Sacred Humanist

"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present". Ludwig Wittgenstein

Perhaps one of the greatest problems we encounter with a negative position on the afterlife relates to a simple human longing, epitomised in the cry, "But if we cease to exist when we die, what is the point of life?" To me this statement could be interpreted as deeply disrespectful to itself life. Indeed I think it so. The person who utters this cry has subconsciously so much contempt for life, he wishes to escape it for a better one; with angels and cherubs in the clouds. For such a person life derives its meaning not from the joy of the here and now, but from an obscure metaphysical edifice of reward and punishment. Life is not be enjoyed for it's own sake, but only to be appreciated as a mundane if appetising prelude to "eternal life". Such is the contempt for living found among many of today's organized religions.

What is more incredible is that this hatred of life is obscured from public view by the simultaneous claim of many faiths that the sanctity of life must be protected. But this isn't because they really care about life, it is because they want to remind us that we are, like a master to a slave God's property and that killing ourselves prematurely deprives our maker of a servant he could otherwise use. This is why the Neo-Cons in the United States are happy to protect a baby in the womb; (at least the child could grow up an Evangelical Christian/acknowledge their servile status to God), but are just as willing to invade Iraq and kill hundreds of civilians to fulfil their military objectives. This demonstrates the sheer superficiality of the sanctity of life rhetoric. It is employed to put us in our place, not to remind us of our responsibilities towards one another.

While I am on this subject I willing to go further. I would argue that the idea of heaven especially, in the modern world, makes life not worth living and that is the problem. We saw this horrifically shown on 9\11 when plains were driven into the two towers killing thousands of innocent people. What kind people could do this. Richard Dawkins provides a straightforward if chilling reply,"Why would anyone want to destroy the World Trade centre and everybody in it? ... The answer is that men like bin Laden actually believe what they say they believe. ... Because they believed that they would go straight to paradise for doing so": They despise their life and value it so little that it easy for such people as these to throw themselves away and take others with them.

The opposite affect of the afterlife hypothesis is perhaps not as violent but equally soul-destroying in it's scope. The poor man waiting for Heaven has little patience with improving his own lot. The priest can lull the fellow into a false sense of security by bellowing from the pulpit, "do not worry about amassing possessions, here on earth, wait till you get into heaven". Such a declaration said Marx has the power to dull the poverty stricken and the oppressed. They are told not rebel against the status quo or unjust social arrangements, rather to wait patiently for their death to arrive. The suicide-bomber and the poor man beaten down my priests are symbols of the danger that lies in a love affair with the afterlife. Heaven and the chorus of angels not only consoles, it paralyses, twisting our natural love of life into something protracted.

It would be better to my mind to leave eternity to the gods and leave the here and now to humanity, lest we speculate to much on the beyond and forget the beauty of life under our feet. For it is likely that this life is all we have, so from me we must extract as much beauty, fulfilment and joy as possible. The person who appreciates life to the full is like an artist, he paints upon the canvas of existence new ideas, love and pleasure and therein perhaps lies the meaning of existence. We must make life our own, take experience with both hands and find meaning and purpose in the face of all our difficulties.

Emptiness and Personal Disillusionment

Over the past few months I have ceased to believe in an afterlife, leaving me with a profound sense of emptiness. I always believed from a child that the essence of all living things never really perished, just were removed from sight. Thus underneath the flux of our world, the relentless drive of change, was an unchanging realm of souls and untouchable ideas. Years later after reading Plato this belief was given voice and vocabulary in his realm of perfect Forms. Like C.S Lewis' spiritual Narnia, of beautiful trees and meadows, in his book The Last Battle, I was comforted by the promise of an eternal rest. Now I look back I see the sheer idiocy of such a belief, and that behind it there is a real hatred of life.

The Folly of Eternity

Now the idea of immortality has the duel power to inspire and revolt me. Surely if God intended us to live forever, then surely he also intended that we loose all our humanity and personhood? It seems to me that immorality is at once the most beautifully haunting of possibilities in the human imagination and yet the notion of life-perpetual seems to be an idea that, if true, would confer a definite curse as well as a blessing. If we imagine the best of all possible worlds, an eternity in a paradise where we live in continual joy, where all pain and suffering has been done away with, even in such a world one can see a looming blight to the hope of our happiness lasting forever.

For humans joy is primarily appreciated through the relationship between it and its cardinal opposites, sorrow and melancholy. We know joy partly because we have avoided that which is injurious to our state of joy. We know bliss because it is the natural opposite of anxiety, without which such a state of mind as bliss can have no real meaning, because we have nothing to be delivered from. The possibility of an eternity filled with joy would soon, after many eons perhaps, grow tired, mundane and normative, far from the exhilaration of our first moment of everlasting delight. Would delight become the soul’s prison? Would an eternity of pleasure become torment? Just as eternity must surely affect the hope of joy, having infinite life-span would also surely affect what we commonly call “life”?

Time Confers Meaning

It appears that human societies of various kinds have understood life as thing to be marked, a map onto which human progress from one point to another can charted. Rites of passage provide a means for us to measure ourselves, articulating ourselves and ground ourselves. Life derives much its meaning from the irreversible nature of moments, of times and places. We know we are alive because of the passing of time, because circumstance and biological necessity locks us in to a state of motion; this fact builds us and defines us. We know who and what we are because of what we have become. The very continuity of our consciousness and self-identity depends upon the passing of time. In a state of eternity what would life become? Every moment would be the same as the next, as if one were restricted to a single moment. We would cease to aware of ourselves, of who we are. We would not be able to foster any kind of meaningful awareness.

The eternal human may cease to be human in the strictest sense because without the necessity of change life is in stasis. We are not compelled, nor can we aspire in "the forever". If indeed the eternal human is confined to what appears to be one moment, stripped of any notion of time and change, the very pre-requisites of awareness and meaning, one wonders wonder why God would bother to preserve human life, if by situating it in eternity it would loose what defines it as life? Surely, it can be argued that striping a life of its essential characteristics, even in the best possible world imaginable would be cruel? Wouldn’t it better to cease to exist rather than to cease to live?

The Great Cycle of Nature

Of course such reasoning can leave you empty, yesterday I felt particularly so but I reminded myself that eternal living would not be life. I am not scared of death because death must logically be an escape from the fears of life including pain and sadness, but I am scared by the thought of ceasing to be consciousness, of leaving this life, never to return. It pains me that the essence of my loved one's will cease to be, that we are all just ashes and air, but this is the great tapestry of nature. its vital we realise that the continual joy of new life comes about because of the decomposition of other living things. A mother takes in nutrients for a growing featus inside her womb, from plants, animals, fungi and even bacteria (if you like your quorn) and their life-giving properties are transfered to the unborn child.

All living things eventually merge into one another, to sustain the continuity of life itself. Death is an imaginary catagory in a sense because when we die we rejoin everything that is alive again. Our bodies become the earth and grass. As Walt Whitman wrote, "The smallest sprout shows there is really no death; And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it". One being dies so life might continue to grow and nurture itself.

And behind us we always leave footprints, firstly atomic footprints. By our very existence the world has been changed through us, we have begun our own set of motions and reactions within the cosmos, which will continue long after we go. They are our impersonal mark. We also leave behind us other footprints, the traces of memory we leave behind in the hearts of those knew us. They will be affected by us, hopefully for good and carry something of us to others, a value, a hope, a story, an experience and in that way we live on.