Does it matter one way or another whether you believe in an afterlife? Maybe you believe it doesn’t. Or maybe you haven’t thought about it. I want to show why it should matter, and matter a lot. You might forward this message to your doubting friends.
There is nothing more fearful than dying if you think nothing follows. If you value life and are glad you were born, then watching its end approach can’t help but be depressing and even frightening. Many people find it so frightening that they refuse to even think or talk about it.
But the horror of dying vanishes if you confidently believe in an afterlife. This doesn’t mean you look forward to death. If you are healthy, you shouldn’t. It just means that the fear of total extinction disappears. And that will feel like a great blessing, a burden removed, as you navigate your way through life.
For most of us who have lived a long life, an afterlife provides hope of meeting loved ones. If you have lost a precious parent, spouse, friend, or even child, grief can be unbearable if you feel they have ceased to exist. But if they are alive in an afterlife, as spirit literature universally affirms, grief becomes more manageable. It’s amazing how many people report sensing the presence of their beloved dead. That can turn tears or harrowing anguish into tears of sorrow tinged with uplifting joy. They are not lost to you. They are waiting for you. What a difference that makes!
Another blessing that belief in an afterlife provides is a sense that what we do in life has consequences. We call this the law of karma, the law of the deed. The spirit literature I’ve been recommending makes it clear that the kind of afterlife awaiting you is determined by your moral character, the habits you build with your free will. If you believe this, you’ll often find the incentive to do the right thing when tempted to do the wrong. Our prisons are filled with criminals who never give this a thought. Would all those scammers who are forever trying to steal your money follow their trade if they believed in an afterlife governed by the law of karma? Belief in this law helps you mount the petty temptations we all have. It can make all the difference.
But belief in an afterlife brings something even better. The spirit literature I follow builds confidence in a Creator of immense proportions at the helm of a soul-making process. This means that we don’t just stop growing in the world we enter at death. Greater worlds follow. No one is forced to enter them, but many will seize the day and march ahead to realms of indescribable glory. For those who don’t, reincarnation is available.
Think of all the people you know who are drifting or slumbering through life. So many are trapped in meaningless jobs. So many kids never make an effort in school. So many jobless or retired people find nothing better to do than endlessly watch television or play video games. The days and hours of meaningless boredom just plod on. Belief in an afterlife that rewards character growth through loving service can awaken tired souls and open new vistas. The way we spend time matters. We should use it constructively. We might read a good book. Or volunteer our time to help someone. Or join a yoga group. Or pray or meditate daily. Or find a church, synagogue, temple, mosque, or gurdwara—whatever motivates us to do the inner work we need. The payoff at death for each of us is coming soon.
Until it does, let us all be a force for good in this world.
Stafford Betty, Professor of Religious Studies, CSUB, (ret) is the author of When Did You Ever Become Less by Dying?, Heaven and Hell Unveiled and his novel, Guardians of the Afterworld. His latest book, The Hell Dwellers: A Novel about the Dark Side of the Afterlife is coming in 2026. Stafford can be found at staffordbetty.com.
One benefit of acquiring confidence that life is everlasting, is that death is viewed as a doorway to freedom from the limitations of the human condition, rather than a black hole sucking our loved ones into oblivion. What this means is that those who have crossed over from life to life have simply experienced a change of zip code. Nothing real is lost. It’s all gain.
There are many incarnate people who cross the transom of my thoughts from time to time, that I haven’t seen or communicated with in decades. This phenomenon of separation in space and time from our friends in the flesh, is similar to what we experience with those who have been “promoted” to the next phase of existence. For us, it may result in transient sadness, but if accounts from the other world are remotely accurate, then our “dead” friends are freer, happier, and more alive than ever. Death is a cause for celebration, even though our joy for their liberation may also carry an undertone of grief.
Hopefully we are evolving towards a future where human receptivity to the spiritual realm will become such that the inner experience of separation from others, in and out of the flesh, will be the exception rather than the rule.
Well spoken, David.
