“WHAT CAN WE BELIEVE?”
“Immortality and Life After Death” - Part I
The well-known and influential British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, once wrote: “That Man is the product of cause which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”
Would a majority of people agree with Russell that all human achievement and consciousness must come to ruin? Is the soul’s habitation to be built on the “firm foundation of unyielding despair”? Is this the most realistic way to view life, death and “immortality”? Why? Why not? What arguments would you offer in opposition to Russell’s views?
Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology, said that religion and its ideas of immortality were essentially “illusion”. We need the notion of immortality and heaven to help us bear the harsh realities of life and our fear of death. They may be helpful illusions, but they are illusions, nonetheless, Freud would say.
What do you think of these ideas? How might Jesus or Paul respond to them? Do most people today believe religion is a “crutch” or “opiate” to help us bear the pain of life, but that it has no basis in reality? How do you feel? How would you respond to Freud?
In his book, Escape From Evil, Ernest Becker says, “We have long known that money gives power over men, freedom from family and social obligations, from friends, bosses and underlings, it abolishes one’s likeness to others; it creates comfortable distance between persons, easily satisfies their claims on each other without compromising them in any direct personal way; on top of this it gives literally limitless ability to satisfy appetites of almost any material kind.”
“Power means power to increase oneself, to change one’s natural situation from one of smallness, helplessness, finitude to one of bigness, control, durability, importance.” And money is this power. Is money then the real immortality system by which we “buy” significance beyond our limited self? What do you think? Why? Why not?
