Survival of Death and Immortality: Belief in Life After Death
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Wednesday, October 11, 2000
Abstract
Is the World Real?
People of a philosophic bent like to remind us that objective experience does not exist. All experience is subjective. Usually the intention of such a statement is to disparage science which takes the reality of the world as an axiom. It is true that all experience is subjective because it comes to us through our individual senses. It is the only world that we know or can know, so why is it not real to us? Subjective, it might be, but to each of us it is real. It might be that other human beings are illusions, but to each of us they seem real, and seem to have experiences rather like our own. We therefore hypothesise a real world outside of ourselves, and that we can gain knowledge from others in it by exchanging experiences. We might be deluded but no one has proposed any other hypothesis that works as well at allowing us to understand things.
We might be living in a virtual reality machine of a much more sophisticated world with more dimensions, but this cartoon world of the greater world is the only one we know or can experience, so it is the real world for us, even if there is a greater world beyond it. An opium smoker would equally live in a dream world until he died of an OD or starvation. He might prefer to live or die in his opium induced dreams, but time was when he knew the real world. If we live in some sort of cartoon world of a greater reality, we never knew the reality, unless it manifests as the perpetual yearning we have for “eternal life” or “life after death.” But even if it does, it cannot alter the reality of our senses, and that is all we know.
So, there are hypotheses about unknown worlds, but the only world we can know is our own subjective one. There is nothing to be gained in terms of wisdom from refusing to hypothesize that our senses actually do reflect some objective reality. Anyone can say it is only a hypothesis, but hypotheses live and die in their practical worth, and this one has proved it is valuable. Indeed, it seems such a good hypothesis that most people assume it is true except when they think about it, when they are liable to deny it despite their everyday lives.
The reason is perhaps that our own senses which receive information from the world are self-consistent as long as they are functioning all right. Our senses act within us as if they were separate observers and confirm that the world is real enough in practice, as if we were viewing it as several different individuals. If they begin to go wrong we get confused because the signals are not self-consistent. So, let us be convinced that to all intents and purposes the world outside us is real and we live in it. It is the Goddess and we should therefore value her as much as our lives, for that is what she is.
Nazarene Ideas
Keith Augustine, an undergraduate student, has collected the arguments against the idea of life after bodily death in several articles at the Internet Infidels website. We are indebted to Keith’s work in our critique here of Christianity’s carrot for its senseless donkey.
The original idea of the Nazarenes was that they would not survive death but that they would be resurrected into life after death. The initial success of Jesus was nothing to do with his suffering or teachings but because he seemed to have risen from the dead proving resurrection and that is still the proof most believers accept that Jesus was God.
Christian belief was that when people died they remained dead until the judgement day when they would be resurrected into this world and judged on the quality of their works in life. If they had done good and noble work in life, the judgement was favourable and they enjoyed eternal life on earth in the kingdom of God, a world free of sin.
Today, though, Christian beliefs about the afterlife are different. They say that believers or those who have faith will live after death, not on this earth, but in a balmy place, but those who do not believe, however good they are, and those who are wicked will be shrivelled up, by the second, in a hot and fiery place, forever!
Now, in a new revision of their belief, Christians seem to think that judgement is somehow continuous; that people die and then go straight to heaven or hell. Heaven is assumed by everyone, though their God had told them that many were called but few could enter the pearly gate.
Anyway, that is roughly the present situation. People believe they die then float around somewhere up there or in another dimension waiting for their friends and relatives to join them to bask in sheer delight in the presence of God—forever—and occasionally sending them spirit messages to encourage them. Strictly this is not Christianity, but there are few modern Christians who would not believe it.
What, though is the firm basis for the belief in everlasting life—in human immortality—or is it simply that, a belief? Is there really life after death? It is a question central to the credibility of religions like Christianity which claim to be able to save you—ensure that you will enjoy eternal delight rather than eternal torture. A personal future life is supernatural and the supernatural remains the refuge of religion as it always has been, though it gradually shrinks as science finds natural explanations for it. The scientific evidence we review here, is that consciousness and its expression—personality—only exist with physical life. There is no reliable evidence for a life after death and the burden of its proof should fall on those who believe in it. We get no proof—merely anecdotes. On the evidence no educated person could reasonably believe in a personal survival after death however desirable it might seem.
