HEAVENLY DECEPTIONS
Will God really keep us alive after
death?
NO MORAL REASONS FOR AFTERLIFE BELIEF
THE HANDBOOK OF CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS
PREFACE
The doctrine of life after death is very popular and there is very little agreement on what this life will be like. Will God keep us alive after we die? We will also test the doctrine of the afterlife to see if it is as really beneficial as most people have been tricked into believing. We pay little heed to the doctrine that the soul is immortal for it could be that though the soul can survive death, there might be other forces that makes sure this doesn't happen.
DEATH – BIRTH TO A NEW LIFE?
BELIEVER: Any system, even if it be atheistic, if it seeks to be the most successful and beloved form of philosophy has to have the doctrine of life after death.
Philosophy must offer satisfaction and not just cold facts. The good thing about the afterlife concept is that it can make people feel good.
RESPONSE: Many of those who deny life after death feel life means more to them because of that. We can all be like them and if we are not there is something wrong with us. Even if you believe in a life after death you have no evidence or proof so you should still fear death if death is to be feared and not accepted so what difference does it make? You may as well deny life after death as assume that it is true.
The truth is that it does no good to derive comfort from a belief if that belief is not true and especially when the belief is harmful which the afterlife doctrine is. Fear of what is real is a sign of maladjustment and weakness. Weakness is a form of maladjustment. Weakness and maladjustment corrupts. Maladjustment is as good a word for a power that corrupts as you will get.
If we should use the pipe-dream of an afterlife to make ourselves happy, then why not pretend that the suffering of an innocent child is an illusion or something to prevent it disturbing our peace of mind?
BELIEVER: There is rational and scientific evidence that death is a new beginning. Though we may believe in a being higher than us who has power over us to destroy us if we live on after death we have no reason to believe it will kill us totally at death. Why would it kill us and put us out of existence when it lets us live now?
REPLY: Why wouldn’t the being let us pass out of existence when it lets us die? There is as little reason to believe in life after death as there is for a being that could destroy us if we do survive death. It lets children go through the most horrendous of torments so we ought not to have much faith in it.
BELIEVER: All things in the universe have obviously been designed by intelligent powers. Even the most shapeless rock is full of design though it does not look like a work of art to us. We see plainly that all could not have been made by a series of chances. No amount of Atheist prejudice or self-deceit can shut your eyes to the improbability of the hypothesis that luck and chance got us to where we are today with our brilliant magical bodies. Some intelligent power that wants us to live made us and that power will not let death be the end of us. The power may have a strange way of making sure we will live on when it does not give us immortal bodies but that does not negate the value of the power and the faith we can have in it. It does not refute the power’s existence.
REPLY: Chance created the forces that give us life but it does not direct these forces. It would be absurd to say that chemicals came to life by chance and made the first cell and by chance the cell grew into an amoeba and by chance the amoeba became something more advanced and so on with an infinity of chances until we are where we are today. But we are only saying a few chances set the wheels in motion for life to appear not that chance directed and controlled the whole process. The intelligent power lets innocent babies suffer terribly. It clearly cannot be trusted so nobody should assume things about what it might or might or might not do. Even if the things it does are not random they look random to us. We have to respect ourselves by going by appearances. If we refuse to see evil as random injustice then we fail to see evil at all.
Whatever we came from existed just by pure chance for there might just have been nothing and so by chance there was not just nothing. We cannot be called religious when we claim chance as our origin and not the work of a God who made us for a purpose. Besides even God exists by chance so why not life?
BELIEVER: There are powers and forces that we cannot understand. We do not understand much about ourselves or how we are able to be aware of things.
REPLY: If we do not understand these things we should not be saying that they help us believe in an afterlife. The strange ability to be aware of things has nothing to do with proving we have souls that survive death. Inexplicable is not the same as supernatural.
