I wrote this essay in October 1995 for the Secular Humanist mailing list. Despite the humorous tone of the essay, there is a serious undercurrent that I think is valid.
Krishna.
The non-religious derive much entertainment from the stupidities of religion---there seems to be hardly any problem that cannot be surmounted by the bizarre leaps of faith that religions demand of their followers. However, religions themselves are subject to certain constraints and modes of thinking. In this short, unscholarly, unresearched, top-of-the-head essay, I will attempt to discuss the broad form of and the need for the notion of life after death in two Middle Eastern (Christianity and Islam) and two Far Eastern (Hinduism and Buddhism) religions---of course with some accompanying simplification; you seriously don't expect me to account for every twist and turn in every denomination, do you! So, here's some food for thought.
All religions require faith. Some demand them. The Middle Eastern religions are credal ones where each human being needs to be an aggressive believer to be saved. A clean slate is a bad start and a life of piety is needed to earn brownie points for the hereafter. Therefore Christianity and Islam invented Hell for the unbelievers. And since Hell is of no use unless you have an afterlife, they also invented life after death and a soul. They then threw in eternity to make the whole affair all the more gruesome for anyone who might have second thoughts about their religion. The Far Eastern religions are transcendental ones where starting with a clean slate is neutral (and maybe even be okay as long as you finish with an equally clean slate). Therefore, the idea of Hell and eternal torment was not particularly necessary, and the Hindu and Buddhist notions of Hell are more of a temporary detention room for wayward kids.
All religions require followers. Followers require incentives. At an abstract and sanitized level, all religions teach people to be good and kind (and boy, do they have strange ways of saying that). When violence is preached, it is often against the bad guys (which can include the unbelievers in the credal religions). Imagine a skeptic asking a religionist why one should be good. Because good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people, Silly!! Well, that is what the ideal world, which exists only in minds of pontificating armchair analysts like me, is like. The real world is much different.
The real world is unfair. Evolution provides the framework for the long-range emergence of cooperative and altruistic behavior, but in the short-term there is very little to prevent free-loaders and crooks from taking advantage of the system. This is true of all animals. Now add humans with a (mostly devious) brain and the attendant abilities to plan and conspire, and things suddenly look really good for the cheats, the bad guys.
So religions have this nasty little problem on their hands. Good guys do not always get rewarded, in fact they often get badly fucked. Likewise, bad guys seem to be having a pretty good time. Now, unless religions did some fast talking to maintain the faith of their followers, there was going to be a mass exodus of the faithful flock. After all, we greedy, selfish, small-minded, grubby little Homo sapiens cannot stand to see another guy be happy (let alone be happy at our expense). Hence life after death.
Here is what religions claim. You may think that you can cheat all your life and get away with it, but there is that guy-in-the-sky watching you (probably eating his pie-in-the-sky) keeping track of everything. And don't think that death is the end of everything. You will live on in your eternal soul and reap what you sow. So much is common between the Middle East and the Far East. How they implement the plan of retribution and balance is where they part company.
Christianity and Islam have the notion of an eternal soul, a single lifetime, and eternal bliss or damnation. Time's arrow (*) marches on inexorably. Hinduism and Buddhism are trickier. Your eternal soul keep being reborn innumerable times and the sins of the previous birth are punished in the current, and so on ad infinitum. Breaking out of the cycle of birth is eternal salvation, after which something funky happens to your soul and further enquiry leads to a throbbing sensation in the region of the forehead. In any case, time's cycle (*) revolves interminably.
So now the religionists have a "good" counter to the skeptics' argument for why they should be good (followers or whatever)---because otherwise, they will suffer (and in ways much more horrible that the small discomfort of being good for a short short time). What is more, this idea is completely untestable---what a bonus!
I predict, from the vantage point of my immense armchair wisdom, that the meme for after-life will be born (independently) or borrowed (shamelessly) in every religious philosophy with any claim to sophistication. It is just too good to be left out. Likewise, the realization that this all-too-short, low-entropy, conglomeration of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen (and other sundry elements) that we call life is all that we have, is often the first step in losing faith in cosmic energy beings.
(*) with apologies to Stephen Jay Gould.
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