Believers might think it impossible for a good God to permit the anguish of the absolute death of a personality once he has created it, but that argument depends on a belief in a good and almighty god. Indeed, the belief in God is sustained by the promise of immortality. Christianity has flourished on people’s fears of death. Christian salvation is the promise of everlasting life in bliss, and plainly, to have everlasting life, first death must be revoked. Regrettably for Christian beliefs, there is no evidence for it and therefore no evidence for salvation. If that is distressing, you can take comfort that there is also therefore no evidence for eternal roasting in a hot oven.
At this point Christians are fond of quoting the maxim:
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The maxim is obviously true and is a caution to scientists not to neglect the possibility of the very unusual. Here though we are not talking about the very unusual, if believers are correct, but the very common. Furthermore it is meant as a warning rather than a principle of daily life. In daily life, scientific or legal, it carries no weight at all. I could not say in a court of law:
Fred pinched my bike—I have no evidence but that doesn’t mean he didn’t.
I would get thrown out. I have to back up my assertions with evidence. I could not say as a scientist:
Porridge is a cure for smallpox—I have no proof for it but that doesn’t mean it isn’t.
Yet Christian bishops, intelligent and well educated men, say:
Belief in Jesus is a cure for death—I cannot prove it but that does not mean it isn’t.
One would imagine that not even an appeal to faith could vindicate a belief that is incoherent. Yet the metaphysical beliefs of Christianity are thoroughly incoherent and attempts by Christian theologians to find sense in them are so convoluted that only other Christian theologians bother to study them. Curiously that has proved a boon to the priests and prelates because the ordinary Christian punters conclude that the wisdom of God is beyond them and put their trust in the clergy—just as the clergy want!
Make it simpler. A pleasant and convincing man you have met advises you;
I have shares in Caribbean Molasses. Buy them and in a year you’ll be a millionaire.
Would you buy them?
Theories of Survival
We are speaking here and in any Christian context of the survival of the personality, the survival of bodily death as distinct individuals. Personality is the characteristic of consciousness which allows it to be uniquely identified over time. A theory of impersonal survival seems less contentious and possibly more likely, an example being the Buddhist belief in Nirvana as a kind of absolute mind that individual minds merge into on enlightenment. Christians would not regard this as survival at all, and perhaps they are right. Our awareness like our life is our own. We cannot know any other. However, we have an effect on the world by living in it which survives our death and arguably our consciousness could affect some wider cosmic consciousness.
The hypothesis that the personality survives death requires a theory of how the mind relates with the body. Three have been proposed; the disembodied mind, the astral body and resurrection.
- A disembodied mind, often considered to be the soul, is considered not material and not located but retains consciousness.
- An astral body is considered material, has shape, position and the characteristics of the physical body as well as the mind of its owner but is tenuous to the point of non-existence. In principle then the astral body is detectable but in practice it is usually too tenuous to detect. Attempts to measure it leaving the body at death have not been reproducible.
- Resurrection implies the death of personality with the physical body and its resurrection with the body, since otherwise personality must survive in one of the two forms already discussed. Christian belief is that a soul exists and is rejoined with the resurrected body, thus combining resurrection and the idea of a disembodied mind. Resurrection can be the reassembling of the decayed corpse or the creation of an identical replica of the body. The Christian idea of resurrection at some judgement day in the future or in a transcendental world is beyond empirical testing.
If the mind depends on the mechanical functioning of the brain then survival in the form of disembodied minds or astral bodies is ruled out but not resurrection. The mind has to be independent of the brain if disembodied minds or astral bodies are to exist. But problems plague the ideas of disembodied minds, astral bodies, and resurrection casting doubt on their truth.
