Truth
The Law Of Death
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, May 14, 1999
Saturday, 03 September 2005
Immortality
Christians declare death to be an evil which can, however, be overcome by faith, whereupon, beyond it, is found eternal life! Even if someone lived the most virtuous of all possible lives, if it ended at death, then it must have been worthless or even wicked. That is the fate of good people who refuse to fall for the Christian scam.
The reward of Christians for their belief is endless life, but they do not stop for a second to consider what living forever would be like. They take it that life after death is just like life itself but is lived in a trouble free world called heaven where they are re-united with all their dead relatives and friends and none of the people they did not like. Having been greeted by all their dead friends and relatives who were waiting patiently for them to arrive, they start to live forever!
If any Christian did stop for a second, they would perhaps think that after a few normal lifetimes of living forever, they would be begging their God for a relief from a drudgery that was becoming hellish. They would be stark raving mad after a millennium or so. This heaven would turn out to be hell, and hell, in which people were incinerated in a lake of molten metal once and for all, would be heavenly.
So, why should death be considered evil? It is eternal life that begins to look evil once it is thought about. The death of a young person or someone in their prime might seem evil, but it is the restriction of their life which is evil not the fact that they died. For people who are old and decrepit or pained in sickness or torture, death is not evil but a blessing. Those who contemplate these matters are still sufficiently active in life to be philosophizing about it, and might consider it too soon to die. That is understandable, but those with senile dementia are in no position to say they want to live still. For these people, Christians have to find a reason for them to want eternal life, and so they invent the notion that sick, injured and demented people are restored to their prime in heaven. What basis have they for this other than childishness or an obvious excuse for an obvious problem about death from old age, sickness or injury?
Anyone can invent never-never lands but Christians make one an item of faith. What reason have they for believing what their churches tell them? In point of fact, the common Christian idea of heaven is not Christian but Spiritualist or even Pagan. Christian theologians tell us that it is an error to think that dead Christians play baseball or listen to Pop music in heaven. Such ideas are only to entice the simple into converting. Dead Christains in heven rejoice in being in the presence of God, and perhaps sing out, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” every so often to remind God that He is holy, or perhaps it is just God’s way of giving them something to do. Eternity is an awfully long time.
One would imagine that after a few lifetimes of contemplating the divine presence, the Saved would be causing revolutions in heaven for a book of crossword puzzles or a chess set. Even if they got them, eternal life would get tedious again soon enough—at least in relation to eternity.
They would not, of course, get any such amusements. Any sort of puzzle has to be solved, and any sort of competition has to be resolved. That is what makes them interesting, but a world in which the puzzle is not solved or the result of the game not known is an imperfect world. In a perfect world all puzzles are solved, all races run, all games completed. Heaven, Christians always forget is a perfect place! Indeed, in the original heaven of the Zoroastrians, the perfect world of the original Good Creation of Ahuramazda, the perfect world was a static world, because change is a result of imperfection. It was the act of the Evil Spirit in creating imperfection, corruption and wickedness that brought movement into the world. The Zoroastrian religion is much more coherent than its offspring, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
The truth is that in a perfect world there is nothing to do except to contemplate and praise God. There can be no heavenly choirmaster because training implies imperfection, so the praise of God must be automatic. Nor can we be taught all the things we did not understand in life. If we do not understand them by the time we reach heaven, and they are necessary for a successful eternal life, then we do not enter. All teaching implies lack of perfection. We cannot even teach ourselves by self-study in heaven, because we must then be imperfect and heaven is for perfect people only. The truth is that heaven can only be perfect if it contains nothing at all. Death therefore is what it seems—everyone’s personal end—and life after death is simply death.
Christians will say that an eternity of contemplating God is possible because the nature of God is that He is infinitely wonderful. Christian believers shamelessly speculate in this way to maintain their illusion of an eternity of life being tolerable, or even wonderful, but conjecture, or rather excuses, is all it is. It is dogma—what is to be believed with no evidence. The clergy need eternal life to persuade people to be Christian, explaining their shamelessness.
