Is Pope Francis Really Dead? Is Anyone?

 

It seems to me there is no valid distinction between mind and soul. These are both terms for the perceiving consciousness plus the will. People tend to use “soul” if they are arguing that the mind is immortal.

I hold to this, firstly, by Occam’s Razor: there is no reason to multiply entities. Secondly, if the soul is not the perceiving consciousness, the “I,” it does not matter whether it is immortal. And if it is to be judged based on our acts of will, as all major religions affirm, it must include the will.

Now, does the perceiving consciousness survive the death of the body? Is it dependent on the physical brain?

Friend Xerxes write, “no one has ever come back from the other side to tell us what goes on there.”

This is not obviously true. As Xerxes himself notes, people have indeed revived after being declared dead; and they have reported experiences of the hereafter.

Granted, we call them “near-death experiences” rather than “after-life experiences.”

But there is a tautology here: “brain death” is actually defined as an “irreversible” loss of brain function. In other words, if anyone comes back from death, they were by definition not dead.

Are their experiences legitimate evidence for an afterlife?

Xerxes laments, “there is no way of testing the validity of their memories.”

But there is. Those returning to life have reported hearing and seeing things during the period when they were supposedly dead; and their accounts are confirmed by others present. So the consciousness survives the absence of all activity in the brain, at a minimum. And the claims of out of body experiences have also been confirmed: they were able to accurately report things they could not have seen from their body. So the consciousness is not tied to the body.

We cannot similarly independently confirm their reports of a world apart from the physical world, to which they journey. But we can confirm it by the fact that those experiences tend broadly to tally among different reports. As Xerxes notes: “Often they report seeing bright lights, moving down some kind of tunnel, being welcomed into a new world of peace and calm.”

It is on the same basis that most of us confirmed the existence and nature of Timbuctu, in the days before Google maps. The fact that those who had not actually been there cannot verify reports is immaterial.

Then there is the witness of Jesus. Xerxes laments that, having been resurrected, he said “not one word about the far side of death.”

He actually said a lot. This was all that “kingdom of heaven” stuff. He said after death would come a judgment, and that the good and just would enter paradise, while the evil and iniquitous would enter eternal flames. And that there was no passage between the two. More detail is given, albeit not by Jesus in the flesh, in the Book of Revelations and elsewhere in the Bible.

I imagine Xerxes means Jesus did not say any of this this after the resurrection. But, having already said it, what would have been the reason to repeat it now, or for the gospels to record it? Only if, based on his more recent experiences in the underworld, harrowing hell, his understanding had somehow changed. Presupposing, as well, that he was not omniscient, was not God, so that he could have misunderstood previously.

And then, as Xerxes reports from his own experience, there is the evidence of “ghosts.” People actually seem able to communicate with us, every now and then, after physical death. While I have not personally had such unambiguous experiences, many others have, including Xerxes, who has distinctly heard his deceased wife speak to him in the night, or felt her presence as she rose from the bed to use the facilities. Such stories are common.

There are other sources of evidence. While anything physical is transitory, appears and disappears, anything mental or spiritual is immortal, endures. The cat runs into the bushes and disappears. Yet the memory of the cat running into the bushes remains in my mind’s eye indefinitely; if it fades, it can be reinvoked. The mental cat is immortal.

You will say memories fade. But they do not die. We may have greater or lesser difficulty summoning them to consciousness, as time wears on, but they are there forever somewhere, and can resurface. A certain smell, a certain song, the taste of a madeleine…

Try that with the actual cat Sniffles you had as a child.

So it is of the essential nature of the mind to be immortal.

This is not yet to get into the medical reports of those with virtually no physical brain sometimes nevertheless demonstrating normal intelligence. This is not to get into the reported miracles of the saints or Indian yogis, like levitation, bilocation, praeternatural knowledge, and so forth; which broadly suggest mind can exist and act without dependence on the physical body. Given, of course, that such reports can be false.