Whatever our minds are they make contact with the world through the senses of the body. For all that the mind of the dead person is disembodied, immaterial and non located, accounts of those who have met them usually describe them with the body, activities, functions and environments of people living on earth. If the spirit has no body, how does it behave as if it had? The spirit which has survived death apparently experiences just those things which require a body. It simply will not do to say that the spirit remembers the senses, environment and so on of its life and projects them somehow to the observer. Memory will not allow it new experiences as a spirit. It cannot be deprived of the means of making contact with this world without disappearing from it. The problem is like the problem of how the invisible man can see. The spirit must therefore have all the senses, bodily functions and so on of a body. In short, it cannot be disembodied. The idea of a disembodied mind reduces to absurdity.
Turning now to theories of the astral body. Here we have an attempt to preserve the visual form of the earthly body without its solidity. Most people image themselves like this when they die. The body is so essential to us that even when it is discarded after death, it lingers in an attenuated form to allow us to retain our senses and individuality. At least now the bodily appearance of spirits can be rationalised. But astral bodies appear in astral clothes. That is because they live in an entire astral plane which has curious parallels in almost every respect with the world we live in, including the need for clothes, it seems.
The astral body is supposed to be an exact duplicate of the physical body and it experiences all that happens to the physical body in its lifetime despite its lack of substance. Spirits used to be called shades and one might argue that the astral body is like a shadow. The shadow behaves just as the object does that casts it. If the object is hit by an arrow, its shadow is hit by the shadow of the arrow. Why then does the astral body not die when the physical body dies? If someone died with an arrow through the heart, the astral heart must have been similarly injured. And if one tries to argue that the astral body is not an exact duplicate of the physical body, then the identity of the spirit with the dead person has been lost.
There are many more problems. What form of matter constitutes the astral body? If it is material even in the least sense, like a neutrino, it can be detected. Why does the astral body remain undetected except when it wants to be? How does an astral body function?
Coming to resurrection. It is said that with every cup of tea we imbibe some of Aristotle’s atoms (or any other person in history that you like). Literal resurrection of the decayed corpse faces a single insuperable difficulty: How are the constituent parts of a long-decayed corpse that have been absorbed into other human beings going to be reconstituted along with the other people who share the same matter? If someone eats someone else, who has the claim to the atoms which pass from one to the other. Perhaps nobody will miss the odd atom since they have so many, but it depends where they are. A missing atom in someone’s DNA could cause a mutation. More serious is that resurrection requires a huge violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
Perhaps then we can conclude that resurrection involves the creation of a new body that is not materially continuous with the old. The philosophical problem here is: is a replica the same thing as the original? Plainly it is not, but this type of resurrection demands that it is. Even gathering all the dispersed atoms of a decayed corpse together again, yields bodies with different histories so they cannot be the same—one was made naturally by growth whereas the other was made supernaturally by God. Children are aware of this. If a child carefully builds a house of cards which the mother accidentally knocks over, the child is likely not to be grateful that the mother rebuilt it. The child will be sulky, knowing that its house was a different one no matter how identical they might be. The child had not built the replacement.
Well, that doesn’t bother you, perhaps because God had remade you exactly as you were. What then if God, through an oversight, resurrected you before you had died, which one would be you? If you reply that you are the original one then why should any replica of you be thought of as you even after you had died? Don’t say it’s all hypothetical. Life after death is hypothetical. The truth is that identity depends upon growth and evolution. I might have none of the original atoms I had twenty years ago but the continuous evolution of this body guarantees that I am the same person. And bodily continuity seems more essential to personal identity than memory because memory claims can be real or false. Memory in itself is not enough to make you the same person over time—bodily continuity seems to be required.
Now if continuity is important, do we have spirits that are suffering from senile dementia? Whether you are talking about astral bodies, souls or bodily resurrection, on the face of it the spirit will be the person at the time of death. Believers do not like the idea that they might have to spend an eternity demented even in heaven and revise the theory to have people in heaven as they were in the best years of their lives. Presumably the choice of best years is God’s. Jesus in the New Testament explicitly avoided all such questions by saying effectively that we do not remain the same people after death but become angels. Angels are sexless so do not have to remain eternally loyal to their loving wife or husband in this life. The partners are not rejected but simply have no need of sexuality.