Let us suppose that it is true, though. An eternity contemplating God without getting bored does not sound like any life that we know. What right have Christians to claim that singing, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” for the rest of eternity is any sort of life? This “life” is merely some sort of automation. If we are to be changed in heaven so as to enjoy this automatic life, we must be changed into automatons. Free will has been taken away. Can such an automatic or even static existence, devoid of free will, be called “life” at all?
The point is that people get weary of life, but do not like the finality of death, especially if life has seemed unjust, as it often does. So the idea of heaven as the Elysian Fields of the Pagan hero seemed pleasant and just. But wandering around sunny cornfields forever also gets boring long before eternity is up, and singing, “Holy Holy, Holy,” forever must be more boring still unless our minds have been anaesthetized or removed. Admittedly the earlier view of Sheol, and Hades—mindless shades wandering around aimlessly forever, unable to contemplate God—seems more likely:
For in death there is no remembrance of thee: in the grave who shall give thee thanks?Psalms 6:5
How can anyone imagine what it must be like to be changed in this way, to make eternal life bearable? It is impossible to imagine being something different in nature from what we are. How can anyone imagine being a TV or even a fish? All we do is imagine what it would be like to be ourselves inside a TV or fish looking out. We remain ourselves not a TV or a fish. Christian explanations of, or excuses for, heaven and eternal life are like that.
All of this is presented to take advantage of people’s fear of death. It is not an irrational fear for healthy people but it is irrational to fear eventual death. Arguably people die naturally when they are ready to accept it.
Christians are encouraging what seems like a sensible belief in heaven, even though it is incoherent and unjustified. There is no evidence for it and any rational attempts to consider it show that it must be intolerable for any conscious being. Believers cannot consider it that attractive a thought because they are not choosing to die to get there like Moslems. Heaven is supposed to be the place where everyone’s individual personality lives for ever, presuming they are Christians, yet such a life would become a perpetual torture and would have to decay into automatism.
Indeed, nobody is really convinced of the eternal benefits of eternal life in heaven, and Christians spend a lot of their time talking about it to persuade themselves it must be true. Others, who are more direct and more honest, and declare that they are not convinced, are accused by Christians of lacking spirituality, though they do not know what that is either. It is all Christian self-hypnosis and self-persuasion based on a shallow egotism.
The Law Of Death
To think religion is centrally the belief in and worship of gods ignores the belief in immortality. The older religious belief could be the hope that mind survives the body as a spirit. Gods were spirits elevated into princes, and the Almighty was the king of the spirit world. Democrats should overthrow the aristocracy of the spirit world and institute a republic—a religion without God!
Most people who believe in God have reasons for doing so. God made the world or order and beauty or laid down moral law. Ask why anyone believes they are immortal. Not one believer in a thousand has a single definite reason for thinking that they are immortal. Did people ever really believe in immortality? Three score years and ten on earth, and an eternity elsewhere is a shocking unbalance.
Indeed, eternity is the temporal equivalent of infinity in space. Any amount of life, if finite, vanishes in comparison with eternity, just as any distance, volume or weight, if finite, vanishes in comparison with infinity. Earthly life is literally not worth bothering about. We should be concerned only about the eternity—with our immortal afterlives. Indeed, humanity should cling more desperately to the belief in immortality than to the belief in God since it is far more personally significant to them. Yet, most have behaved as if they did not really believe it. Despite its apparent importance, they remained concerned for the flesh and its impulses and pleasures, not least clergymen.
The reason people say they believe in immortality is that the bible promises it. To accept such authority with any confidence in the truth of their belief, they must first be quite convinced, by solid proof, that there is a God to make the promise, and that He actually did inspire the bible.
Christians gloss over the truth that their religion sits on the base of what they claim to be bold statements of remarkable facts. Now, a fact is an expression of actuality. Something which is certainly true. It is hard enough if not impossible to prove the existence of the material world, yet Christians along with other religions claim there is another world beyond and greater than the material world, and it is a fact! How can they prove it? How can they be so certain there is a spiritual world for people to be immortal in?