The rational conclusion, therefore, based on the evidence, is that the mind or soul is immortal; that there is life beyond the life in the body. It is merely a materialistic prejudice to balk at the idea.

William Blake, or Bishop Berkeley, or Plato, would argue that the body and the physical world are the epiphenomenon. Only the mind is real. Blake wrote “the body is that portion of the soul visible to the five senses.”

Berkeley has never been disproven on this. People just don’t want to hear it.

Boris the Cat

 

Friend Xerxes tells the story of Boris the Cat, a companion animal on a solo cruise around the world. 

His column is titled “The Absence of a Happy Ending.” With an added “[Reader alert: This column is a downer]”

Somewhere in the South Atlantic, Boris fell overboard, and was not seen again.

“When things go wrong, we’re told to have faith. As Julian of Norwich once assured us, ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’

            “I wonder if Boris would agree with her.”

As though this advice was for cats. Anyone who’s had a cat as a kid could have told him, cats do not live long in any event.

So why this melodramatic reaction, particularly when men, women, and children are dying daily in Gaza, or the Ukraine, and gruesomely in Israel on October 7? And yet it is the unmet cat, who died many years ago, that occupies Xerxes’s thoughts?

Jung once said, sentimentality is a scaffolding concealing brutality. Hitler loved his dogs. 

I fear we no longer care about humanity. Making much of “nature” and cats and the like is a scaffolding concealing our own brutality from ourselves, at times when in our hearts we know we are guilty of it. We reassure ourselves by manifesting exaggerated delicacy. Goodness! We wouldn’t swat a flea! We lament the death of every cat!

Death, after all, is every cat’s ending. “Death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.” 

The conventional belief is that an animal’s consciousness, when it dies, simply ceases to be. Lights out. That is not tragic: it is neutral. Sad because this cat’s life was a few years shorter than it might have been? 

Then where is the concern over aborted children?

Boris may have briefly felt panic. There is a Jewish prayer, “Lord, don’t let me die while I’m still alive.” I imagine that is a prayer against panic, against facing death unexpectedly. If so, Boris’s panic must have been brief. Cats are not renowned swimmers. A small furry animal in a turbulent sea? 

And if this is Xerxes’s or his readers’ main concern, do they spare a thought for the terror of animals led to slaughter, whose meat they eat every day?

Xerxes then makes Boris's death a parable to suggest that we invented heaven to console ourselves, because we want a happy ending.

But that does not work. Xerxes probably knows this in his own heart. He has a Christian education. Animals, according to traditional Christian belief, based on Aristotle, do not go to heaven. If heaven were only wishful thinking, we would surely insist that Boris did, and we would have our happy ending. Why does Xerxes choose an example that does not work?

Because his real point is a concealed one. He wants to believe we are all like cats, and cease to be at death. That is his wish for a happy ending. 

Because the alternative, as Xerxes neglects to note, is not heaven. All people do not go to heaven. In fact, in most traditional views of the afterlife, few do. There is an alternative destination, or perhaps two or three. Or, for Buddhists or Hindus, an infinite number of possible destinations, of future lives.

And moderns in general try hard not to believe in God or the afterlife, and insist that man is no better than an animal, a cat, and exalt nature, because of a guilty conscience, and terror at the just consequences of our actions.

One Hell of a Hangover

 

Buddhist Bardo

Friend Xerxes declares, without details, that he came to a “rational conclusion” long ago that there is no afterlife. 

Yet he then presents evidence from his own experience that there is an afterlife. He hears his late wife’s voice; he feels her move beside him in the bed.

He dismisses it only by denying Aristotle’s Law of Non-Contradiction, which is the foundation of all rational thought. He says there is no “either/or,” only “both/and.”

In other words, his belief that there is no afterlife is unmoveable by either reason or evidence. The phrase “long ago” here is telling: he, like many another, has his heart set on no life after death, and will not permit himself to think any more about it. It is a doctrine in literal denial of both reason and evidence. On what basis, then, does h hold it?