I really enjoyed your text. I agree that it’s important to have the certainty of an afterlife. I gained this certainty through mediumistic messages from my wife. It’s important to know that we will be reunited with the loved ones we have temporarily lost in this life. This is also important in shaping our conduct in this life, as you mentioned.
It’s important to share this message, even if in today’s material world, it doesn’t interest many people. Thanks.
Well said, Jean-paul. Thank you.
Well spoken, Jean-paul. Thank you.
My many Christian friends seem to have no vision of the afterlife beyond praising God in a 24-7 church service. I believe that is the primary problem. It’s hard to imagine nothing but worship day in and day out.
While I have no bones to pick with any religion, “praising God in a 24-7 church service” would be my idea of hell, not heaven. Praising God can be seen as raising one’s eyes to the starry heavens, a manifest symbol of the majesty of the divine order. As one poet put it with reference to God; “The universe of stars is but a cloak to thee.”
Thank you for the article. I so much want to believe but with no actual proof there is a part that wonders if it is all just hopefull thinking.
I hear of those that feel they have proof either through validation from someone or actual contact themselves. Not having any of that experience – not for lack of trying – there is still a skeptic lurking in my soul. Blind faith is not something I can accept without some doubt. Wish it was different.
Angela,
Skepticism is the appropriate stance for anyone approaching a belief in continued existence after bodily demise. I had long held a wishy washy vague belief in some sort of afterlife. My assumption was that this little light of self awareness that I possess would at death merge with an infinite brightness of cosmic consciousness. The problem with such a belief is that it is untestable and immune from any argument hurled against it. Having read a number of the books published by White Crow, and many, many others, I have come to an evolving awareness that what may await us after this life is something less cosmically dramatic but, paradoxically, more human and down to earth.
Some scientists are fond of saying that “proof” applies only to alcohol and mathematics. That may be an unreasonably high standard by which to evaluate the reality of an afterlife. If you ask “Who ate all the chocolate ice cream” and your toddler’s face and hands are covered in the sticky stuff, then that would serve as “proof” that the toddler is, at least, one of the culprits. Law, which deals with human motives and action, utilizes forensic science along with old fashioned shoe leather to gather evidence to arrive at a level of proof sufficient for conviction. In criminal matters, the standard of proof required is “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Whether there are sufficiently reasonable doubts about the afterlife rests largely on who you ask. If the afterlife were put on trial, with a jury of common folk, who would win, the prosecution or the defense?
Angela, I think you are confusing “proof” with “evidence.” There is far more than a preponderance of evidence in the matter. Whether you accept it as “proof” is a subjective matter. “Blind faith” is believing without any evidence at all.
Angela, you and I had quite a bit in common until I did the research for my book When Did You Ever Become Less by Dying? The evidence you are looking for is right there. I’m pretty sure your doubts would disappear. That is how powerful the evidence is.
Another reason to believe in the afterlife is simply because it is true. That’s a bold claim, but unlike the purely philosophical concept of non-existence, the belief that life continues after “death” is a testable hypothesis. All who have passed from the earth bear witness (assuming they survive) to what follows after separation from the physical body. In principle, the “dead” might be able to communicate with us, appear in spectral form, or otherwise leave evidence of their continuing existence.
There can be no positive evidence of people passing into oblivion, because as Shakespeare put it, no traveller returns from that undiscovered country. The void of non-existence cannot host ghostly specters, or move ouija board pointers, or whisper in the psychic ear of the medium. Non-existence cannot form the elaborate mystical stage of near death experiences, or explain the other worldly visions that may appear on the deathbed. If the hypothesis of annihilation at death is true, then all mediums are frauds or deluded. If annihilation is true then NDE’s, despite whatever transformative effects they have on their recipients, or how powerfully real they seem to experiencers, must be hallucinations. Sorry to gaslight you Dr. Alexander, and all of the increasing number of those who have had transformative experiences coincident upon a brush with death, but you have been bamboozled, snookered, duped into believing a pleasant, luminous, lie. Dream on suckers; or so the skeptic might say.