Death is the law of the universe. In the days when Plato worked out the first rational arguments for immortality, as distinct from mere religious tradition, the claim was not so exorbitant. The stars themselves, the Greeks thought, were immortal. They were small, undying fires set in the firmament. Plants and animals died, of course, but these stars made men familiar with things which never died.
Now we know that the stars are born and grow and die just like us, except that their life is enormously longer. There is a time when each is a shapeless cloud of hydrogen. There will be a time when the most brilliant star in the heavens will disappear from the eyes of whatever mortals there may then be, to become star dust. Stars are made of the same atoms as our bodies. They obey the great cosmic law of evolution—that things which come together shall in the end go asunder—shall die.
What of the atoms themselves, then? Are they immortal? No! They were formed and will die either during the lifetime of the universe or at its end, for the cosmos itself is not immortal. It will either disappear in a big crunch or will cool down to absolute zero as an empty shell devoid of matter. There is a chance equivalent to tossing a coin and it landing on a smooth surface on its edge, that the universe is everlasting. If so, it will be the only eternal thing, all its constituents having a finite life. The fundamental law of Nature is death.
Nature gives a chance to countless things to enjoy their hour of life. The material of which the apatosaurs and cycads were fossilized in the earth’s past is now moulded into horses and trees. We humans have our chance because the living things of long ago died and left the matter of their bodies to be used in new forms. This is the only immortality. The day dies, and will never return. The law of the universe is death.
Christians protest that their souls are not made of matter and will not be dissolved into elements. It is not a fact! They have no proof. They simply believe it. As Henry James said, explaining why he believed in personal immortality, “Because I choose to”.
What is the basis of “choosing to” believe? To believe is to accept something as true, but how can something be accepted as true when it is belied by every example available in the world? The law of the universe is death yet Christians believe that they will not die!
Mankind is apparently different from everything else in the universe. Mankind builds cities, writes poems, measures the world. Does any other creature in the world even remotely approach him in his powers and his nature? Well not all mankind is so obviously noble. Some are simple, some drunks, some are disabled, some are maniacs and some are politicians.
At one time, no one could write poems or measure the world, no one could make a house or even a hut, no one could write or even draw the simplest symbols. The utmost that anyone could do was to chip a piece of flint. Before, no one could even do that. Were these ancestors of mankind members of the same race?
You see the fallacy. A few people can do wonderful things and everyone claims the credit. Though most of us are not obviously spiritual and immortal, we evolved from even less spiritual and immortal beings. Ultimately we find an ancestor who was plainly animal—was it still spiritual and immortal? The reason most people have in their minds for claiming immortality is unsound.
Evolution And The Soul
Many branches of science—anatomy, physiology, psychology, archaeology, anthropology—show that man was evolved from a common ancestor with the apes. Science teaches, without a credible dissenting voice today, that mankind, body and mind, has evolved. Humans took several million years to evolve from the ape to the ape-man stage. They then took a few hundred thousand years to evolve from the ape-man to the primitive stage. Millions of stone implements, representing several hundred thousand years of human life, put the gradual evolution of the human mind beyond question.
A child could see the bearing of this on the belief that man has a spiritual and immortal soul. If the ape has no spiritual soul, at what stage in this long and gradual evolution was an immortal soul infused into the developing body. And, if at some stage the creature acquired a soul, why then did it impel it to start fighting with its neighbours?
Evolution makes the belief in an immortal soul improbable. It does not disprove it. We do not attempt to prove negative statements. But, clearly, we now, in face of the general law of death and man’s continuity with the animals, demand very strong and clear proof of the religious claim.
The Christian attitude is to deny the scientific facts. But why should all the experts in the world, basing their judgements on studies of the evidence over millennia, be wrong and Christian believers, basing their own judgements on ancient and fallible memoirs, be right? Plato’s Atlantis is more likely to rise from the ocean depths.
