death, or to create some image of it, even if he must confess his failure,” Jung offered. “Not to have done so is a vital loss.” As Jung put it, “critical rationalism” had eliminated the idea of life after death.

Apparently, some progress was made in restoring belief in a hereafter by 1914. In reviewing a book about life after death for the April 1914 issue of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, Professor James Hyslop wrote: “The primary importance of the book is the simple fact that the subject can be discussed, when twenty-five years ago a book either affirming or denying immortality would not have received publication, most probably. Skepticism and agnosticism have been so confident of their positions ever since Immanuel Kant and Herbert Spencer, that no man has dared venture to show himself on the affirmative side for fear of being accused of being religious or of being a fool.”

For those with an open-mind the evidence for survival was overwhelming and was embraced by many during the Great War. But the conviction melted away during the “Roaring Twenties,’ when materialism renewed itself in times of prosperity.  An economic depression and then another world war stemmed the tide of materialism and its close companions, hedonism and epicureanism.  But with the aid of the new technology called television, the entertainment and advertising industries regained the upper hand for the materialists. “An unfortunate awareness has overtaken our species,” opined humanistic philosopher Alan Harrington, in his 1969 book, The Immortalist. “Masses of men and women everywhere no longer believe that they have even the slightest chance of living beyond the grave. The unbeliever pronounces a death sentence on himself. For millions, this can be not merely disconcerting but a disastrous perception.” 

As Harrington viewed it, when people are deprived of rebirth vision, they “suffer recurring spells of detachment, with either violence or apathy to follow.” Harrington saw mass atheism, to which he subscribed, as responsible to most, if not all, society’s ills, including misplaced sexual energy.  Erich Fromm, another humanistic philosopher, agreed. “The state of anxiety, the feeling of powerlessness and insignificance, and especially the doubt concerning one’s future after death, represent a state of mind which is practically unbearable for anybody,” Fromm stated. 

As science progressed, its leaders became concerned as to how to replace the soul it had succeeded in eradicating.  Their solution was humanism – materialism, secularism, and rationalism bundled together with ethical and moral concerns and constraints. Also referred to as a moralist, the humanist was someone able to live a life of dignity and morality without subscribing to religious beliefs.  In effect, it was seen as a very noble and honorable way of living, one governed by discipline, moderation and courage rather than fear of punishment in an afterlife.  It was a more heroic approach than that of the religionist. Yet, the humanists struggled in their idealism.  While sound in principle, it was not so easy to put into practice, especially for those past their prime years and approaching what they saw as the abyss of nothingness.

One with our Toys

Research in the areas of past-life memories and near-death experiences supplemented earlier psychical research in countering the materialistic mindset, but the researchers in those fields, especially that of the NDE, were overly cautious in linking their findings to consciousness surviving death. It was all about enjoying this life, even if it meant self-deception, i.e., tricking oneself into enjoying it with a possible false assumption. Not until very recently have some leading NDE researchers dared make the link between the experience and a larger life. Meanwhile, religion has continued to stress the need to worship God while avoiding the evidence for survival, since some of it seemingly conflicts with established dogma and doctrine. This has made it quite easy for the fundamentalists of science to continue repudiating survival.  That is, the evidence for a Higher Power is much more subjective and elusive than the evidence for survival. No God, no afterlife is the mistaken inference.       

In spite of the overwhelming evidence for survival developed by scientists and scholars to this day, as well as the support provided by quantum physics, those subscribing to scientism, the other extreme from religious fundamentalism, have not yielded in their resistance. Moreover, the mainstream media has fully supported the fundamentalists of science.  The distinction between the findings of psychical researchers and the superstitions and follies associated with religion is too much and too inconvenient for science and the media to grasp.  And they ask why, if your God is so powerful, “he” can’t provide evidence that goes to absolute certainty. Victor Hugo, the famous French author and poet, asked this very question of a spirit claiming to have been Martin Luther in the physical body. The reply was that “doubt is the instrument which forges the human spirit.”  To put it another way, some doubt is vital to learning lessons that give life a purpose. 

Further bolstered by the entertainment and advertising industries, materialism, the core of nihilism, is simply too attractive to the vast majority of people. In recent years, the entertainment industry has bombarded the public with uncensored lewdness and vulgarity. 
Nevertheless, there is no indication that the Easter message of some 2,000 years ago is going away. The need for meaning in life beyond being “one with our toys” will always be there, even if mostly a subconscious need. “The decisive question for man is whether he is related to something infinite or not,” Jung asserted.  “That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.”

Although Sigmund Freud is remembered as an atheist, he is said to have sent a 1921 letter to researcher Hereward Carrington, saying: “If I had my life to live over again, I should devote myself to psychical research rather than psychoanalysis.”

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, and Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I.
His latest book, No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife is published by White Crow books.