BELIEVER: The mind is separate from the body and brain and so it survives when the body dies. Zen Buddhists meditate on contradictions like the sound of one hand clapping and get into a state of awareness in which the contradiction is experientially reconciled. Matter cannot do this so it is something different from matter as we know it that can. The mind is not the brain. It is important that the believer learn this for themselves by experience. We put experience before the testimony of others and first-hand evidence before second-hand. We will not evolve outside the body which is why we will become a body after death for self-development must be the reason for evolution. The Zen experience reconciles the contradiction by making the mind think two opposing thoughts at the one time when it normally can only hold one. But this reconciliation is not real. The two thoughts are still contradictory. It is just that the experience has changed. The mind then is not matter as we know it but something of another dimension independent of the kind of matter that surrounds us so its survival beyond death is possible
We can only concentrate on one thing at a time. The Zen experience is performed by simply fusing the experience of A with the separate experience of non-A. It can fuse two separate moments of consciousness. They are separate for one moment is taken up with one experience and the next with one that contradicts it. You cannot be aware of two incompatible things at the one time. So how are Zen practitioners able to do it? That they can do it indicates that the mind has power over time. They are able to fuse two separate and disparate moments. This has to be what happens for there is nothing that can make A the same as non-A so time is being fused. It is possible to fuse time thus for all time is as one in the timeless state called eternity. Death can be defined as the end of our perception of time so we cease to exist. The power to fuse is the key to life after death. We will use it to hold on to life when we pass on. We have the power to become eternal or to have an eternal experience.
REPLY: The two contradictory experiences are supposed to become one experience. That thought is an absurdity so its temporary insanity those people are experiencing. They think they can hear the sound of one hand clapping. The two experiences or thoughts or memories of what a clap is like and a hand by itself that can't clap are separate. Only a mind that is tricked into feeling that it senses and realises the two are one and the same can achieve the union. It’s all a mental trick. The two are misperceived as one. It is not two contradictory experiences contained in two separate moments that is being fused but just two memories of what a hand and a clap is like. Two moments of time are not being fused but two ideas in the mind.
If two contradictory things can be reconciled then perhaps though the experience tells us we will live forever it is wrong though it is absurd for it to be wrong!
BELIEVER: Why could there not have just been nothing? There could have been nothing so there should have been nothing. When it is simpler for there to have been nothing, there should have been nothing. This suggests that everything that exists contains psychic power or supernatural power. It is made of it and it is biased towards good though evil happens because non-existence is inferior to existence and it is pro-existence. This gives us confidence that we will live forever. The zenith of existence is being conscious and so we are the least likely of beings to cease existing. Whatever force makes us is more concerned with our life than our happiness. It is up to us to make ourselves happy and nobody else is going to do it for us and we should not assume that they will.
REPLY: There could have been nothing but that does not mean there should have been nothing or that it is impossible for anything to exist. By chance there is more than just nothing and there always was. It’s not supernatural that things exist. It’s just lucky! The argument that existing things contradicts the way things should have been with nothing existing at all suggests that supernatural powers are illogical and incoherent. That argument if valid and true would forbid reliance on miracles and religious experience.
BELIEVER: Motion is magical. We cannot explain it – we just take it for granted for we see it so much and do not notice how strange and incomprehensible it is. Motion is life. Consciousness is the movement of information into the mind which moves and perceives it. The mind is magical therefore it can survive death.
REPLY: You could imagine magic in anything. If nothing at all existed nobody would be able to explain why. Some would say it would still be magic then! The Believer's argument mistakes what is inexplicable for what is magical. Of course I am not saying there would be people around if there was nothing. It's just an illustration to make a point.
GOD DOES NOT IMPLY AFTERLIFE
The Sadducees were the branch of Judaism that believed in God but not in a life after death or in a resurrection. These doctrines were not in the Torah and they wanted to revere the Torah alone as scripture.
They held that the concept of an all-good God would not necessarily imply that there was a life after death.
God is a mystery of a million paradoxes. God is no argument for a life after death for you don’t really know what he would do. He is necessarily incomprehensible to our mortal minds. If he is an argument for life after death then there should be no mystery in religion.
The Sadducees taught that life is
a gift. If you get a gift of $5, you have no right to
complain that it wasn't $10. So they concluded that if God gives you a few
years of life and death is the end you cannot complain. So the Sadducee
could argue that when God is good enough to give us a life at all we
should be grateful even if death is the end.
He does not owe us anything and would have the right not to keep us alive beyond
death. But that would be true if we did no truly
good works at all or was rewarded only in this life for our goodness. God could give you a reward before you do
the works for he knows you will do X amount at least. That explains how a
person can do great good and then die. It is because the good has already
been rewarded.