Apologists say the brain is merely the organ, the piano, the violin, the harp. The soul is the musician. It is conceivable that mind is a spiritual artist using a material instrument. The mind may be the same, all the time, in everybody. It may be merely the brain that differs, from age to age, and in different individuals today. The mind, a believer might say, can express itself only according to the quality of its organ or instrument. A genius or an idiot is a man with an abnormal brain. The spiritual and immortal soul was there all the time, but it could not express itself until the organ was perfectly developed.
Why then would God create the soul millions of years before it could act? Why go on creating souls—for the only plausible theological theory is that the soul has to be created in each individual human being—during those millions of years of the lowest savagery?
This musical instrument idea assumes the point to be proved. That point is whether the mind is a spirit, and the action of the musician’s mind on the piano does not help us in the least unless we suppose, to begin with, that it is a spirit. If, as many hold, the mind is only a function of the brain, then it is a question of the action of matter—brain and muscle—on matter
In Christian terms, the mind does not play on the body. It is one with the body. There is not the least analogy with the musician, who can close his piano and leave it when he likes. The analogy is a superficial substitute for thought.
An insoluble problem in religious philosophy is how a spirit can act on or through matter. Anyone inclined to think that God and soul explain things need to be reminded of it. No one has given us the least plausible idea how spirit can act on or with matter. It merely introduces new mysteries. This a third reason for demanding that the proofs of the spirituality of the soul shall be particularly strong. There is a strong presumption against it:
- death is the rule of the universe,
- the human mind is certainly evolved from a mind that is not spiritual and immortal,
- it is unintelligible and creates more mysteries than it solves.
Ancient philosophers mainly held that the mind is a spirit. What do they mean by spirit? How does it differ from matter? Scarcely ever is there a coherent answer. Nine-tenths of the preachers, who predict the future of us all and seek to cultivate the spiritual in this materialist world, could not tell you what spirit is. Spiritual books forget to define it.
Religious philosophy purported to define these things. Matter is extended or quantitative substance. It has dimensions. It consists of parts, and so it can be dissolved. Spirit has no parts, no dimensions, no quantity, no extension. It has only qualities. Unfortunately the qualities only show themselves through a body. Body is quantitative, and can dissolve into its parts. Mind is not quantitative and so cannot dissolve into parts, or die. So said Aristotle. Modern definitions of these things do not improve on his. Matter occupies space. Spirit is like a mathematical point. It has no magnitude.
It may not sound so warm and thrilling to say that our soul is a non-quantitative substance, but our hope of immortality depends on it entirely. So, we need to prove that mind is immaterial or unextended. What are the proofs?
The truth is that we do not yet understand consciousness or even what it consists of. Sleep-walkers have no consciousness. On the spiritual hypothesis, their souls, the supposed source of consciousness, are switched off from their bodies for the time being. The body acts mechanically and automatically. Yet the somnambulist avoids every obstacle. They will go round a table put in their path. That might show some form of consciousness, or that the hypthesis is wrong in some other way. People can react to things without consciously being aware of it. Tennis champions begin their careers consciously learning how to hit the ball over the net but eventually, as experiements have shown, actually react to the ball unconsciously, and extremely effectively when they are winners.
The mental world is still obscure. The human brain is a most complicated structure. It consists of hundreds of millions of cells put together in a way neurologists do not properly understand. Science admits its ignorance, and that it is still trying to get to understand such a complicated organ as the brain. Christians do not need to do it. They already know the brain has a soul somewhere pullings its strings, but have no good reason for believing it. It illustrates how religion is a substitute for effort.
A hundred observations suggest mind is merely a function of the brain. It varies with every minute alteration of the brain. A fever or an opiate speeds up the mental activity. A heavy meal or a dose of alcohol benumbs it. During the first world war the Germans gave their shock-troops a drug which made them giants in spirit. How a spirit can act on the brain is impossible to understand but chemicals act on the mind easily.
