After starting college, I slowly became disconnected with the Christian faith that had been an influential part of my life in high school. It wasn’t due to the fact that I fell into the collegiate life of hedonism and simply abandoned all things good and holy. My loss of faith was a gradual process of erosion—philosophy classes fueled my skepticism and contemporary philosophy’s explicit attacks on religion made it clear that I could either take my academic discipline seriously or adhere to ridiculous religious precepts. Even after severing my ties with Christianity completely, though, a few of the ideas retained some appeal. Chief among them was the concept of an afterlife.
But now, nearly six years since my divide with the Christian faith, the idea of an afterlife is offensive and repellent. This shift in my attitude actually occurred long before I took the time to reason it out, but I finally sat down and took the time to think about it last week after the subject came up in a conversation with some friends.
Marx is infamous for his declaration that religion is the opiate of the masses. This accounts for a number of problems that I have with religion, but fails to really address why I have such a problem with the concept of an afterlife. Nietzsche addresses it perfectly, though, claiming that religion is Platonism for the masses. Although a tad heavier on the philosophical buzzwords, the crux of what he is saying encompasses my distaste for the idea of an afterlife perfectly.
Plato posited that there was a separate plane of existence that contained the ideal “forms” for every object and concept known to man. Each form realized an absolute perfection unattainable by anyone or anything in the mortal world. Anything on our plane of existence was merely an imperfect attempt to mimic the forms. No matter how beautiful a statue is, no matter how long and hard an artisan worked on it, Plato argued that there was a transcendent form that realized the aspirations of the artist more perfectly.
The idea is bothersome. It’s universal one-upsmanship: anything you have or experience, no matter how amazing, is less than a form located elsewhere, inaccessible to you, a mere mortal. It’s one thing when a concept like this is applied to art, but what about feelings of love? Forms apply to feelings, too—your mortal understanding of the feeling is dwarfed by the transcendence of the absolute perfect. The bond between two lovers? Parent and child? In the grand scheme of things, these mean nothing: the forms realize the intensity and grandiosity of these emotions far better than anyone can know.
In much the same way, the Christian afterlife posits an almost identical framework: Heaven is a separate plane of existence that is far beyond our mortal comprehension. The love and presence of God is far greater than anything we can know or understand. Our worldly desires and passions, compared to being in the presence of God in Heaven, mean absolutely nothing to us.
Once again, we get the same sense of universal one-upsmanship. No matter how intensely or passionately I feel about something here, there is something far greater in the abstract “out there” that I cannot fathom. The idea cheapens my existence here in the mortal realm where, quite frankly, I’m more than happy. I can be intensely loved and passionately engaged and more than satisfied by what the world has to offer me. I don’t need an abstraction to sustain myself. Perhaps the idea of an afterlife would be less appealing if the same people that took the time to obsess pray/worship would use the time to revel in the delights of the mortal realm. It really can be quite good down here.
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