Some say that belief in God implies that there is no afterlife for if there were it would prevent us being selfless for we could anticipate a reward in it. That is not claiming that you can’t be selfless if you are going to get a reward after death for your good deeds. Perhaps there is a reward and you don't know. It is claiming that if you believe in life and rewards after death your good deeds are less selfless or not selfless at all. We must remember to, that life is a reward by itself. Many of us would rather live forever in poverty than not live at all. Let us think of reward as life and as the blessings we get in life for having done good.
When there is a choice between selfless love and gratitude for the reward you have to choose the former. It is not a sin to be churlish when you have to be for that is not being churlish but having no alternative. Gratitude that rejected love would be false gratitude.
Love is sacrifice according to all the religions. Where there is no belief in the afterlife, it follows that your good deeds will be more altruistic for there will be no reward expected. To be selfless believing that there is a reward cannot be as good as being selfless believing that there is no reward if altruism is good at all. You might not do the good deed for a reward in either case but it is better for you if there will be a reward or if you believe there will be. It is harder to do good believing there will be no rewards so it is more loving. It shows that you want to do good more because it is good and not for a reward etc. You would be at least slightly less sure of that if a reward was a possibility. God must desire that we be perfect altruists so there can’t be a life or reward after death or he does not want us to believe in it.
But what if he rewards in this life? Maybe he would but he cannot for rewards are spiritually bad for us according to the religious doctrine that love is sacrifice. Once we hear of rewards, we are never sure if they had a little influence in us doing good. Then they lessened the goodness for true good cares only about good not rewards at all.
God acts like he is boss. The fact that God may have power does not give God the right to tell people what to do. And the fact that God is good still does not give God the right to boss people for before we can listen to him we have to be sure he is good meaning that we should know what good is without depending on his authority. If we can be good without God then he should not be bossing us for bossing is an evil thing and needs to be necessary to be justified. So God as Lord and King represents immorality and evil and power – which is what the clergy want him for. We are his slaves. Any rewards he gives he gives not because we are sons but they are like the gifts a slave master can give his slave. Such gifts are an insult for a gift implies you don’t deserve or have earned what you get. If it is right to have a slave, then it is hard to see how it could be right or necessary to be kind to the slave. If a person should not be compensated for their work they should not be compensated for their work.
Rewards make God worse not better for they are not what he can think he ought to give though they are good for us. Perhaps we should believe that there is no life after death though there might be one? Perhaps God can’t tell us if there is one. That too would detract from self-sacrifice so he would have to believe that it is out of the question.
One major argument for an afterlife is that one is needed for God to make up for injustices that happen in this life. But if we are here to sacrifice ourselves and to suffer why should God make up for unjust suffering for morality is painful for us? We would be expected to love our enemies altruistically even when they are tormenting us to death. Even if we can’t do good for them having a good will towards them is being self-sacrificing.
You can’t really make up for injustices for you cannot make them not to have happened. And they are pointless when we forget them or if God makes us forget them. To say that God will put the balance right is to make it as good an idea to become the target of as much abuse as possible as to be perfectly happy. It destroys morality. If the evils in life are made up for by God then the evils have more or less to be forgotten.
If the afterlife exists and you are as sure of it as you are that a person that is not stabbed through the heart will live on, it is impossible to condemn murder for it is only killing a body but not the person. The person can still develop and learn if she needs to. And the distress of the relatives would be down to ignorance for why mourn if the person is alive? God condemns murder so death must be the end. It must be the final end for why condemn putting a person out of existence for a while if they can come back? That is just like making somebody fall asleep. Belief in the afterlife is only harmless if you keep it just as a weak belief and not as a certainty. Christianity wants you to treat faith as knowledge and that is sinister.
The doctrine of God implies that there is no life beyond the grave.
NO MORAL REASONS FOR AFTERLIFE
BELIEF
To believe that death is the complete destruction of the mind and body of what is more valuable than money or happiness, a human person, is to find a reason for condemning murder. Even if we will return to life, it is still the destruction of what is valuable. But could it really be evil to put a diamond out of existence for a while and then bring it back into existence again? No. So, it must be the same if this is done to a person. If we simply go to another place at death then murder is not wrong and the grief left behind would be the fault of the bereaved.