Incredible? Yes but, come on, it’s all incredible isn’t it? Honest?
Well not to most young Americans—70% believe in angels! That really is incredible!
There is a fourth way in which people might survive bodily death which is very close to the Christian conception. It is the hypothesis that the whole of our existence is unreal. We are not experiencing real life at all. We shall return to that at death. What we are experiencing is a virtual reality of a hyperexistence where we live as hyperbeings—gods, if you like. Just as we can get engrossed in virtual realities of various degrees ranging from games playing and obstacle courses, through exacting intellectual games like go and chess to TV and cinema and ultimately the promise of modern electronic virtual realities machines, the hyperbeings have the same idea.
In this theory, it is the mind that really exists not the body and the material world which is all an illusion. Descartes knew that the mind, if nothing else, existed. And so it might be. In the hyperworld, we are stripped of our real memories with a drug or whatever, are placed into a console with a scenario programmed and we live it. Because our true memories have been temporarily wiped, we only have memories picked up in the virtual reality. When we die in the programme, it is merely the end of the "game" and we wake up into real life again—heaven! Are the people we meet in our virtual life real or are they illusions too? We will not know until we wake up. They could be either elements of the program or, like an interactive game, they could be other people in hyperreality.
Why? What is the purpose of it? We are told this is a Vale of Woe by Christians. Perhaps they are right in a sense and we are put through the programme as a test—a sort of hyper-outward-bound course or a hyper-initiative test. If we fail we might have to be put through it again, and again, until we succeed—the Buddhist idea of reincarnation. Or perhaps it is like most of our virtual realities, it is just an amusement. We are in a hyper-cinema or a hyper-arcade. This idea has been the basis of a number of science fiction stories and science fiction has a strange way of becoming science fact.
Can we test it? Since the mind is the only real thing, our link with the real hyperreality is our mind. Once we become aware we are living an illusion we are in the situation of a lucid dream. We can keep telling ourselves: “It’s only a dream. It’s only a dream”. Perhaps people who die before old age have realised it and woken up into reality. So, if you decide to test it , you might die, but since heaven is a hypersphere of hyperbeings, it is like becoming a god. You might find though that you are in a hyper-corrective center being taught a lesson for your crimes, or in a hyper-mental hospital!
It is clear, though that praying to a god is not going to help you. Your God is yourself!
Psi Evidence
Parapsychologists say their indisputable evidence for paranormal or “psi” phenomena has been ignored or denied by the scientific community because psi does not fit its preconceptions and cannot be explained by normal science. They speak of a coming scientific revolution comparable to Copernicus’ discovery that the sun is the center of the solar system.
Historical figures like Copernicus and Darwin were faced with real dogmata and had to amass evidence to prove their theories, opposed by the Church. Any resistance today is much more diffuse and charges of scientific dogmatism are largely unjustified. Science is built up on a huge foundation tried and tested through experience. New discoveries depend upon the truth of the existing ones. If any brick in this edifice had been seriously flawed a mass of fissures would have rapidly opened above it. Whenever fissures begin to appear the surrounding structure is examined and the source of the weakness found. There is no basis here for dogma, except in the narrowest surrounds when cracks can sometimes be ignored or papered over for awhile. Since paranormal phenomena are by definition elusive, arguably this has happened, but any scientists can make their reputation by exposing a flaw and repairing it. It is the openness of science that prevents it from being dogmatic.
