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 [This is an older essay I am re-publishing here so it can have a wider audience.]
I have a question: What happens to me when I die?
Not what happens to people in general, or good people, or religious people, or other people, or my relatives, or people in other countries, or whatever: What happens to me when I die.
Considering the fact that each person will die, I am amazed at how little material is available for those of us confronted by death. The government spends huge sums of money developing the food pyramid, and researching the FTC's list of common scams, but there is no similar publication about death. I know I am more likely to die than to fall victim to some half-baked scam. If the government is going to publish useful information, wouldn't the "ultimate statistic" (i.e. every person dies) be a logical place to start? (I am not advocating favoritism towards any religious or philosophical point of view, but instead suggesting something like I've written here which lists the known possibilities to guide people as they make decisions about what to believe.) In modern America, personal death is almost totally ignored. Impersonal death is the stuff of entertainment, and of the news. But people don't seem to give any thought to personal death. I am left to try to glean answers from human history, mostly from the religious traditions of humanity.
Based on my research, the human race has produced three views on what happens after death. Every culture and people group throughout time has had different rituals for and approaches to death, but in terms of the core beliefs about what will happen to me when I die, I find only three basic ideas.
In a sense, there is a fourth view, that of the agnostic. This would be someone who says no one can know what happens after death. There are two slightly different versions of agnosticism: one says we can speculate on alternatives about death, but never know which is correct; the other says we can know nothing whatsoever about what happens after death. Either way, the agnostic position is hardly a satisfactory answer to my question about death. In my research, I have found three clear, easy to understand, and orthogonal (i.e. none overlap) possibilities. Because these views are orthogonal, I am confident that one must be correct. (Or that none are and there is a view I have not discovered.) Because I have exhausted the possibilities, I am able to make an informed decision.
[Additional Note: There is a fifth alternative: What happens to me after my death could be totally random and non-deterministic. Some random process may let me into Paradise, force me to be reborn, end my individual existence forever, or do something else totally unexpected. This process is not determined by anything I do in life or anything under my control. I don't discuss this view, because it is irrational and by definition there's nothing that can be said about it.]
The three views on death: NIHILISM, EARNING SALVATION BY SELF-EFFORT, and SALVATION BY GRACE. [Which will be discussed in the next three parts, followed by a conclusion.] |
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NIHILISM: When I die, whatever is "me" (a distinct individual) ceases to exist, period. There's not much else that can be said about this view. The nihilist view is typically found in secular philosophies, such as naturalism (or, materialism)...[ abbreviated | read entire ] |
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EARNING SALVATION BY SELF-EFFORT: Some part of my distinct individualness will live after death, and I am able to either make the life to come better, or to make the life to come worse, by my own self-effort during life. What happens to me after...[ abbreviated | read entire ] |
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SALVATION BY GRACE: I must save myself through my self-effort, but I am unable to, therefore I need a substitute who has taken the punishment for what I have done wrong in life, so that I do not have to earn a place in the life after death, but...[ abbreviated | read entire ] |
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Conclusion: For myself, I have studied this question for many years, and have narrowed down the possibilities to the three I present here. If I believe in nihilism, nothing matters, and I might as well just die. If I believe in salvation by my...[ abbreviated | read entire ] |
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[This is an older essay I am re-publishing here so it can have a wider audience.] Consider the time in human history when Jesus appeared. The coincidences are amazing: ITEM: The Messianic prophecies of the Hebrews created a set of conditions...[ abbreviated | read entire ] |
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[This is an older essay I am re-publishing here so it can have a wider audience.] Karma is one of those ideas which gives people a simple tool with which to filter the world around them, so it has achieved an amazing persistence and stability. At...[ abbreviated | read entire ] |
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continued from part 1 Because karma is easy to understand, and an easy tool to apply to the world, it persists. Because it doesn't explain reality correctly, people change the definition in a subtle way so they do not have to deal with karma's...[ abbreviated | read entire ] |
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[This is an older essay I am re-publishing here so it can have a wider audience.] How many people who believe in a system of salvation by works have thought about the practical implications of this belief? I hope this article will challenge...[ abbreviated | read entire ] |
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The two major world religions, Christianity (including Judaism) and Hinduism (including Buddhist versions), both say the standard is perfection. This is interesting because the two religions are the dominant views under which most of humanity...[ abbreviated | read entire ] |
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