The killer who sends us to God or Heaven would be doing us a favour. And we must be ready for God and Heaven when we go to them. No divine purpose is thwarted for if we are not ready then it is God's will for he takes ultimate responsibility for all that happens for being the all-powerful creator he has to. God has the power to take care of his plans. Even if we have free will, our choices proceed from our thoughts and feelings which can be manipulated without detriment to our freedom for thoughts and feelings are not free will. They only address it and guide its direction. So if a man kills it is because God wills it. Murder would only be a sin for one who did not intend the killing to be done for God. It is fanaticism to approve of human beings being prone to death and you have to approve if you want to believe in God. You have to agree that life after death makes murder less evil than it would be if we did not live on and that is sinister.
The attitude, “Our troubles are nothing at all no matter how big they seem when we have all eternity to be happy” is a popular religious piece of sentimentalism. It is a religious doctrine. It is a dangerous way of thinking despite being comforting. It will lead to at least some apathy for your personal suffering and especially that of others. It can't give you comfort without trying to give you apathy. And the attitude/doctrine is a natural and unavoidable consequence of the doctrine of a happy afterlife. Ignore those who try to persuade you that the attitude is innocuous. They will try to do that with statistics that allegedly prove that believers in the unchangeably happy hereafter are mentally and spiritually better than unbelievers down here below. Even if they are right the fact remains unchanged that the people supposedly helped by their faith are helped in spite of their belief. Perhaps the statisticians are able to boost the statistics by rationalizing the failures. Anyway, only greater suffering can come from the promotion of and adherence to the attitude/doctrine mainly in the long term.
Some prefer to deny the afterlife is about perfect happiness. They say you just have to grin and bear it there like you do in the present life. If the afterlife will have its ups and downs the dangers of the doctrine of a happy afterlife is avoided. Another danger that is avoided is the approval for murder implied by the concept of a blissful afterlife. The danger is also avoided if you drop the idea of divine beings or super-scientific beings that care for us and have a purpose for our deaths.
And how are we supposed to believe the doctrine makes people better when the majority of people claim allegiance to religious beliefs when we know that religion is manipulative and bad? Would the picture be much different if they did not?
The doctrine that everlasting happiness lies beyond the grave certainly makes that life more important than this one and makes normal people feel the pain of being stuck here on earth while Heaven has all these everlasting goodies.
If the next life will be better than this one that would entitle you to neglect people who are not important in your daily life on earth now? You could argue that you may as well enjoy yourself now at their expense for they will be fine in the end. This makes sense if suffering is only an insignificant blip as Christianity tries to make out.
Some would say that you would expect it to imply that you could devote yourself to them at your own expense because there are so many goodies waiting for you in the hereafter and so you will only have to endure the inconvenience for a while and then it is permanent relief. But since you would rather look after yourself and gratify your affections, you can neglect the other people for you come first for all the loving you do is about fulfilling yourself. You are surer you exist than anybody else so the only compromise would be to just help those who are useful to you. The doctrine of bliss beyond the grave is a bad influence.
If the next life will not be much better then it seems you should do all you can to help others be as happy as possible now. But is this right? Why not focus on yourself now and put off the helping others till later? Plus leaving others without help ensures that they will get tougher and will struggle better to help themselves in the rest of this life and in the next. It is not wrong to neglect their lives in this world when the next world will be no better. We know that life ends in suffering and loss and death but that doesn't stop us trying to help people now. Why should it if they live on after death? It is more natural to help people. You cannot just ignore people because life is cruel. If you ignore others, they will ignore you. It is unnatural to do nothing at all for others.
It is certain that it is better to hold that the next life will be imperfect for that is a bit more encouraging to do good works for others than is the view that the next life is perfect.
When you deny the next life, you will find it is more encouraging to help people now for we are more sure people exist and that they need help than we are that the next life exists. Then the tendency towards good is maximised. We know we have to deny some of our inclinations in order to gain acceptance of the trials of life so that we can bear them better because this life is all there is and we have to make the best of it. We have to help others even if we would rather not. Not helping people does us no good.
We must never teach that this life is nothing and the next life is more important. Making the next life more important is what happens when we see it in terms of everlasting happiness. We must not teach that we came here for some sensible purpose for that implies that suffering is necessary. Acceptance of a life after death should give us courage to do good better and if it does not there is little use in believing in it and there is no point in believing in it.