Scientific studies are based on observation and must come up with testable predictions. A century of effort by some scientists to establish paranormal phenomena failed. Only now does Robert Jahn seem to have made a case for a 1 in a 1000 anomaly in randomness when an operator desires a certain outcome. If the phenomenon is really mind over matter and some way is found of amplifying it, then there might be a basis for a revolution. But just as Jahn, a physicist, painstakingly studied his random machines for 18 years, any such revolution will be scientific and the paranormal phenomena will become normal. Part of the problem of psi is that there is no support for it in theory meaning that testable predictions cannot be made. Indeed, supernatural phenomena have the characteristic of a mirage or rainbow—they change into something else as you approach them. Psi phenomena can best be described as any phenomenon for which no one has yet thought up a tenable theory. As soon as there is a tenable theory the paranormal disappears.
Apparitions are mainly hoaxes or hallucinations. Photographic evidence for ghosts looks remarkably like double exposures and cleverer trick camera work. People hallucinate because the eye and brain tries to make sense out of what they see. Faces and forms appear even in random shapes. When perception is not clear and people are in a state of fear, the brain is liable to give a signal to flee. The signal might be an apparition of something menacing. Clues to this are the fact that the form of ghosts is culturally linked. Like religious apparitions people see what they already have in their mind. The present hysteria about mass abductions by little grey wide-eyed beings is exactly the same. People today are pre-disposed to hallucinate greys rather than goblins, banshees or demons.
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are also cited as parapsychological evidence for survival but other than the personal experience that people have, there is no evidence for them. Again we are in a dream world. Dreams are real but they are not physical happenings but phenomena of the mind. Despite using all of the sensitive means of detection at the disposal of science, no one has been able to get a reproducible correlation between someone passing by in an OBE and a detectable effect. An experiment was designed to determine if OBE subjects can retrieve information from a remote location by viewing target letters, numbers or pictures, placed in distant rooms. Some tried to reverse the procedure by determining where subjects went during OBEs. Results were mixed and inconclusive. No paranormal phenomenon was clearly manifest.
However, people who have OBEs are better able to construct bird’s-eye views of normal situations in their heads and are more likely to recall dreams in a bird’s-eye perspective. Now that might sound pretty unimportant but if it were well developed it could prove to be a valuable asset, especially to the military.
Visions of a balmy place when people are near to death or NDEs are also given as evidence of astral bodies or disembodied minds. Though the details of NDEs depend on the individual’s personal and cultural background, their central features seem common and so proponents claim NDEs are objective evidence for an afterlife. These proponents do not however say how these afterlife phenomena can be distinguished from what goes on in a dying brain quite naturally through oxygen deprivation, endorphin release, and random neural firing. Computer simulations of random neural firing based on eye-brain mapping of the visual cortex have produced the tunnel and light characteristic of NDEs. The experiences of dying people are likely to be similar as the brain shuts down but mostly they are not reported. Those which are are similar to the mystical experiences recorded by those who deprive themselves in various ways with the intention of bringing them on.
The patients who report NDEs are not actually returning from death because brain death is irreversible and even in cases of people recovering from near death, only one-third report NDEs. Perhaps only one third of us go to heaven!
The core features of NDEs are found in drug-induced and naturally occurring hallucinations. A build-up of carbon dioxide in the brain will induce NDEs. The successive stages of NDE visions have occurred in sequence under the influence of hashish and a tunnel effect is a common form of psychedelic hallucination. NDEs can be induced by direct electrical stimulation of brain areas surrounding the Sylvian fissure in the right temporal lobe.
Physiological and psychological factors affect the content of the NDE. Noises, tunnels, bright lights, and other beings are more common in such as cardiac arrest and operations, whereas euphoria, mystical feelings, life review, and positive transformation can occur when people simply believe they are going to die. That people sometimes change their personality, usually for the good, after an NDE is a result of facing death rather than a vision of heaven. Those who have been close to death are equally likely to change their way of living whether or not they had a vision of heaven.
Some claim information has been obtained in NDEs by means other than sensory perception. Accurate descriptions of the environment in NDEs are cause by the altered state of awareness which exists when a person is semi-conscious. Real perceptions are incorporated into their hallucinatory dreams. There is no corroboration for claims of perception outside of the immediate environment of the patient or accurate perception in NDEs in the blind. NDE cases have been reported where the patient has identified the “beings of light” as the medical staff making resuscitation attempts.
