BELIEF
Does it Matter?
My friend Jules was talking to me about writing a book and I mentioned I was writing one too.
“What’s it about?” he asked.
“What happens after we die, except we don’t die. No one’s dead. You know, the trivial stuff, that’s the premise.”
“Very niche then,” he joked. “For the fringes of society.”
“Maybe,” I replied. “Although most people think about it occasionally, after all, the death rate is still running at a hundred percent.”
It is true that among the people I know, men in particular, the majority don’t believe in an afterlife. They don’t want to contemplate death and in that group I’m definitely on the fringe.
In my limited experience, many people who identify as Christian do so because they were born into it. It’s tradition. But when you ask them what they actually believe, they don’t elaborate. Then there are those who have rejected the dominant religion of their culture for one reason or another, and because they’ve rejected that particular story, they reject or at least ignore all the other stories.
Organized religions begin with a story. They become codified, then political, and often end up as control mechanisms. From the Church’s perspective, any attempt to discover the nature of reality must be done within the confines of the institution. The Church might be fine for pastoral care and practical help, but when it comes to the question of existence beyond the physical world—the central theme of most religions—it has little to offer beyond its interpretation of the Bible. Some Christian groups, such as the Quakers and Pentecostals, encourage direct spiritual experience, but they are in the minority.
Throughout history, it’s difficult to find a society that didn’t—or doesn’t—believe in dimensions, spirit worlds, or realms beyond our own. I say “didn’t” because political systems such as Soviet communism once demanded absolute loyalty to the state, suppressing anything considered more important, such as organized religion. However, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Russians have turned their gaze to the heavens, leading to a resurgence of religious practice.
Thirty years after the communist era ended, a 2022 survey by the Levada Center, a leading independent polling organization in Russia, reported that 71 percent of the population identified as Orthodox Christian and 5 percent as Muslim, while 15 percent reported having no religious faith.
Polls can be misleading because of how questions are framed. For example, someone might not identify as religious yet believe in life after death—or they might consider themselves religious but reject certain concepts, such as an eternal afterlife.
A 2022 Gallup survey of sixty-one countries found that two-thirds (62 percent) of respondents said they were religious, while one in four said they were not. Atheists made up 10 percent. Among the rest: 57 percent said they believed in life after death; 23 percent said they did not believe anything happens when we die; 15 percent were undecided. In the U.S., 60 percent said they were religious; in Japan, it was 15 percent.
In the 2001 World Values Survey, 93.9 percent of Chinese respondents answered that they didn’t belong to a religious denomination. In China, where the population is ruled by a communist government, aside from any cultural differences, being a member of a religious organization—at least publicly—can be potentially dangerous, so a low polling number is understandable. However, when a different question is asked, the percentage increases substantially.
According to a 2019 Harvard Divinity Bulletin, 75 percent of respondents in China reported participating in ancestor worship rituals, and other polls suggest that more than 70 percent of the population regularly engages in the practice. Ancestor worship (or reverence) often includes a belief in some form of continued existence or spiritual presence beyond death.
Fear of Oblivion or What Comes Next?
During a conversation on the subject with my eighty-year-old father, I said, “You know, Dad, I think you’re wrong about the whole death thing. The evidence is out there that ultimately there is no death other than the dissolution of the physical body.” He didn’t want to debate it, whereas we regularly debated everything else. He didn’t even want to hear about it. It bothered him.
Similarly, I remember being at a dinner party and someone brought the topic up. A man sitting opposite me said he didn’t believe any of it. His partner interjected saying he was fearful of death and refused to go to funerals, and that by avoiding the subject he thought he could deny death by putting it out of his mind.
During the conversation, I said, “If I told you Santa Claus is god and the elves are his angels, would you believe me?” He laughed. “No, of course not.”
“You’d think I was crazy or having fun with you. Either way, the proposition wouldn’t bother you because you know it’s nonsense.”