Recognise that it is not how long you live that is important but how much you enjoy the time you have got and we dedicate ourselves to help you to do that. If you fear death you are not grateful enough for the time you have here and for being born. Your gratitude should be able to handle the fear and neutralise it.
If you were content with life on earth and with helping other people you would not be even looking for evidence for an afterlife. Looking demonstrates a selfishness that is certainly unbalanced. How can apparitions and near-death experiences prove life after death when they proceed to defend a harmful doctrine?
To believe that you should endure terrible inconvenience and suffering to help others while thinking you will have a superb life after death because of it is fanaticism for this life, the life that you are most sure of, comes first. You are not as sure that you will live on as you are that you are alive now.
THE HANDBOOK OF CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS
Chapter 10 of this book discusses the evidence for life after death.
It says that the six theories about what takes place after death are,
1 that we do not survive
2 that we live like some kind of half-person or ghost in some gloomy world
3 that we return in another body
4 that we are all part of one God and at death just merge back into that God
5 that only the soul survives
6 that the whole person returns to life in a resurrection.
Then it has a look at the objections to life after death.
The first objection is that consciousness is dependent on the brain and when the brain dies there is nothing to survive. This can mean that the brain causes the conscious self or that the brain is identical with it. If the brain causes the conscious self or is identical with it then death is the end when the brain dies. Consciousness dies with it. But if the brain causes the self or is the self, the self could perhaps use other forces to interact with and survive when the brain dies.
Then the book asks if we are just material beings then how come we can have notions like equality or truth which are not material things? But even a computer can see that two material things the same size and shape are equal and it sees this equality as truth. If the argument were right then we would have no perception of material things at all for you cannot have this perception without having it in terms of measuring quantity and what is true and what is equal.
The next argument says that there is a unity in our thinking. Thoughts may differ but they are united in being mine. I can be aware of many different things at the one time though I can only concentrate on one but this many is united in my awareness. I have only the one awareness with which to be aware of all of them. It has been proposed that there is some kind of scanning mechanism in the brain that does this so fast that it seems to happen all at the one time. It is easy to agree with the argument that this would require some material thing circling around the brain but there is no such thing and besides how is it going to move inside the head when the head is full of matter? But what if it is some kind of undetectable material energy that is able to do that? Radiation can penetrate matter.
The book says that this scanner is not a material thing because if it were, it would be replaced the way the cells in our bodies grow new cells to replace the body that was there before and that would mean you change into somebody knew every so often. But there is no proof apart from memory that this replacing of the self does not happen and rationally speaking it would prove nothing if it didn't keep being replaced. And if I had my sister’s memories replace my own this moment it would feel exactly like I was her and always had been. The book argues that if the brain is the self then there is no self for the self is just a pile of bits and pieces. But bits and pieces can compose one thing and the self is a thing.
Then the book argues that if the self is a material thing then it was made by random forces and so any conclusions it makes are questionable for no intelligence made it. But the senses verify and random or not the conclusions are remarkably right. The self could have been made by a spirit. It could still be a material thing. The authors of the book know fine well that if the self is material that doesn't necessarily mean that something random made it.
The materialist idea that thought is not an action of the brain but is produced by it the same way as the creak of a machine is attacked in the book. You could put it this way: "Thought is not an action of the brain, but is produced by it the same way as the creak of a machine is produced without being a part of the machine". The mind could not influence the matter of the body if that were true for a creak does not influence the machine. The doctrine is called epiphenomenalism.
But a thought is not like a creak. Nobody knows what it is. We know thoughts recorded by the past are stored in cells of the brain. The machine is influenced by the creak – the creak means wear and tear.
The book then says that though the self or consciousness needs the body and brain to learn it does not follow that the consciousness will die with the brain. Correct. But it might be implausible for it to survive. This is a question of probability.
The book argues that the view that if we become disembodied beings there will be no way of making a distinction between person and person because on earth we use the body to do that. But the distinction will still exist for my consciousness is not your consciousness. The distinction is still there even if we will not be able to make it in the afterlife. The distinction issue has nothing to do with proving that we do not exist after death. The book says that the body is replaced with a new body and can change radically in appearance and still be the same person.
