Monopoly on afterlife

“One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more;
Death, thou shalt die.”
– – John Donne

A cynic may say that death should not worry you because you will never get the devastating piece of news; you won’t be among those who are going to read your obituary. However, dying “for good” is scary and inconceivable, no matter with what disaffection we reflect on the ‘suffering’ in life – we want to join the carnival again. This is perhaps why Donne’s Death, Be not proud, with its belligerent refutation of the power of death has so much appeal, whether you believe in a soul or not. It, more or less, tells you that when you cross the bridge, you’ll find yourself again amidst others in some tangible form. And, each religion tells us what that form is going to look like.

Afterlife begins where breathing ends. Religions take over from where doctors have done their utmost to keep you breathing and fail. While the family members, neighbours, relatives and undertakers get busy with the formalities with regard to your remains as they say, the ethereal part of you or the ‘soul’, which is interpreted in all subtlety, is taken care of by the religion, which has a monopoly on the hereafter. Your faith matters little about things on the mundane side of the border, but it makes all the difference on the other side.

As we all can see, the material body keeps changing every second ceaselessly from birth to death so that you can almost call it a process instead of a ‘thing’. Although they talk about “keeping the body and soul together”, if you are to remain intact, all you do is to focus on the maintenance of the body and not the soul. It matters little whether you believe in, doubt or are unaware of the soul, the transcendental part in you.

There is no knowing which part of the body this “migrant self” resides in you or how it is connected to the body and there is nothing that you can do to ensure its continuity except looking after the body. If you focus on the soul and forget the body, well, presumably, that’s the end. It is natural for you to mean the death of the “body” whenever you think of death; the soul is assumed to carry on. Not the other way, though. That is, you never talk of the death of the soul and the ‘continuation’ of the body, unless you speak figuratively to mean a kind of ‘spiritual’ death, or depravity, which is completely describable in terms of thoughts and morals, all supervised by the brain. No need to bring in a soul into the formula. In other words, unlike “brain death”, you cannot talk of ‘soul death’ in any pragmatic or comprehensible way, unless you move into the realm of the supernatural.

Religions tell us what is going to ‘happen’ to us when we die but each of them has its own final word about its nature, which happens to be different from all the others. The only concurrence is that there is another ‘life’ of some sort after death. And, every religion asserts that its version is inconvertible although none of them has a way of proving its veracity. Breathe your last and then, bang, you will know.

However, it stands to reason that if any discipline can answer problems that are beyond the reach of science, it must be superior to science. And, obviously, such a grander system must be able to explain not only what science cannot explain but also what science has already explained, in a more elegant and simpler way. However, we have not heard of any such a system of a higher-order provided by any faith. We are yet to hear of a knowledge system which explains, say, surface tension, gravity, the motion of planets etc. in a more lucid way than science does. Instead, religions assert that this superior method is faith. We are supposed to believe what is contained in scriptures about the next world. However, the fact that they have different readings about ‘afterlife’ places us on a somewhat unfamiliar plane of comprehension and verification.

Firstly, and obviously, in this belief-based system of gaining insight, we come to a completely novel method which is different from that of science or reason. In science as well as in all day-to-day affairs, it is deemed sensible to choose between different statements that claim to be true about any given issue, be it afterlife or anything else. From what we know, in science they use observation and empirical testing. In ordinary life we examine and use reason to check whether claims square with facts. If a statement is not supported by facts it is considered untenable. If none of the given statements match up with the underlying conditions, we have to hold back judgment till we find enough facts. However, this common method of verification is pronounced unsound and futile in religious claims about ‘afterlife’. Instead, it is sensible and legitimate, we are told, to believe the assertions. The point is, as repeated ad nauseam, they are as numerous as religions themselves. And, our selection is invariably that of our parents.

This is ridiculous given the sublimity attached to religion and its supposed superiority to science. ‘Religion’, in the singular form, is meaningful to you with respect to your religion, not others. Surely, you rarely talk about the ‘superior state’ of religion with respect to all religions in general, without a shrug of feigned magnanimity. Referring to religion in the abstract is not dissimilar to using terms like nation without a specific context. People may feel large-hearted and non-judgmental when they use the word ‘nation’ in a discussion but it’s always ‘our nation’ when you leave your philosopher’s seat.

In the absence of any objective criteria propounded by an ‘Agent’ above all religions, or by a ‘Religion of all religions’, if you like, we have to give equal credit to all religions and their pronouncements on the next world. However, the acceptance of one necessarily negates the possibility of accepting all of the others. For example, if one religion says you will be trapped in an endless cycle of death and rebirth while another says you have either hell or heaven for good, accepting one will automatically cancels the other option. So, if you have a couple of religions in your country- let’s forget about the hundreds of them available, if only you are curious- you will find yourself in an unenviable position as regards what to accept about the ‘life after’. That is, if you don’t wish to be hopelessly insular.

However, you should not panic, they say. Simply, believe what your parents’ religion prescribes about the ‘next birth’. Still, how can you say that religion A is not acceptable simply because B happened to be the only one you got to know in your infancy? Now, we are in a pretty soup, aren’t we? It seems we are to venerate “believing”- no matter what we believe in. This tends to undermine the seriousness we attach to religion, for, here, content turns out to be a thing of no consequence. Only belief matters?

Susantha Hewa