ZOOM Plurationalist Dialogue 119: Is There Life After Death?

The reasoning theists, atheists, liberals, libertarians, & conservatives of Secular Bible Study, Circle of Ijtihad, First Minneapolis Circle of Reason, & Winnipeg Circle of Reason join Inter-Belief Conversation Café for our 119th Plurationalist (Interbelief Reasoning) Dialogue, "Is There Life After Death?"

Why ask? We’ll all find out the answer someday, right? (Or, perhaps, will none of us ever know?) Why isn’t waiting to see not enough for us? Is the thought of an afterlife comforting or terrifying (or both)? If it’s all over when we go, why should we even try to be good? But if there’s indeed an afterlife, do our good works before we go even matter? Should we embrace the present and treat speculation about the hereafter as harmful fantasizing? Should we eat sumptuously, lounge around, party, and die; or eat moderately, exercise, meditate, and die anyway? Neanderthals buried tools and possessions with their dead -- so even cavemen believed in Life after Death. Why has humanity always assumed there is something more to come? And which celestial musing was first to invade our daydreams -- The Heavens, or the Gods?

Shakespeare's Hamlet speculates that Death, rather than bringing the eternal peace of sleep, may bring dreams too terrible to contemplate. Suicide may not end his troubles but make them worse. In The Odyssey, Ulysses travels to the underworld and finds the dead miserable in Hades. Dante’s Divine Comedy provides a detailed tour of the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce depicts a shabby place where individuals are incapable of giving up the sins that brought them there. Hell’s gates are locked from the inside. Haven’t these literary giants answered all our questions? Why should we ask more? They say there is life after death, and what happens to us there is our fault.

Do we even want our afterlife to be about us? Should our actions determine whether our next life will be either eternal torment or eternal bliss, regardless of whether that is a Heaven or a Hell, or a reincarnation into an earthworm or a saint? Some Christians and Muslims see a purgatory or journey that allows for improving one’s final lot. For Baha’is it is a continuing process in an afterlife we can’t imagine in our present state. For some Jews and atheists life continues in one’s philosophies and works to heal the world or attain the stars. Do we really think there is some accounting office somewhere that keeps track of every altruistic or malevolent thought and deed? Could the next life seem as unfair as this one so often seems?

What if life ends with our death and nothing follows for us? For Hamlet this was a desirable thing. But don’t most of us want something more? Why? If our life is good, why not enjoy it now and not worry about whether someone will judge it worthy or unworthy? If our life is bad, why not change it now and not worry about the consequence (because otherwise, the sooner it’s over the better, and further existence might then just allow us to be hurt more)? If our life’s goodness or badness is irrelevant to our life’s chosen mission, then why worry about an afterlife rather than about how to achieve our mission?

What if death ends and everything follows for us? Science doesn’t seem to detect any objective hint of life after death, but is this maybe something science now can’t measure? Psychics, soothsayers, and necromancers have claimed contact with the dearly (or not so dearly) departed -- but are they credible, or are they fooling us and perhaps themselves? Near-death experiences of a bright light, hovering over one’s body, and seeing dead acquaintances may be reality, or a type of fever dream. No one in recorded history seems to have taken a return trip to tell us which experience it actually was. At most we have deathbed statements like the inventor, Thomas Alva Edison’s remark, “It is very beautiful over there.”

Is any of our afterlife speculation healthy? The Sufi mystic, Rabia Basri, reputedly carried a torch and a bucket of water, proclaiming that if she found Heaven she’d burn it up and if she found Hell she’d pour water on it. Her message was that faith and virtue are false if merely based on a desire for heaven or a fear of hell -- and that Love of God alone is our purpose. Because she was saintly, that may have been easier for her to say, but does she have a point? In Les Misérables, we hear that to love someone is to see the face of God. Do heaven and hell reside here, in this world, not in Shakespeare’s undiscovered country wherein dreams may or may not come?

On Mon 3/20, 7-9 PM via Zoom, we'll ask if this life is all there is, or if we can hope for something better. Meanwhile, our agreements of open-mindedness, acceptance, curiosity, discovery, sincerity, brevity, and confidentiality should help us go to the light and not to a dark place. We may not be able to change what is or isn’t to come; but we can talk about it!