The panoramic life review closely resembles a form of temporal lobe epilepsy. There are even cases where epileptics have had OBEs or even seen apparitions of dead friends and relatives during their seizures. Children having an NDE are more likely to see living friends than anyone who has died, suggesting that NDEs are not experiences of an external afterlife but dreamlike recollections.
Past-life memories are also considered evidence for survival, particularly reincarnation. There has been evidence accumulated by parapsychologists where people provide accurate historical details when they describe “memories” of apparent past lives while under hypnosis. This evidence is more consistent with cryptomnesia. The subconscious mind as a vast, muddled storehouse of information from books, newspapers, magazines, lectures, television, radio, direct observation and even from overheard scraps of conversation. Under normal circumstances most of this knowledge is not subject to recall, but sometimes these deeply buried memories are spontaneously revived or revived to please the hypnotist. They may seem baffling, since their origins are completely forgotten. Past-life regressions have often convincingly been traced to forgotten memories. Historical novels read many years before and forgotten are a common source.
Another form of past-life evidence does not involve hypnotic regression. “Memories” of previous lives spontaneously occur during waking life in cases investigated in India by Ian Stevenson. The religions of India teach reincarnation so here we have a culturally linked phenomenon. Stevenson collected cases where children generally between two and four year old began talking about their “previous lives” and even their previous death. Usually the memories are gone by age eight. In several cases, the persons the children claimed to be in a previous life did in fact exist and many descriptions given were accurate.
Stevenson dismissed the possibility of fraud because he saw no motive for it, but many children claimed to have belonged to a higher caste, and a motivation for gain is obvious. One boy wanted a third of his “past-life father’s” land. An anthropologist and a lawyer, asked by Stevenson to examine some cases, were not convinced. The two families did not know each other before the inquiry in only 11 of some 1,111 cases. Mostly, they had met years before and the chance of independent testimony was small. Even 7 of the 11 were flawed in some other respect. Rebirth cases are anecdotal evidence of the weakest sort.
Mediums are often cited as evidence for survival but they are not. Doubtless some mediums have unusual abilities which could perhaps be developed more successfully if they did not invent their silly pseudo scientific or religious theories and jargon of psychic energies, vortexes, spirit guides and so on. These women—mostly they are women—where they are not plain fraudsters, have a highly intuitive sense which could probably be better developed if they thought of it properly rather than in the nonsensical way they do. If mediumistic phenomena are indicative of survival then those claiming it must prove it is the only hypothesis able to explain the facts. Otherwise the survival arguments have no force. If any natural reason can be supposed, then the survival argument deflates, however bizarre the event, for the onus is to show it is paranormal. Intuition is, in any case, almost paranormal at present because it is undervalued and underdeveloped in our society.
Scientific Inquiries
While the parapsychological evidence for survival is insufficient, the physiological evidence for death of mind with brain is more than sufficient. Evolutionary evidence is that the abilities of the mind are proportional to the size and complexity of the brain in relation to the size of the animal. Developmental evidence is that mental abilities emerge with the development of the brain—failure in brain development prevents mental development. Clinical evidence is that irrevocable brain damage from accidents, toxins, diseases, and malnutrition can cause mental abilities to be permanently lost.
Then there is neuroscience. Electrical or chemical stimulation of the human brain arouses perceptions, memories, desires, and other mental responses. Altering the brain’s chemistry can cause drastic personality changes. Schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease are dramatic examples of mind-brain dependence. If you ingest or inject any of several different types of drugs which influence the brain, you can alter your mental states. If you are thinking of suicide, don’t go to a psychiatrist, go to a pharmacologist. Chemicals like prozac cannot get rid of your social troubles but they can relieve suicidal tendencies.
