Life after Death - Major Religious Views
The history of religion is closely associated with beliefs in survival of death. Ancient burial pits, mounds, and tombs often included objects designed to be useful to the deceased in their next lives. From prehistory onward the available evidence suggests that survival belief has been widespread and dominant.
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Disbelief and Uncertainty
Disbelief also has its tradition, however. Early Chinese philosophy mostly saw death as the natural end to life. Because humans are all part of the cosmic process there is no reason to bemoan one's fate: It is best to become a good person and live well with others into old age. Ancestor cults did flourish, but the illustrious thinkers of the time discouraged people from investing too much in the prospect of immortality. Confucius himself replied to a disciple's question by saying, "If we do not yet know about life, how can we learn about death?"
The world has not been divided neatly between believers and disbelievers. Many people have experienced doubt or uncertainty. It is not unusual for people of strong faith to have wrestled with their doubts from time to time, nor for skeptics to wonder if immortality, improbable as it seemed to them, might not yet be true. Doubt and disbelief can be occasioned by weakened or conflicted custom, discredited authority, negative personal experience, discredited or counter facts, and compelling alternative arguments.
Belief and Faith
Belief can be grounded on custom, authority, positive personal experience, inner knowledge, external fact, reason, or any combination thereof. By "faith" is usually meant a certainty of belief derived from personal experience and/or inner knowledge.
Custom and authority, reinforced by impressive rituals, was probably enough for many people who lived in small face-to-face societies and worshiped local gods. Intense ritual experiences can also produce an inner conviction that one has touched the sacred. The truth was therefore felt as inside one's self as well as with the people and nature. Authority became a stronger force in religious belief as people organized themselves into larger organizational structures. Although the Egyptian dynasties with their central authorities took shape about 7,000 years ago, there were still many small societies worshiping local gods throughout the days of the Roman Empire. Politics, social action and control, and religion were tightly entwined in emerging civilizations. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were all beset with internal dissension on a variety of concepts and practices. Authorities, bolstered by canons of approved writings, systematically accepted a particular view of survival while rejecting others.
The God Factor
Questions about the existence and nature of God and the survival of death lingered despite the weight of Church authority and tradition. Medieval theologians and scholars debated these related issues with intensity and often ingenuity. Saint Thomas Aquinas, for example, argued that the soul is immortal despite its association with the vulnerable body because it comes from God who is the "necessary being" on whom all other creatures depend. This was an influential view, but there were dissenters who argued that "the immortal form" that survives death seems to have none of the characteristics of the actual person who dies—this kind of immortality was too abstract and distant for the critics of Aquinas. Elite scholars made repeated attempts to prove immortality by rational analysis and were regularly taken to task by other elite scholars.
The Challenge of Science
Immortality became a keen issue for society at large as science emerged, challenging the order of the universe as conceived by theology. Astronomers in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries made observations that contradicted the Catholic Church's official beliefs about the nature and motions of earth, sun, and other celestial bodies. In the nineteenth century the English naturalist Charles Darwin's theory of evolution led to a convulsive response on the part of established institutions. If humans are but another kind of animal, what then of immortality?
Philosophers and scientists lined up on both the side of belief and disbelief. Strenuous arguments pro and con continued well into the twentieth century. Meanwhile, academic philosophy quietly slipped away from what increasingly seemed like an outmoded and unrewarding debate, and only in the late twentieth century took the challenge up again.
Does God Exist?
Belief in a just God and personal immortality was shaken by calamitous events throughout the twentieth century. Two world wars, genocides, and a host of other disastrous events led many to reject the traditional assurances. Others devoted themselves to assuage their sorrows and affirm their beliefs through spiritualism and communication with the dead. Brought up within conventional churches, some set off on quests to find ways of life that might speak more directly to their needs. These quests sometimes took the form of exploring Eastern religions, sometimes in reshaping Judeo-Christian beliefs and practices (from which the New Age movement emerged).
What Happens when We Die?
Reports of near-death experiences were welcomed as another opportunity to affirm personal immortality. At the core of these reports is an absolute conviction: "This is what happened; this is what I saw, what I felt, what I experienced!" Logical arguments for or against survival of death are always vulnerable to powerful rejoinders. Scientific findings are always subject to modification, even rejection, by subsequent studies. What a person feels and experiences, however, can seem sufficient within itself. A sense of direct experience and inner knowledge is more convincing to many people than a survey of external facts or convoluted argumentation.
Changes Change Focus
By the waning years of the nineteenth century longstanding social and moral order was rapidly crumbling. The pace of technology and commerce had picked up dramatically and shifted attention to the opportunities of the present life on earth. The establishment had a difficult time keeping the lid on simmering developments in all areas of society. Increasingly, death became a concern for individuals and their families and fell less under the control of church and state. The "market culture" had taken over, and ideas about survival of death would have to compete not only with each other but also with other, sometimes more compelling, possibilities. And compete they did, with contests spanning through the twentieth century.
The Question Still Remains . . .
At the turn of the twenty-first century an enormous range of ideas, attitudes, and practices presently coexist. Little, if anything at all has been settled, and the survival of the "Survival Question" appears to be assured for some time to come with societies, organizations, and especially religions squaring-off and trying to maintain and often defend their positions.
World-Class Religions and their views:
- Atheism
- Christian
- Catholic
- Judaism
- Islam
- Buddhist
- Zoroastrianism
- Hinduism
- Shinto
- Confucianism
- Jainism
- Taoism
- Sikhism
- Bahá'í
