Posted on 20 October 2011, 1:14

Last month the 14th annual Bakersfield Interfaith Conference addressed the question of afterlife.  Representatives of the world’s three largest faiths—Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism—shared their convictions, and a professional philosopher with materialist convictions made the case for extinction.  It was a lively time with almost 250 in the audience—by far the largest crowd we have ever had.  Who said the subject of afterlife is uninteresting!

I’ve thought a lot about this subject.  My recent book The Afterlife Unveiled is evidence of this, and my new novel, The Imprisoned Splendor, to be published next month by White Crow Books, takes place in the afterlife.  Allow me to make two points.

A number of my colleagues at the university where I work assume that my interest in the afterlife comes from disappointments in life—a happy afterlife would be compensation for a botched life in the here and now.  They could not be more wrong.  Instead it comes from a concern for life in the here and now.

To put it simply, if a society stops believing in an afterlife where its members are held accountable before God (or Higher Power) for what they do, they will tend to drift from the moral and cultural norms that are crucial to its existence.  As Ivan said in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.”  This drift, I believe, is occurring right now in our own country, especially among our youth.

It is not fashionable to say this, but every society needs absolutes.  Nazi Germany didn’t have any.  It was prepared to violate its treaty obligations if they became inconvenient.  And they did.  It was Himmler who asked the question, “What, after all, compels us to keep our promises?”  The answer was, Nothing.

The influential post-modern philosopher Richard Rorty couldn’t do much better.  He, too, lived without absolutes.  When asked how he defended his sense of moral outrage at the Nazi Holocaust, he could say only that it was based on his “personal sense of revulsion.”  But the Nazis didn’t share that revulsion.  So who is right?  Without absolutes, there is no answer.  Everything is relative.

The eleventh-century philosopher Al-Ghazzali, widely regarded as the most influential Muslim since Muhammad himself, classically makes the case against all this relativism.  To deny the existence of a surviving soul, to “deny the future life—heaven, hell, resurrection, and judgment”—is to invite moral chaos.  He predicted that men and women living without absolutes would “give way to a bestial indulgence of their appetites.”

And that’s what’s happening—in government, on Wall Street, in our cities, in our neighborhoods.  How many sacrifice their own interests when no one is policing them?  There are those who say that men and women are capable of policing themselves by using reason.  My experience of people who talk this way is that they are often the first to reason their way out of the policies and standards they helped create!

We need to feel we are being policed by a Power far bigger than we are and that there are penalties for our inhumanity.  In his book The Devil’s Delusion, David Berlinski, a secular Jew, makes this point.  No fan of the Catholic Church and the atrocities of some of its priests, he nevertheless defends it.  “Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons?  If memory serves, it was not the Vatican.”
   
The other point I want to make is that people suffer from metaphysical depression when they reject belief in an afterlife and a God to govern it—though they might not know it and would probably deny it if buttonholed.  One of Bakersfield’s most respected citizens, Stan Simrin, the city’s unofficial Torah teacher, put it this way a few days after 9-11 at the 2001 Gleaners’ breakfast: “If there is no God, then the existence of all that is beautiful and good is but accidental, the byproduct of blindly swirling atoms, or the equally unpurposeful mechanism of present day physics. . . . Atheism leads not necessarily to badness, but certainly to incurable sadness and loneliness.”

Along with Simrin, I am convinced that it is easier for people of faith to face death than for their materialist friends who deny the realty of anything beyond the physical body.  All of us are glad to be alive; we don’t want life to end.  But what a blessing to know that death is just the dropping of the physical shell.  That is what the paranormal evidence I study turns up—over and over and over again.

Stafford Betty’s new novel The Imprisoned Splendor

The hjackers of that planes in the 9/11 attacks and the others suicide bombers, only could has día that heinous and horribles deeds thanks theirs firm faith in an afterlife…

Stafford,

An interesting article. Relative to the comment about atheism “not necessarily leading to badness, but certainly to incurable sadness and loneliness,” I believe this is true of agnosticism and general indifference as well, at least in one’s final years, when opportunities for repression are limited. It may not be conscious sadness and loneliness, but it straddles the consciousness threshold and results in what William James called “soul sickness.”

I look forward to reading your novel.