The book then gives the argument from authority, majority opinion and the sages like Jesus that there was life after death for the doctrine of the afterlife. But what use were any of these people for they never provably had experience of life after death? Jesus said more about life after death before the resurrection and nothing after it so we can’t take him too seriously.
The argument from the conservation of energy says that that matter is never destroyed but only transformed is then introduced. The book reasons from this that it is more likely that spirit cannot be annihilated than that matter couldn't be and concludes that it is very likely that spirit is not destroyed. The only thing I would do is substitute consciousness for spirit. Consciousness is not matter as we know it so it will be better matter. Religion cannot use the argument because it says that matter came from nothing and can go back to nothing.
Then the book dishes up the argument from the dead cow. This argument says that you have two cows and one is dead and the other alive and yet there is an incredible difference between the two. The book says that you cannot explain what makes the live one live so it is something outside the rules of nature as we know it and which can survive death. The book complains that the only catch is that it has everything that has life surviving death. The book says it only proves that life survives but life could be one force so there would be no individual immortality. But who cares as long as we survive? Another problem is that the life that survives might die another way. Perhaps it could recycle itself if intelligent and incarnate again to prolong its life. The energy of life could preserve itself by drawing upon other forces to feed itself after death. Maybe that is the reason there are things like plants that die for disembodied beings use their energy to stay alive after death. But if life survives will it be conscious life? If my life survives my death it could be like a living being such as a nettle and have no consciousness at all.
I would add that if you put a dying cow in a tight bodysuit that completely covers it and then encase it all in concrete, nothing leaves that cow when it dies. The cow does not get lighter or anything and no energy comes out but there is still a huge change. This suggests that life is a force that is beyond the laws of matter as we have them. But can we say this? We know a lot less about the laws of matter than we think. So we cannot use the supernatural as an explanation. To say that forces beyond the laws of matter do this is not to say that the forces are non-material or spiritual. When something moves there is an amazing difference between it then and when it doesn't move. Yet you don't speak of some force leaving the moving object when it stops moving. But you don’t see any difference between a clock that is wound up and ticking and one that isn’t wound up and not ticking either.
The argument from magic comes next. It says that since we can do magic things like levitating an arm by lifting it that the self can do magic and the self must be more than matter and will live on if its bodily matter dies when it has this supernatural magic power about it. This argument is dealt with very inadequately in the book. One could object, “But a robot can lift its arm.” Religion might respond that a robot can only do that if a person programmed it so it was a person’s magic that gives it the power. It is possible to imagine the forces of chance accidentally making a robot that does this but the difference is that there is no self to make it do this so there is no magic. This thought suggests that it is magic when a person lifts an arm but not magic if a crude robot made by chance does it which is silly. It is like saying that tea is only tea when a person makes it and not when a machine makes it. The book says that the magic can involve lifting our arms against the law of gravity by sheer willpower and thought alone. This is not true. The willpower and thoughts tell the nerves to move the arm up and the muscles contract through an electrical impulse. The thoughts do nothing. It is the electricity in the brain that does the moving.
Plato’s argument is next. It goes as follows. The mind is meant to be rational so if it becomes evil it tries to destroy this rationality. Plato said that evil destroys. The self which he calls soul is full of evil and it is not destroyed despite the evil. The person who is good is just as aware and conscious as the one who is evil. So Plato concluded that the self must be immortal. The book says that this argument is good but inconclusive for evil spirits or God might destroy the self after death. Perhaps the self could run out of energy and die. The fact that evil is an abstract thing not a force is ignored by the book. A painting is not damaged by having ugly images put on it to enhance it. Good and evil are not powers - they are about how you use the powers so evil cannot necessarily damage your existence as a person.
First of all evil spirits would be killing selves now and taking their live bodies. They would be putting themselves in your place in your body. And why not? What use would it be killing anybody after death? Why kill selves after death especially when it is somebody that might be converted to join the dark side? It would seem that if spirits damage themselves by doing evil then if they fail to diminish their selfhood to the degree that they cease to exist then they should damage their power by being so evil. So how could they kill anybody?
And a good God wouldn’t kill the spiritual self. We don't need belief in God. If we accept the trials of life and recognise things like depression that even faith cannot help we don't need the God crutch. We don't need him to be God before we can love him. In other words, if God gave away his godship and his powers would we still love him? We don't love him for him if we don't. God has the power to end our lives at death even if the self could live on without the body. He intervenes to snuff out the life. If the God concept makes us less sure that we live on after death then the concept should be scrapped. We should not degrade ourselves by desiring belief in God.
