To me, nature appears cold and horrific as much as it seems wonderful beyond words. My own life tells me in no uncertain terms that there is no higher, caring power, and yet I feel something I can't comprehend that is suggesting otherwise. If I were inclined to melodramatic metaphors, I would say it's as if I was pulled by two horses running in opposite directions. If I wake up in a better, mellower mood, I could say life is stretching me to make me more flexible. Things would certainly be simpler if I could convince myself to follow one point of view at the expense of the other. For the sake of consistency, I could just dismiss as delusions those feelings telling me there is something out there, and embrace hardcore atheism. Or I could take the other route and begin reading much more into these feelings, and build a whole cosmology around them to explain everything about God, the universe, and the meaning of life. I could end up with a perfectly consistent theory to do away once and for all with any doubts and ambiguities. I would be free of contradictions. I would be strong in my forceful conclusions. I would feel confident thanks to the clarity of my certainties . . . and I would be a liar.
The only way to come up with a seamless theory would be to ignore all those experiences I can't explain. But that is the coward's way out. It's what people choose to do when they are driven by a curious blend of ego-driven arrogance and tremendous insecurity. Disturbed
by not knowing the answer to many of life's secrets, some believers seek comfort in the self-important illusion that they and they alone own the truth about God. With equal dogmatic certainty, hardcore atheists deny the existence of God, no matter how the word may be defined. Unfortunately for believers and atheists alike, certainty in these matters is the enemy of truth and the building block for reassuring lies.
The Nez Percé leader Chief Joseph once remarked, “We don't want churches because they will teach us to quarrel about God.”
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Chief Joseph gets my vote because any organized religion that promises to offer crystal-clear answers about God stops the individual search for God cold in its tracks. On the other hand, I have no problem whatsoever with traditions that don't insist on forcing God to fit into a rigid theology.
The Lakota people use the term
Wakan Tanka
to speak of a divine energy that pervades all things. The most common translation of Wakan Tanka is “Great Mystery.” This is probably as close as we get to my idea of God. It's something that you may perceive, something great and powerful, but also mysterious and so far beyond human understanding that trying to conceptualize it would be ridiculous. Similarly, the Taoists refer to the Tao, the power that is at the roots of all things, as a “cosmic mystery.”
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We are very far away from any sense of atheist denial here. Wakan Tanka and the Tao recognize an energy that is as real as it is sacred. And precisely because it is real and sacred, little effort is wasted trying to explain it away.
After all is said and done, what we know is very little. And anyone—believer or atheist alike—offering certain answers does so because he or she is too scared to admit having doubts. Only strong personalities can accept to live with mystery. But let's try to resist
the urge to oversimplify reality. Any answer based on incomplete information is at best tentative, a work in progress. No one can know what God is or what he/she/it wants us to do. The search for God is an ongoing quest with no destination in sight. The healthiest step we can take in this search is to remain flexible while striving to do one's best.
Believe in life after death, and you will die. Don't believe in life after death, and you will die. Any way you slice it, you will die. Death laughs at our beliefs and disbeliefs. No one has a clue, and yet everyone has beliefs. All our theories, all our conjectures, all our promises of rewards and punishments. . . . Things must definitely be funny from Death's perspective. Not knowing drives us crazy, and Death loves to tease. Like all good attention-magnets, Death knows that the secret to popularity is mystery. Once people become too familiar with something, they lose interest. But the mystery . . . ah, the mystery is hard to resist. And this why the riddle of death captivates the minds of human beings and never lets go.
The concepts of God and the afterlife are intimately tied. In most religions, those claiming to know God's will promise rewards for following them (e.g., an eternity of bliss in heaven or a much better reincarnation in a future life) and punishments for disobeying (take your pick: burn in hell while being tortured by demons, or be reborn as live bait for a fish).
God and the afterlife are connected in yet another way: there is no irrefutable evidence for the existence of either of them. This is why Buddha strongly resisted indulging in his disciples' curiosity about both God and the afterlife. Why bother with things that are beyond human comprehension and that we have no control over? Buddha suggested in the Parable of the Arrow. Focus instead on what you can do: find a way to eliminate the causes of suffering and improve the quality of your life. Buddha's brutal pragmatism has no patience for idle speculation. His philosophy/religion is driven by a practical purpose, and is not meant to console us or comfort our fears. And this is why Buddhism is an exception among the world's religions, since most religions are built on the twin pillars of God and Death.
But as human beings, we crave solutions to these problems too badly to let a simple lack of evidence stand in the way of some answers. Does life have meaning? Is a benevolent force watching over me? Will I go on existing after my body turns into the main course at a banquet for worms and bacteria? Those who are alive can't discuss the subject based on their experience because they haven't died, whereas the dead have first-hand experience but are usually not too talkative.
I am obviously no different, so my feelings on the topic are nothing but the speculations of a blind man musing about the nature of light. And yet, they are all I have, since I can't turn to more reliable sources, for there is no one alive who has more (or less) experience when it comes to God and the afterlife than I do. Pure logic tells me that the odds of someone having an “afterlife” after their physical body dies seem slim. How could consciousness continue when you no longer have a brain? Those who suffer severe damage to certain areas of their brain may go on living, but the spark of consciousness
is gone forever. How, then, could we expect consciousness to survive the complete annihilation of the brain?
Plenty of people like to find support for the reality of an afterlife in tales of near-death experiences. Some of these survivors recount a whole array of fantastic events: white lights at the end of dark tunnels; visions of angels or demons; guest appearances by Jesus, Krishna, or another deity the about-to-be-dead are fond of. Typically, the visions end when the individual is brought back to life. This is the closest that anyone alive has come to experiencing death, so these stories receive much attention from those looking for proof of an afterlife.