People assume that the mind is a spirit because mind seems so different from matter. The force of the impression is powerful. But it is only the imagination that is impressed. The intellect waits upon the advance of science. But science is unravelling the mysteries of mind and brain. Mind ought to be far more wonderful than anything else in the universe. Its organ, the brain, is the most wonderfully intricate material structure that exists. When we understand that structure, we shall know whether or not consciousness is merely a function of it. Until then there is no logic whatever in pretending to say what can, and what cannot, be a function of the brain. There is no force in saying that something must be a spirit until you know positively that it cannot be material.
It is singular how little believers in it think of proving that the mind is a spirit. What science cannot explain today it may explain tomorrow, and the man who builds on its ignorance today will retreat tomorrow. For the last hundred years the theologian has been engaged in retreating.
What Is Personality?
The doctrine of immortality begins to look far from simple and satisfactory when you examine it. Religious ideas not only melt into mysteries and unintelligibilities when you analyze them, but they conflict with our scientific knowledge. And it is not a question of evolution only. The science of psychology itself must have a deadly effect on belief when hardly one in ten of our psychologists believes in personal immortality. Few experts on the subject in the world do. Like psychologists, philosophers rarely believe in personal immortality. In psychology, the idea of soul has long since been surrendered. It became the science of the mind, not of the soul.
What sort of a thing will the soul be even if we suppose it to be immortal? Whether the soul could or could not think when it is disembodied, it certainly cannot have anything like the personality it had on earth. Think of every little trait or feature of a child or any person you love. The golden curls or fine glossy hair, the soft blue or fine brown eyes, the round limbs and graceful carriage. These all go down into the grave forever.
But even features of character depend entirely on the body. In the early days of science temperaments were divided into four main types—the lymphatic (sluggish), choleric, bilious and sanguineous. This was crude psychology, but it expressed the well-known fact that much of a man’s personality depends upon his bodily qualities. Nerve and brain, stomach and liver and pancreas, blood and muscular tone, all have their respective influences on what we call character. Vitality, the sweetness or quaintness of disposition, the warm affection, the reserve or the spontaneous effusiveness—all emerge through the visible and material body. What will this disembodied soul of husband, wife, son or daughter, mother or father, or best friend whom you hope to meet again, be like? What will even memory be without the brain? For whatever be its nature, it depends vitally on the brain.
The pagan Romans, whose cold and vague attitude towards a future life was much derided by the new Christians, were nearer the truth. The view of the future life which Christianity brought was, with its eternal torment for the majority of the race, the most repulsive yet formulated. The Roman, like the Babylonian, believed that the soul survived the grave, but it was a pale, thin shade that survived. He had little interest in it.
Nor does the agnostic attitude mean that it is equally probable whether the mind is or is not a spirit. The chances are not even. Buddha and Confucius came to the conclusion that religious speculation was a waste of time several centuries before the great thinkers of Athens appeared, and the earliest Greek thinkers seem to have been of the same opinion. This was half a millennium before Christians invented their own belief. Has anything now, two and a half thousand years later, been settled on the religious side? Nothing. We are no wiser. We rule out the proofs of immortality given by Plato and S Augustine, and we have no better to offer.
The weight of modern science is against immortality. Evolution proved a deadly weight against the belief. Psychology, as it evolved, turned against it. Physiology throws all its weight into the materialistic scale. Neuoroscience too. Not a single fact has been discovered in the last hundred years that favours the view that the mind is a spirit.
Theories Of Immortality
What are the proofs which modern theologians attempt to give of the immortality of the soul? The more learned of them frankly give it up. Immortality is, they say, a matter of faith. An infinite God can make us immortal, and the bible says that He will. The feeble and tottering belief in immortality is propped up by two other feeble and tottering beliefs—God and the bible. Can anyone at all critical accept it?
Other religious writers prefer to say that, while they cannot prove the spirituality and immortality of the soul, they can suggest reasons for believing in it. For instance, some of them say, science has discovered that the conservation of energy is a law of the universe. No energy is ever destroyed or annihilated. So the mental energy must persist. The soul must survive.