The New Atheists commonly claim that belief in an afterlife is wish fulfillment. “Pie in the sky when you die.” This is projection. Most people do not want there to be an afterlife. If there is no afterlife, we can do as we please here and now and get away with it.

The concept of an afterlife comes with the concept of cosmic justice, and always has, world-wide. We will one day stand naked before God, all our acts revealed. We must submit to a higher authority than ourselves. According to the Ojibwe, wild dogs will tear us apart for our sins. In Hindu or Buddhist terms, we must pay our karmic debt. Merely ceasing to exist, to break this cycle, is the ultimate Buddhist or Hindu hope: “nirvana” means non-being.

As with so many, Xerxes does not believe in an afterlife because he does not want there to be an afterlife. There is nothing to fear in simply going sleep and never waking up; there is nothing to fear in being blown out like a candle.

On the other hand, his love of his late wife is saying something different. Love speaks of the eternal. Or his wife is herself calling him, out of her love for him.

Safely Dead

 

There are a lot of YouTube videos recounting “near-death experiences” (NDEs). In one I was watching recently, the woman reported feeling an overwhelming feeling of relief, a sense that she had made it safely.

Safely? She’s dead. Safe from what?

She does not say, and perhaps does not know. But the answer is obvious. Safe from sin, safe from hell. I expect the sense is instinctive. 

“Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

We all die. That is not the struggle for which we live. 

Dead Letters

 

Interesting as it might be to speculate about UFOs and alien craft, there is a far more mind-blowing issue that gets less attention: NDEs.

That is, “Near Death Experiences.” If they are real, they confirm the immortality of the soul, and make life here on earth seem relatively insignificant. We live only in the antechamber of eternity. 

An eternity that, based on our choices here, could be eternal delight or eternal suffering.

According to the researcher interviewed by Andrew Klavan, 23% of those who report near death experiences experience something hellish. But the real proportion who see an awful afterlife is probably higher than this. For this is self-reported, and reporting that one is bound for hell is not great for one’s reputation.

The researcher also reports that those who, in these circumstances, cry out to Jesus for help, find they are rescued. This, for what it is worth, is also claimed in Buddhism: one cries out to Chijiang Posal, or Amita Bitsu. 

Yet clearly many do not. Klavan tells of an acquaintance who, after a near-death experience, still insists she is an atheist

Salvation, then, just as the Catholic Church teaches, is available to all right up to the moment of death. Anyone who goes to hell does so by their own choice. 

Why do they make this choice? Because they will acknowledge only themselves as God. In modern psychiatric terms, they are narcissists. In traditional religious language, it is the sin of pride. “Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven,” as Milton has the Devil himself explain.

Not that those who submit to God at the last moment get home free. As Klavan’s interviewee reports, everyone goes through a life review, in which they experience everything they have caused anyone else to experience. This corresponds to purgatory: if you have done another harm in life, caused them physical or emotional pain, you will experience the full measure of that harm yourself. All secrets are revealed.

Hospice nurses report that most patients die happy. Usually, perhaps a week or two before the end, they start seeing visions of deceased relatives or friends welcoming them. And they die peacefully, in repose. 

It stands to reason that, while everyone may fear the pain of death, and the uncertainty, good people will, on the whole, welcome it; bad people will fear it. 

This is probably the truth of the common observation that “the good die young.” They will, on average, because they have reason to welcome death rather than fight it. And we do seem to have some control. People tend to hang on for after Christmas and New Years, or for their birthday. 

This is not to say that longevity is automatically evidence of a bad person. Or early death proof of goodness. It may be that a good person lingers because they feel some obligation to do something before they go. A bad person may get shot robbing a bank.