Personally, I badly want to believe these stories. They offer hope for something beyond death, and I'm not about to spit on something so desirable. My annoying logical side, however, forces me to cancel my membership in the believers' club and throw my enthusiasm under a cold shower. Near-death experiences, by definition, are not death itself. Science tells us brain activity can continue for several minutes even after somebody is declared dead. In other words, not all of the body dies at the same time. What this means is that the visions of the nearly dead may just be one last big show put on by our very imaginative brains before the lights go out for the last time.
It doesn't surprise me that vast numbers of people choose to abandon logic when it comes to the existence of an afterlife. Life would truly be grim if the only alternatives were between a cold, heartless logic condemning us to a gloom-and-doom vision of the universe and a cowardly delusion filling us with false hopes. But I'm not sold on the idea that these are our only options. Logic and reason are great tools, but they are also very limited because they are only as good as the information available. Imagine putting the most brilliantly logical human beings of a few millennia ago in front of
a television. Without any previous familiarity with electricity, they would be at a loss to explain it. All their logic and reason would do little to help them solve the puzzle. When we face the possibility of life after death, we are in a similar situation. We hardly know the first thing about death, so how is logic going to explain it all? Even though logic and reason don't seem to offer support for the idea of life after death, it doesn't necessarily mean much.
In my own life, I have had plenty of experiences that left me in the dust when trying to make sense of them. I have seen perfectly blue skies fill with storm clouds and heavy rain within a few minutes of someone praying for rain. I was told by a medicine man that my urine would turn black right before I would be freed from a spell that had been placed on me: I nearly doubled over laughing since this sounded like the weirdest bullshit I had ever heard . . . until a few weeks later when my urine did turn black. While camping, a friend of mine and I stared at each other when, on a day with no wind, we saw my tent shaking as if someone was moving inside of it. No big deal, we figured. One of our friends must have decided to use it. Except that when we opened the flap no one was inside. While helping cut a tree for a Sun Dance, one of the most important ceremonies of the Lakota people, one of my fingers was broken in three parts and nearly severed when a tree fell on it. I was less than reassured when the old Lakota man running the ceremony told me not to worry because he prayed about it, and the spirits told him they would take care of it. Prayer was not exactly my number one choice as medical treatment for multiple fractures. But I was hours away from the closest hospital and didn't have many other options. Sure enough the old guy could not stop laughing when I undid the bandage to see an extremely swollen finger with much of its skin gone, but otherwise back in one piece. A few weeks later, the skin
was fully regrown and you couldn't even see a scar. X-rays showed no signs that any trauma had ever occurred.
I could go on, but I'm sure by now you get the point. Plenty of experiences in my own life seem to violate the normal laws of physics, and yet they happened anyway, right in front of my eyes. I could explain these experiences away with wild theories about spirits, the afterlife, the power of prayer and God, but I would be lying. At the end of the day, I don't know why or how these things happened. I just know they did, and I have no explanation for them. This is why I don't rule out the existence of an afterlife despite the protests of my logic and reason.
The long loop of my personal experiences brings us back to our starting point: we have no certain answers about the afterlife one way or the other. Anyone claiming to know otherwise is trying to sell us something. And yet, death is too big of a topic to ignore. While the nature of death is a mystery, the fear of death is as real and concrete as it gets, so it needs to be addressed. The rest of this section will do precisely that by focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of the various religious approaches toward death in order to fish for something we can use to face the most terrifying force confronting everyone who lives.
There is no greater source of anxiety for human beings than the inevitability of death. Death is a demon that sinks its fangs in our soft flesh and tears it apart. It feeds on our very muscles and blood. It consumes our bodies, our identities, our emotions, our memories. It is a vampire that can't be stopped, a hunter who never fails to bring down its prey. Nothing is as scary as knowing that, at this very
moment, Death is tracking us down. Sooner or later, it will tire of the chase: it will overtake us and devour everything we have ever been.
Normally, we get mad if anything makes us waste a few hours. We flash with anger if something ruins our day. But our daily problems suddenly seem petty if we weigh them against the immensity of death. We are no longer talking about a few lost hours or days or years. We are talking about eternity here. Clearly, all our other concerns pale in comparison.
This very legitimate fear of death is the engine driving most religions. One of their primary reasons for existing is to help human beings deal with the prospect of physical annihilation. This is the hottest merchandise sold in churches and temples: the promise that they'll help us escape death's sharp teeth.
Religious opposition to secular viewpoints often stems from the fear that if we abandon organized religion, we will abandon the only force standing between us and death. Tom Stewart, a co-prosecutor at the infamous 1925 Scopes trial, opposed Darwin's theory of evolution not because of any evidence, but because accepting evolution would rob him of any hope of defeating death: “Would they have me believe that I was once a worm and writhed in the dust? Will they take from me my hope of hereafter? I want to go beyond this world to where there is eternal happiness.”
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Clearly, Stewart was too terrorized by death to let facts interfere with his hopes.
When grown men so badly need reassurance that after death they will live in eternal happiness with God and all their loved ones, it seems both desperate and pathetic. They use religion the way some infants use pacifiers. Karl Marx used a harsher metaphor when he famously called religion “the opium of the people.”
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Both metaphors may be accurate, but so what? Pacifiers and opium exist because
they fulfill a need. If you want someone to quit drugs, you have to offer them an alternative to fulfill that need. Contrary to what Nancy Reagan believed, no one quits drugs because someone tells them drugs are bad. No secular challenge to organized religions will ever succeed unless it offers something to replace what it takes away. Freud correctly argued that religion would never disappear as long as human beings continue to be afraid of death.
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Most secular movements are doomed to failure because they do nothing to lessen the fear of the unknown. So before we turn to possible alternatives, let's look at how different religions address the fear of death.