All of the above inconvenient facts, which the nihilist must combat with an arsenal of dubious explanations, buttress the hypothesis of a life after life. However, the nihilist does have the firm backing of the consensus of the neurological community that mind is what the brain does. No functioning brain, no mind = death is final; or so they say. Such a hyperbolic claim from the bright minds of brain science, contradicting the beliefs and the experiences of countless people of all time and all places demands more than vigorous handwaving and a promissory note that one day a testable theory will arrive. Just you wait, it will be a doozy.
There’s a joke about a man looking under a parking lot lamp on a dark night. His friend comes along and asks him what he’s doing. He replies “I dropped my keys over there by my car, but the light is better here.”
On another blog post here, there is some commentary about the afterlife of the “Great Agnostic” Robert G. Ingersoll. While he spoke on a number of Spiritualist platforms in the late 19th century and was well aware of their beliefs, he was a hopeful agnostic with respect to life in the hereafter. He certainly would have preferred that his loved ones be consigned to the dust rather than become subjects of an angry, fickle, narcissistic god that dispatches those who displease him into eternal damnation. A number of mediums, however, reported that Ingersoll quickly arrived in a delightful humanist heaven, warmly greeted by kindred spirits and those he loved and lost in life. Though he was no friend of Jesus while in the flesh, Ingersoll was a devout keeper of the commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself. That love for humanity was his passport of safe passage to the spirit world.
That there are no atheists in foxholes, is clearly false. No doubt many atheists in foxholes found the carnage and mayhem around them as vivid confirmation that a loving God does not exist. Likewise, believing that death is an eternal rest, is not in itself a cause for horror. People that I’ve spoken to about death are more afraid of the dying part than the dead part. Socrates remarked that he awoke most refreshed after a night of dreamless sleep, ergo an eternal nap should be no worry. But Raymond Moody points out that what makes a dreamless night pleasant and refreshing is that you awake from it! Non-existence is literally nothing to look forward to.
Belief, in this scientific era, is under siege. Scientists say that they don’t have beliefs, they have hypotheses! But a hypothesis is essentially a belief, based on observations, that is subject to verification. If the hypothesis survives a beating on the anvil of test, and its predictions are true, then it goes in search of a theory for explanation.
We will all personally test the hypothesis that life continues after the dissolution of the body. Belief in an afterlife is not merely a form of Pascal’s wager as a clever means of getting a good seat on the Barge of the Dead. Nor is it simply a sure bet, that inhabitants haunting the Kingdom of Nothingness can never collect on.
The afterlife needn’t forever be consigned to the unfashionable realm of faith. There is, as yet, an undiscovered science of the soul that will, I trust, one day manifest a robust theory that all, but the most ardent materialists, should accept as a reasonable explanation for how the ghost of spirit enters and leaves the elegant machinery of life.
In messages to James E. Padgett Ingersoll claimed that after death he’d had an easier time than Swedenborg because of the latter’s entrenched beliefs. On September 27, 1915, he told Padgett, “I am Ingersoll, and I am not the agnostic any longer, but the most repentant believer in all God’s spirit world, and one who now knows that Jesus Christ was and is the son of God to the fullest meaning of the word.
Oh, how glad I am that I came to you when I did, and that you caused me to seek the society of your band of beautiful and bright spirits who are filled with the Divine Love of the Father. For if I had not been with them I would not have witnessed the scene of last night and today be a believer in the Jesus, who I now know is the saviour of men by his wonderful love and knowledge of the truth.”
“…the son of God to the fullest meaning of the word.” To some Christians this would mean Jesus is the co-creator of the universe with its trillion galaxies. But I don’ think this is what Ingersoll had in mind. I’d like to think he viewed Jesus as “the saviour of men by his wonderful love and knowledge of the truth,” and only that. That would be quite enough!
I would love to believe in an afterlife. I lost my mother and my wife twenty years ago and have often asked out loud for some response that would reassure me that they were still in existence. What I received back was a resounding silence. I am 78 now and have resigned myself to just winking out of existence. I won’t know about it, of course, so I will have no regrets.
Max, have you done any research on the question of survival? My little book When Did You Ever Become Less by Dying? Afterlife: The Evidence will probably change your mind. There are at least ten solid lines of evidence that will give you hope of meeting your wife and mother. Best wishes.