Depressed people become suicidal not actually out of despair. It is more often out of hope. They often kill themselves, or try to kill themselves, because they have a strong intuition that they are going to something better. Some have said so to me. And I have felt the same. The truly depressed are almost inevitably  good people, and people with special spiritual insight.

It all makes me want to ponder my own relatives and how they died.

I have litttl real information on my father’s father. He died young, at 61. I was too young to be told much. The simple fact that he died young makes me think he was a good man. Also the fact that he was apparently depressed in this life. One of his favourite sayings was “the majority of men live lives of quiet desperation.”

I remember him as a very gentle man.

Next to go was my mother’s father. I heard that he went to bed one night saying he did not feel well, and did not wake up. That struck me as a good way to go. I assume he was a good man. I remember him, too, as a gentle man.

Next, my mother’s mother. They said at the time, she had just decided it was time to go, that she had no reason to linger; and so she said her goodbyes, to me as to others, and she went. That suggests true blessedness to me. I felt she radiated calm when I went to see her. She pointed out a squirrel outside the window, nuzzling the snow. It was winter, but life went on, and new life would appear.

I remember her as a a gentle woman, and she is mentioned as generous in at least one book. She lived near the train station, and on Christmases, she would bring a special meal to the clerks who were obliged to work on that day. She was known up and down the rails for her Christmas meals.

I also remember that she loved to laugh.

Next, my father’s mother. From what I knew of her in life, she was a conspicuously good person. She volunteered much for charity, and was extravagantly generous to others. As someone used to say of her, “she was always taking in some bird with a broken wing.” She was an observant Catholic, and made a Catholic of me by her example. 

However, when in her seventies her heart was giving out, she was preoccupied with various diet and health regimens, and proposed to the doctors a heart transplant. “After all,” she said, “what have I got to lose?”

She was not looking forward to death. She was fighting it. This is not a good sign.

A few weeks before she died, she commented to me that, working on her cousin’s tax returns, she kept getting visions of an invasion by Communists. It seemed so real.

This does not sound like the expected welcoming by departed relatives. Rather, by red demons?

Soon before her own death, only weeks before, her brother died. When informed of it, she was surprised. “I thought I’d get there before he did.” 

Others on the point of death apparently get visits from relatives they did not know had died. She didn’t. This perhaps bodes ill for either her or him.

While my grandmother was a kind and generous person, she was selectively and wilfully so. She had favourites. In being overindulgent to her favourites, she was in effect downgrading the worth and needs of others, those outside her magic circle, and taking to herself godlike powers. She was like the mother of a murderer who insists “her boy” could do no wrong, and cares not a bit for the strangers he kills. In the cosmic balance, inordinate and unqualified love is just as wrong as open malice; and ultimately just as malicious. And just as selfish. Think of the relative who keeps pouring the alcoholic spouse or parent another drink. 

It grieves me to suppose so, but I fear for her fate.

Next to die was my mother. I have been told little of her last days. But I do recall hearing the doctors were surprised at how far the cancer had spread. Usually, they said, the pain would have driven someone to go to the doctor long before. 

This could mean two things. Either she in effect committed suicide, looking forward to death as an escape; or she feared death so much that she was in denial, and was avoiding hearing the fatal diagnosis.

Was my mother a good woman? Most who knew her would insist she was. She was quiet and unassertive. She publicly deferred to my father in everything. But I suspect this was only to avoid taking responsibility. I have hints that, behind the scenes, she was often strong-willed; and if she was, she did not seem to influence her spouse much for the better. She certainly showed no interest in religion, God, or morality. Or, really, in her children, or in anyone other than her husband. This sort of unqualified support is, again, immoral.

Dying out of pure denial was certainly the case with my first wife, who was an atheist and a narcissist. I could feel the lump in her breast for months, and nagged her to see a doctor. Didn’t she care about the fate of her young children? She admitted it was because she was too afraid of the diagnosis. I finally threatened to leave her, and this at last got her to go. Had she gone earlier, she might have survived. Because she stalled, the cancer killed her. At the last, when it had spread to her bone, she insisted she could not believe or accept this was happening to her.