He agreed. But he wasn’t laughing at the proposition that no one’s dead, even though he said he didn’t believe it. Just like the conversation with my father, it clearly bothered him. Both seemed certain of their positions and neither wanted to contemplate the possibility. The question is why? We weren’t talking about death being the end—which many people understandably fear—we were talking about potentially carrying on, which one might think would be good news for lovers of life. Maybe it’s because of what Shakespeare’s Hamlet called, “The dread of something after death, the undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveler returns.” In both cases it appeared that the fear of the unknown was as strong as the dread of annihilation, perhaps more so.
Imagine you are on your deathbed and someone offers you a pill. If you don’t take the pill you die and that’s it, but if you do take it, you’ll continue in another body, in another world. Would you take the pill? Both of these men were what I would call adventurers. Both were the World War II generation, and I’m pretty sure they would have taken the pill, yet they didn’t want to contemplate the undiscover’d country.
Shortly before his death in March 2022, Michael Cocks (mentioned in Chapter 3) and I had one of our regular video conversations. Michael had been an Anglican priest for more than sixty-five years. During the last nine years of his life, we had regular two-hour chats where we discussed religion, spiritual ideas, and whatever came to mind, but generally, we didn’t bother with the mundane.
I feel very privileged to have had those conversations, and while we often challenged and questioned each other’s ideas, I don’t remember our ever exchanging a cross word. Michael said he felt he benefited from our conversations because we talked about anything, whereas in his church, subjects that weren’t in the book of Common Prayer—reincarnation, for instance—weren’t generally discussed. During one conversation, I asked him for his definition of a Christian. “It’s the pursuit of Christ,” he replied. I liked that. It seems like a goal anyone can reach, whether we call ourselves Christian or not.
Michael saw phenomena such as synchronicities, deathbed visions, spirit communication, and NDEs as a validation of his faith, but he said he was in the minority among his fellow clergy. Some of his peers had lost their faith while still in post but hadn’t publicly “come out,” while others had converted to Christian atheism, which sounds like an oxymoron. Having rejected Church dogma, they had thrown the baby out with the bathwater and were unwilling to contemplate a spirit world beyond this one, despite the abundance of evidence. It’s understandable. Imagine spending your life convinced God is real and making a career of preaching Christianity to thousands of people, only to lose your faith. That sounds like an unnerving prospect. To then discover that there’s good evidence that something might lie beyond death might be too much to contemplate.
During our conversation, Michael told me he’d been having nightmares.
“What are you fearful about?” I asked.
“Oblivion,” he replied.
“Didn’t you get the whole Jesus thing?” I joked. “The immortal soul and all that?” He laughed and that led to a more general discussion about the fear of death.
Having reached ninety-three years old and a lifelong man of faith, Michael’s fear was of taking his last breath and ceasing to exist. My response was that if I had a fear of death, it was taking my last breath and finding myself in the basement of the many mansions Jesus talked about.
Before the accident, I was reasonably comfortable with the belief that one day I’ll go to sleep and not wake up, or take a final breath and that will be it. After all, I go to sleep every night, and to date, I haven’t worried about not waking up.
On the morning after I’d banged my head, I was lying in a hospital bed waiting for a general anesthetic. I’d read somewhere that a small number of people die from anesthesia (apparently around 1 in 100,000). I looked out a window at a small patch of grass and thought, I’ve packed a lot in, and if this is the last thing I see, that’s fine. I’m not a particularly brave person, nor was I being stoic, but I felt very peaceful—as if everything was as it should be.
Since that accident, my worldview has changed. I feel there is a consequence for everything, and death doesn’t change that. Death is the end of the chapter, but not the end of the story.
I remember watching a movie years ago. It was one of those old Hollywood gangster mafia movies. There’s a scene in it where the don has been shot. He’s lying on his deathbed and one of his lieutenants is sitting by his bedside trying to comfort him.
“How are you feeling?” the lieutenant asks.
“I’m scared,” replies the don.
“You don’t need to worry. No one can get you while I’m here.”
“I don’t mean that,” snaps the don. “I ain’t afraid of any man.”
“What then?”
The don looks him in the eye. “What if the priests were right?”
