"the last enemy to be destroyed is death." Jesus took care of that and has laid claim to life. Death is simply the end of the body...not the real you...that part that lives on and is ever transforming. It is true...we can keep getting younger....a spring in our spiritual step...a dance with the divine...a giddy heart....a "can't wait" attitude to see what is going to happen next...it is such fun...
This is a post taken from a Facebook friend. Rather than respond there I'll just briefly comment here. As much as I disagree with statements like the above, it's not worth risking a connection. Actually I may speak a little to the complexity of navigating such relations, that is, those relations in which there is a radical difference in philosophical and/or religious beliefs. A friend and I have started writing a book regarding just such a relationship but it remains to be seen when it will be completed.
It was Feuerbach who criticized statements like "the last enemy to be destroyed is death" for being entirely too convenient for a creature who longs for the certainty of its own immortality. Freud, developing the observation, wrote in his Future of an Illusion:
It will be found if we turn our attention to the psychical origin of religious ideas. These, which are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end results of thinking: they are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes.
For those Christians who might dismiss Feuerbach, don't forget it was Karl Barth, one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century, who took Feuerbach quite seriously, even writing a preface to a later edition of Feuerbach's most provocative work The Essence of Christianity (and let us not forget that Feuerbach himself was a theologian).
Now this is what we might call a psychological critique of the notion of an afterlife or life after death. But what about a scientific one? I have written elsewhere about the importance of keeping in mind the connection between personality/consciousness and brain. One can observe, even in the most basic of human experiences, this connection. For example, when someone is struck in the head with great force there is a loss of consciousness, that part of us that is our personality, our self-awareness etc.. that part of us that Christians and others believe will transcend the limitations of our bodies. But if trauma to the brain causes an immediate loss of self-awareness, the consistent conclusion to draw is that the ultimate trauma to our brains, death, will result in the same thing. What will it be like after we die? Nothing. The same as when we are struck in the head and lose consciousness. There is not even any darkness, let alone angels and a light at the end of the tunnel (an experience brought about by a brain starved of oxygen as it turns out). There is simply nothing. How can we imagine this? It was once said by Alan Watts that one simply needs to think about what it was like before one was born (and had a brain). In the same way that "death" before birth meant our complete lack of existence, so too death after birth will mean the same thing. If this is unsettling to some, consider Feuerbach's words, and those of Freud. Could it be there may be a grain of truth in there somewhere? Life and existence paid scant attention to the needs of our ego before our birth, why should they after?