“Split-brain” patients who have undergone an operation that severs the corpus callosum to reduce epileptic seizures yield remarkable evidence against a disembodied mind. The corpus callosum is a broad band of fibers that directly connects the left and right hemispheres of the neocortex. When it is cut, the two hemispheres of the brain are separated and function virtually independently. The result of split-brain surgery is the formation of two mental systems, each with independent mental attributes. A variety of psychological tests corroborate the existence of two streams of consciousness demonstrably unaware of the contents of the other. If information is presented to only one hemisphere of a split-brain patient, the other hemisphere is unaware of it and is not capable of understanding the reactions of the informed hemisphere. Has such a person grown twin souls? Presumably not, but why then cannot their disembodied mind pass information from one to the other hemisphere reuniting the person’s consciousness?
Survival proponents who think that the brain is an instrument of the soul try to reconcile physiology and the soul by arguing that like a coloured glass which only transmits the light that shines through it (since it does not create the rays itself) and like an organ which transforms already existing air into music, the human body acts as a transmission apparatus for the supernatural soul. Now arguments like this impressed Bishop Butler 300 years ago but today they are merely interesting analogies and prove nothing. Even so the analogy is imperfect. If the human body corresponds to a coloured glass then the living personality corresponds to the coloured light that the glass transmits. Now while light in general will continue to exist without the coloured glass, the specific red or blue or yellow rays that the glass produces will certainly not persist if the glass is destroyed. Similarly, without the organ the particular vibrations of the air giving the appropriate tone and timbre to the air will not exist.
A severe injury to the head may change a cheerful man into a sullen and morose homicidal maniac. Did the blow change the man’s soul or is it merely the instrument that is bent and the man’s soul remains cheerful? Implants of “brain pacemakers” which electrically stimulate the cerebellum in the brains of psychotics often relieve their symptoms totally. A depressed former physicist heard voices commanding him to choke his wife. Given a brain pacemaker his depression lifted and the voices vanished. Later the pacemaker’s wire broke and the poor man again had to be restrained from strangling his wife. When the wires were repaired, again the man’s behaviour improved. Is this man’s soul a candidate for the everlasting grill or the balmy place?
Does the soul age with the body or is the soul constant? If the soul is constant and only able to express itself through that imperfect instrument the body, what is our real personality? We cannot know, because the only personality we can meet is that one moderated by the imperfect body. And, if this is the case why should God punish the poor soul by perennial burning when the instrument it had to play was defective? The coloured glass transmits brown light instead of red so God throws away a perfectly good lightbulb!?
With the single exception of hypnosis, not one of the phenomena originally classed as supernatural, or later as paranormal, has achieved general acceptance among the scientific community. Not one demonstrable, or repeatable, paranormal effect has been discovered—with the possible exception of the minute effect reported by Jahn after 18 years of exhaustive trials. Not one testable hypothesis has been proposed which unites these supposed disparate phenomena or even offers a valid prediction of one of them.
Consciousness as inseparable from the functioning of the brain remains the cornerstone of physiological psychology because the theory is scientifically parsimonious, fruitful in its productivity and the range of phenomena accounted for and because there is no credible alternative.
Experimental scientists and neuroscientists have shown that consciousness depends on the brain. Few lay people today deny that consciousness depends on the brain. And even all parapsychologists do not believe that psychic phenomena indicate the independence of mind and body—many consider psi as an undeveloped or partly lost brain mechanism or instinct.
If the mind depends upon the body, it follows that the mind must die when the brain dies. This is hard for many to accept but refusing to believe something does not make it any the less true. Denying the death of the personality at bodily death is as obstinate as the refusal of seventeenth century cardinals to look through Galileo’s telescope at the celestial orbs.
Bertrand Russell had a healthier attitude:
I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.
In the mid-18th century philosopher David Hume stated the common sense basis of the finality of death:
The weakness of the body and that of the mind in infancy are exactly proportioned; their vigour in manhood, their sympathetic disorder in sickness, their common gradual decay in old age. The step further seems unavoidable; their common dissolution in death.
Jews and Christians might note, merely out of interest, that their own bible has the perfect expression of the reality of death, despite their eternal life bribery for converts:
But man dieth, and wasteth away:
Yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?