Energy is never annihilated, it is true, but energy is constantly changing its form, and when the energy is associated with a complex material structure, and that structure breaks up, it is bound to change its form considerably. The law of the conservation of energy does not say that the energy is conserved in the same form. So, in whatever form of energy a thought is, it is not conserved as that form and that thought. It degrades to heat and the heat dissipates as the universe expands and cools. An analogy might be old automobile that is condemned to the scrap-heap. It does not continue to exist as pressed metal sheets, parts and so on, but is reduced to scrap metal which is melted down and used again elsewhere. The body goes on existing in some form, but its functions do not.
Why are some scientists on the side of religion? Few of them accept any particular part of the Christian religion but some accept a hybrid of their own. In the past, they have been duped by mediums, for scientists, especially physicists, are singularly careless in excluding fraud from experiments away from their own benches. In places like the mid-West of the USA where it is dangerous to dissent from the redneck believers in Jarvay, perhaps some scientists refuse to risk their lives, and certainly will not risk their careers. It shows how near the new inquisition has got in America.
The Freedom Of The Will
If man is free, if his will can act without compulsion or coercion from any power or motive, then man does stand out from all the rest of the universe, and the law of death may not be for him. His mind must be an indissoluble spirit. Psychologists have been analyzing and disputing about this apparent consciousness of freedom for a century, and they are now generally agreed that it is an illusion. What you are really conscious of is a series of acts. It is just another belief that there is a thing called free will behind them. It might be surprising to know that free will is only an unproven hypothesis, but surely it has some significance.
In the ordinary acts of life we behave automatically. We don our clothes, brush our teeth, and eat and walk, and even work, in a mechanical way. The motive arises, by routine, at the proper moment, and the action follows. It is only in graver things that we use our freedom. It is only when two or more motives seem to have about equal force that we are conscious of any freedom. If one motive, the reason for doing one thing, is palpably stronger than the reason for doing the alternative, we do not hesitate. The will acts on the stronger motive.
When we hesitate between two courses, do we doubt for a moment that our will eventually follows the one which seems to us wiser or more profitable? Just to prove our freedom we may choose the less wise course. Then we merely have a new motive thrown into the scale. Our will always follows the weightier motive. How, then, is it free? All that we are conscious of is the hesitation of our mind, because for a time one motive balances the other. They may remain so balanced that we do nothing, or leave it to others to decide. But if we do decide, we are merely conscious that the battle of motives is over and the stronger carries our will.
But, you ask, what about moral responsibility? What about praising and blaming people for their conduct? What about crime and its punishment? Is not our whole social and moral system based upon the theory that a man is responsible for his actions? We cannot logically blame the criminal if he has no free will. The practical point is that society can make unsocial conduct or crime unattractive to the man who may be disposed to indulge in it. The sentence inflicted today is a deterrent rather than a punishment.
The cat which steals your chop or your chicken has no free will. So, do you take it in your arms and say, “you only acted according to your nature”, or do you thrash it, to teach it a lesson? When you pat on the head the dog or the horse that has done good service, and so encourage it to repeat its performance, are you acting foolishly? You know better. Good feeling as a reward of good conduct is a new motive to the will. The frown or the stroke of society is a deterrent.
Determinism, or the theory that denies free will, has no social consequences whatever, except good ones. When we grasp the real nature of the criminal, we treat him more wisely. When you have a social practice founded upon thousands of years of wrong ideas the readjustment is not easy. But it is really only a question of reading a new shade of meaning into the words.
We can still imprison or inconvenience people who act criminally, without intending to punish them. A man is responsible to his fellows for any evil consequences of his acts, and, since the moral law is social law, he has moral responsibility. Society has just as much right to protect itself from breaches of those laws which we call moral—such real moral laws as truthfulness and justice—as it has against breaches of common law. To do so it can use the system of reward and punishment which we call praise and blame. We praise or blame the act, because of its consequences. We know quite well that there was no free will in it.
Society has every right to smile encouragement or frown its disapproval.