My thoughts exactly. The one thing about being a materialist is when you get to the end of your life, you might think, that’s it. It’s over. I learned a lot from supporting people who were feeling suicidal and discovered early on that many were in so much mental and/or physical pain, that death presented itself as a welcome release. But what gave some pause for thought was the possibility that if death is not the end, killing oneself might just make things worse.
I empathize with the materialist’s position. After all, we’ve had 2,000 years of what could rightly be called brainwashing—being told we are going to heaven or hell. When I was a materialist, I didn’t accept the premise that there is a higher moral authority or that life has any inherent meaning beyond what we choose to give it. From my perspective, the Ten Commandments were just ten rules for life, created by humans, not given to humans. It’s an easy position that requires no effort, other than the belief that the physical world is all there is.
Agnosticism also sounds like a cozy, secure, logical position. It seems reasonable to say I don’t know and leave it at that. The question is, does it matter to us as individuals? A common answer to the question: “What happens after death?” is, “I’ll worry about it when I get there.” But is that a good idea?
Belief at the Point of Death
Imagine a five-year-old boy. He is playing a game and is fully immersed in his own world, not worrying about the past or future. He’s living in the present, and all that matters at that moment is the game. Meanwhile, as a parent—someone who is a little further along the path—we might encourage him to eat healthily, learn to read and write, engage with others and be kind, because we know from experience that a friendly, engaging, literate, healthy child is more likely to have an easier journey through life. However, it takes work, and if the child was asked about the future, he might say, “I’ll worry about it when I get there.” If he takes no notice and does none of those things, he might still manage, he might even thrive, but for many, life will be more of a challenge. The communicators are telling us the same thing: “Sure, worry about it when you get here, but be prepared for a tough journey.”
On April 13, 1915, Salyards4 echoed other communicators observations, that at the point of death what we believe is important: “… Sometimes the mind of great learning (according to the standards of earthly learning) is more harmful,” he wrote, “and retards more the progress of that man in the ways and acquirements of truth, than does the mind that is, as you might say, a blank; that is, without preconceived ideas of what the truth is on a particular subject.
“This unfortunate experience exists to a greater extent in matters pertaining to religion than to any other matters, because the ideas and convictions which are taught and possessed of these religious matters affect innumerably more mortals than do ideas and convictions in reference to any other matters.
“A spirit who is filled with these erroneous beliefs, that may have been taught him from his mortal childhood, and fostered and fed upon by him until he becomes a spirit, is, of all the inhabitants of this world, the most difficult to teach and convince of the truths pertaining to religious matters. It is much easier to teach the agnostic, or even the infidel, of these truths, than the hide-bound believer in the dogmas and creeds of the church.”
In a communication with Padgett on January 4, 1917, Luke concurred:
“The infidel who says he doesn’t believe, the agnostic who says he doesn’t know, the orthodox who believes, but whose belief is erroneous, and the free thinker who believes only what reason teaches him as he proclaims—if such beliefs are not in accord with the truth all come under the same penalty—that is, the impossibility of becoming the perfect man while such erroneous beliefs or want of true beliefs exist.
“So I say, belief is a vital thing in the progress of a man towards perfection, and men should cease to declare and rest on the assurance of such declaration that it makes no difference what a man believes if he does what he may consider to be right and just.
“Why, I, who know, tell you that the earth planes of the spirit world are crowded with the spirits of men who are in darkness and stagnation in their progress towards the perfect man solely from the causes that I have above written, and some men have been in that condition for many long years, and will not find progress except as such erroneous beliefs leave them and beliefs in accord with the truth take the place of the former.
“But for man and spirits there is this consolation, that at some time, how long in the future I or no other spirit know, these erroneous beliefs will all be eradicated and man will again come into his original perfection. But the waiting may be long and distressing, and wearisome to many. …”
∞
In a 2011 interview with The Guardian newspaper, physicist Stephen Hawking said, “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
Hawking might be correct about the brain being a computer, but if our minds are more than just brains—and centuries of anecdotal and scientific evidence suggest that’s the case—then believing we simply cease to exist after death seems more like wishful thinking for those who are afraid of the light.