As the waters fail from the sea,
And the river decayeth and drieth up:
So man lieth down, and riseth not:
Till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake,
Nor be raised out of their sleep.Job 14:10-12
Is this something the Holy Ghost missed, or is it the truth, and the rest fodder for fleecing flocks? Nothing we have discovered in the years since Job compel us to believe differently from him, no matter how much we might dislike it. We must conclude that all of the people, popes, priests, preachers, rabbis, mullahs, mediums, gurus, quacks, fakes, phonies and frauds trying to persuade you that they know otherwise have a hidden agenda that you should insist on knowing. Then you might be less inclined to believe their claptrap.
Renunciation of Life
The work and reality of the renunciation and self-sacrifice which count life itself of no value obtains the crown of eternity itself.
The words of a Moslem human bomb, fanatically ready to blow himself up as a self-sacrifice to the glory of Allah, to receive eternal life carressing black-eyed houris as reward? Or the insane beliefs of a Kamikazi fighter pilot eager to renounce life by diving his aeroplane into a US warship? Don’t be silly! These are the words of Herbert B Workman, MA, sometime Principle of Westminster Training College, a man responsible for honing the beliefs of generations of Christians sadly departing into the real world to spread the same absurd message when they would rather be renouncing this valueless life and sacrificing it for the “crown of eternity.”
With teachers like this at the turn of the twentieth century, is it any wonder that, at the turn of the twenty first century, the world is in a mess. This outlook illustrates one of the central purposes of religion—to fool simple or impressionable people into being willing to give away the only life they know they have for a lottery ticket to an eternal life that no one has any proof anyone ever wins. Nothing could be better for the rulers of countries with imperialist ambitions. They have a ready supply of fanatical young soldiers ready to die for a cause they are told is God’s own. And it is God’s own cause whichever side you are committed to! The Christian God, Christ, supposedly died in God’s cause, though he is himself God, and the cross upon which he was hung became the symbol of victory—In Hoc Signo Vinces.
Christians will say that Workman’s intention is to move Christians to sacrifice their life in this world by devoting it to good works and not to seeking glory—rewards can be had forever with God. Well, doubtless that is true, but for anyone with half a brain it invites the question, what is the point of trying to save the wicked world when eternal glory beckons? And the answer that God has ordained it thus makes it even more pointless.
The truth is that Christianity is an other-worldly religion that pays nothing more than lip service to this world. It is just God’s entrance exam, to make sure you are worthy of eternal salvation. But, if this is the same omnipotent and omnipresent God that Christians have told us about, why doesn’t he know whether anyone is worthy or not? The whole of Christian theology is a scarecrow of cast-off bits of philosophy tied together with gullibility and patched with unreason.
Adelphiasophists reject it. The only thing we are sure about is the very life that Christians consider valueless in the very world that Christians want us to renounce. The nihilistic Christian belief was fine for dukes and bishops in the Dark Ages when ignorance was cultivated to keep the upper crust of clerics and nobility in luxury while the mass of the peasantry had to sacrifice their lives to get their rewards after death. “Pie in the sky when you die,” the skeptics called it, and they were right to be skeptical. No one should believe it in an educated world. They still do because the Christian churches still retain disproportionate influence in crucial aspects of human development, like education. Children are taught science and the supernatural in alternate lessons so that they finish up being unable to distinguish reality from myth. That is a triumph for ignorance and the prelates.
It is time that a religion was taught in schools that emphasised the only life we lead and the only world we shall live in. Parents should demand that the supernatural other-worldliness of the Christian myth and hymns to the god of the sky should be abandoned in favour of the religion of the Goddess and hymns to the earth. When that starts to happen, blasphemy might cease to be the empty crime of uttering a critical word about the Christian God and become the real crime of despoliation of the earth and merit severe punishment. It will not happen however until women begin to see themselves as reflexions of the world and determine to renounce the wrongs of the age of evil—the Christian age.
Moses and Exodus