Does the self run out of energy? Why does the self never run out of energy on earth? People die of physical causes so it is the body that does the damage. Nobody dies just because their self died. If their self did die the body would live on and be a shell. Plato is thought to prove the spirituality of the soul. From where I see it, Plato proves that the soul is not necessarily spiritual but that it is able to patch itself up where it damages itself by evil. The damage is done but it will not be fatal for the soul is able to draw on other forces to survive on to make up for the damage.
The argument that being evil destroys your soul is nonsense. An evil thing can exist forever intact. If the soul is spiritual then it is one being without parts. It cannot lose any of itself or fade away. It either exists or it doesn’t.
The argument from the soul’s simplicity that comes after gives no proof at all that the soul has no parts. It says you can have half a body but you never have half a soul. But that proves nothing as this here shows. You can have half a chicken but not have half a lamb when there are no lambs in the country.
The argument is begging the question. It assumes that there are no parts in the soul and then argues from this assumption that the affair is proven.
The argument from being versus having is dished out by the book. The argument claims that I am self, I don't have a self. The book says that I have a brain and have a body but I do not have a self for I am a self I am not the brain or the body. My body and brain belong to me. There has to be something to do the owning and that must be my immaterial or non-material and therefore spirit self. I must live forever for I am not the body. I am spirit not a material thing. This is nonsense. What is my self? Is it the scanner faculty I call consciousness? Is any thought I am having me as well? If it is then it follows that I am not me for I can look at my thought like I was outside of it. The argumentation doesn't work.
The book uses an argument which says the power to think and will are immaterial powers and can only be functions of an immaterial soul or spirit. Like Fulton J Sheen in The Life of All Living it would say that though my thoughts are distinct from my soul they are not separate from it so I am a spirit for I can be my thoughts and see them at the same time (page 28). But when I can separate my self from my thoughts as with my body they should say that I am not my thoughts just as they say this proves I am not entirely my body. The interesting thing about this is that if I do evil, I must think evil to do the evil. So my evil thoughts are part of me and I am evil. A doctrine like that makes it impossible to say that you can love the sinner and hate the sin. Jesus demanded that we hate sin intensely so that we would rather lose an eye for life than use that eye even once to sin with.
The book then argues that mystical experience proves life after death for the mystics despite all the serious disagreements in interpreting their experience all agree that the consciousness lives on after death. I would add that most mystics have had no interest in caring for others which adds outstandingly pathetic weight to their testimony of an afterlife!
The argument that life has no meaning or purpose if death is the end is unsatisfactory for meaningless events do happen. For example, viable babies can be lost and suffer and die without the mother knowing. The arguments that we should believe in a life after death in case there is one and that the desire for life after death proves there is such life should not be in the book at all for they are simply appalling. Meaning in life is got from countless sources not just religious faith or belief in an afterlife!
The remainder of the arguments are:
1 Since God is creative and just and loving we must live on after death
2 Feeling the presence of the dead proves they are still alive
3 Near-death experiences are put down as evidence - though rather cautiously because nobody can be proved to have had an experience after dying and because they contradict Christian theology
4 The resurrection of Jesus is supposed to prove life after death.
The dubious thing about the resurrection is that Jesus allegedly raised people from the dead before he raised himself and these testimonies are not focused on historical authentication like you would expect. When the Jews were saying the resurrection must have been a hoax, the natural thing for the Christians to have done would have been to verify the other resurrections as much as Jesus’ own. But far from having done that, we have the story of the raising of the widow’s son in Luke alone and Lazarus in John alone and they are treated soberly and briefly. More importantly no effort is made to authenticate the stories – another hint of a late origin for the gospels and that they were making a lot of the stuff up. The gospels of Matthew and Mark and Luke are similar to a great degree. John is very different. How the three gospels, Matthew and Mark and Luke can claim a right to encourage us to believe in the resurrection when they show collaboration is just like the three witnesses of a crime being allowed to confer together before being brought into court. No - its worse for there was no court for Matthew and Mark and Luke.
The Handbook is not worth talking about never mind purchasing.
