Life After Death

"In a way the Segal book is the perfect accompaniment to reading Gilgamesh , because he so brilliantly puts this into a broader context. This book covers the ancient history of the near East, and the origins of the Abrahamic tradition of Western religion up until the beginnings of Islam. We tend to see religions as very monolithic, having a set doctrine that sprang from the earth or was handed down from the heavens. Segal is extremely good at showing us how the history of religion is the history of humans encountering each other and the common sets of problems among different traditions, and how they all intermingle and evolve in trying to find solutions to them. He does that in particular by looking at afterlife beliefs. Luther famously said that if your god doesn’t deliver eternal life then I don’t give a mushroom for your god. For a lot of people, it is exactly what they expect of religion. Religion is supposed to deliver immortality. That’s what it’s for. But it varies from religion to religion how prominent a role it takes. It’s interesting to look at the example of Christianity, which had a definite beginning in the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. It’s all about the conquest of death. St Paul’s writings, which really created Christianity, are all about how Jesus conquered death for himself and for all of us, so we can all live on. Easter was when we celebrated that. I think it was certainly meant very literally at the time of Jesus, St Paul and the apostles. There’s every indication that they believed in a literal resurrection that was also very imminent. Paul writes as if it may happen in his lifetime, and if not then certainly soon after. It has been, and you still have Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on your door telling you it’s coming soon. The fact that it didn’t happen within one or two generations posed a bit of a problem for Christianity, though. If you believe in physical resurrection, this means that all of our loved ones are rotting at the bottom of the grave waiting for the last trumpet to sound, and that we too will have this prospect to face. That’s both philosophically difficult, and unattractive. We don’t want to imagine our loved ones or ourselves rotting in the grave, waiting for the day of judgement that was supposed to come and hasn’t yet. The idea of the eternal soul – which was brought into Christianity by Greek converts – rescued Christianity from this problem. It means that grandpa’s up there looking down on us, and when we die we’ll go up to join him. People imagine it differently, and their imaginings are not always coherent. But if the soul is to do the work we expect of it, it’s got to bring our consciousness with it. That’s what people want. They expect their personality, their mind, to live on, and they expect our soul to do this. Not that long ago, this was not just a matter of faith but a fairly sensible idea. How this overcooked cauliflower in our heads could produce thought was a great mystery – and still is to some extent – so it seemed like a perfectly sensible scientific proposition that there was some other, immaterial thing that produced thought and carried our mind. Whereas resurrection required God to intervene and re-assemble all our bones. But now, of course, the soul looks less plausible from a scientific point of view."