Another book of Christian Apologetics, Reasons for Hope, says that the soul is the form of the living thing.
Catholics teach that the bread of holy communion when validly consecrated by a priest literally becomes the body and blood of Jesus Christ. It looks like bread and no experiment can prove it is not bread but the Church claims that it is really the body of Jesus. The Church says that the taste, appearance, weight and smell of the communion wafer do not prove that it is bread. What makes something bread is substance. Substance is like a partless soul for it can do without the things that appear to the senses. Substance has nothing to do with the appearances of bread, taste or smell or colour etc. The appearances can stay but the substance can change. Bread can become Jesus without changing anything that makes it seem to be bread. They say the substance of bread turns into the substance of Jesus by the power of the priest.
In a similar way, this book says the soul is the substance of the body, its form. But suppose the body was made up of parts then each part could have a different soul and the whole thing coming together makes up a person. The soul could be made up of many souls just as many cells can make up one brain. It takes many. If the souls separate as in death perhaps, the self ceases to exist. There is no proof that the soul in each person is one soul so the book is wrong to claim there is just the one (page 32). The rest of the arguments are largely what we have already met in relation to the awful Handbook.
The book also argues that since the intellect can know the body like it was an outsider it must be independent of the body and will survive when the body dies (page 38). But the intellect is a sense. It senses out absurdity from non-absurdity. It is only consciousness that is the mystery. A sense can pick up something without being conscious. A computer can work out if there is a disk in its floppy drive. Is sight independent of the eye because it can see the eye in a reflection? The argument is totally stupid.
Page 41 dubiously argues that the soul cannot be put out of existence even by God for God made it to be immortal. Though he has the power, his morals forbid him to do so. But that presupposes that God promised the soul in the first place that he would never kill it. He had no need to promise that. But the book seems to think that by merely giving it the power to be immortal he promised it that and that is bad logic. With that logic, when he made babies with the power to grow up he did wrong by taking their lives.
If the soul is just the form of the body then the body is completely replaced with a new body every so many years so that the body you have now is not the one that existed ten years ago then you must have a new soul now. The Christians often say now that if the soul just survived death that is only part of the person surviving not the whole person which is why the resurrection is necessary for body and soul make up the person. The implications of this after what we have just read are silly indeed. It implies that since your body dies and is replaced by new cells when it is alive until you get a brand new body that you are not the same person as before.
CONCLUSION
People are trained to take comfort in the idea of God who will keep them alive after death but this is a false hope for even if God existed why think that he would do that? There is no reason to think we can live on. However it is still possible that we survive death. We have no reason however to think that we do and to really care for our lives in this world we have to abandon the concept.
BOOKS CONSULTED
AFTER DEATH – WHAT? Fred Pearce, Christadelphian
Publishing Office,
ETERNAL LIFE, Hans Kung, Collins,
GOD AND THE NEW PHYSICS, Paul
Davies, Penguin Books,
HANDBOOK OF CHRISTIAN
APOLOGETICS, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, Monarch,
JEHOVAH OF THE WATCHTOWER, Walter
Martin and Norman Klann, Bethany House Publishers,
IS THERE LIFE AFTER DEATH? Paul
Kroll, Worldwide
MIND OUT OF TIME, Ian Wilson, Gollanez,
LIFE AFTER DEATH THE WONDERFUL
FACTS, Alan Hayward, Christadelphian, ALS,
REASONS FOR HOPE, Ed Jeffrey A Mirus,
TEACH YOURSELF PHILOSOPHY OF
MIND, Mel Thompson, Teach Yourself Books,
THE AFTER DEATH EXPERIENCE, Ian
Wilson, Corgi,
THE DEVIL HIDES OUT, David Marshall, Autumn House, Grantham, 1991
THE LIFE OF ALL LIVING,
THE INCREDIBLE CREED OF JEHOVAH
WITNESSES, Frs Rumble & Carty, TAN,
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO HEAVEN?
Dave Hunt, Harvest House, Publishers,
The Web
www.csicop.org/sb/9803/reincarnation.html
Case of Reincarnation Re-examined by Joe Nickell. This refutes the reincarnation claims of Jenny Cockell.
BIBLE QUOTATIONS FROM:
The Amplified Bible
Sunday, 10 February 2008