My brother Gerry went next. 

He died on his 65th birthday. He seemed to know for months before that he was dying; knew before the doctors did; he told me so. He also said to others, I am told, that he wanted to die. He felt he had won through, and done what he needed to do. He had suffered for many years from depression. His death seems to have been his birthday present to himself.

He was not a conspicuously good person. He was nasty to me when we were both young. He stole things. In his early years, he got in trouble with the law.

In his last years, however, although he remained an adamant atheist, there was a gentleness about him, a humility. He consented to wear a green scapular I sent him. “After all, it can’t do any harm.” So at least, he was not afraid of God, and would not renounce him. I have strong hopes he was saved. I hope he will welcome me when I die.

Most recent to depart was my father. He lived a long life; I think he was 92. He almost died in the leadup to Christmas the prior year—I hear the doctors said all his systems were shutting down, and they expected him to go at any time. Yet he rallied and went home.

He was back in hospital some months later. Pneumonia, I think. Then they said again he was rallying. And then, as I recall hearing it, in the middle of the night watch, he suddenly sat up in bed, as though alarmed, and died.

That does not sound good. It sounds as though he was fighting to the last moment to live. Who dies sitting up? It sounds as if he was trying to force himself awake, awake from the sinister dream he was about to dissolve into.

It reminds me of reports of the death of Elizabeth I: “It is said that Elizabeth resisted lying down out of fear that she would never rise again. Elizabeth lay speechless on the floor for four days before her servants finally managed to settle her into bed.” She is supposed to have uttered the final words “All my possessions for one moment of time.”

To put it simply, he was not a good man. And, to all appearances, he died unrepentant.

Down that Rabbit Hole

 

The point of the “green world” that Northrop Frye repeatedly discovers in Shakespeare’s comedies and romances is that it is the world of imagination, where the stories come from. In it the impossible happens, with magic and fairies and music from some unseen orchestra. 

As this is the place where stories come from, and where every reader goes to, the challenge, faced by every writer, is to propose some way to get there from the workaday world we know. This is the “willing suspension of disbelief” Coleridge identifies. We must believe in the world of the book or story.

It has to be some place people do not commonly go; because it is radically apart from our common world. In it magic happens. It is not sufficient to say it is a dream. Baum, in “The Wizard of Oz,” used a tornado spinning Dorothy over the rainbow. The film version transformed this into a fever dream; which is the one thing one must not as a writer do. Partly because that is too easy, even if true; partly because it harms the willing suspension of disbelief. We are too inclined to dismiss our dreams, rightly or wrongly, as unimportant. They fade and we forget them with the dawn.

Shakespeare frequently makes it a dark forest; hence Frye’s “green world.” Which he mistakenly imagines is some fertility ritual. Forest merely represents some place not commonly visited, away from the madding crowd. The forest is often a portal to fairyland in the fairy tales as well: Sleeping Beauty’s castle is beyond an impenetrable forest. Hansel and Gretel are lost in the woods and find the witch and her gingerbread house.

In “The Tempest,” Shakespeare also uses a voyage that loses its bearings and lands on a remote and uncharted island. This is an especially popular conception in British literature, England being a seafaring nation. Gulliver’s Travels, Lord of the Flies, Robinson Crusoe, More’s Utopia, Irish legends of Tir na n’Og and Hy-Brasil. 

Americans, influenced by their own geography, prefer to locate it on the frontier, past the next mountain barrier, somewhere in the West. 

Perhaps the best portal concept found in literature, to my mind, is the mirror in “Through the Looking Glass.” This is satisfying on several symbolic levels.

Science fiction has it easy: the world of imagination is out in space, on another planet.

Another common location is above the clouds; as in the child’s conception of heaven, or the land of giants in Jack and the Beanstalk.

Another is under the earth, perhaps entered through a cave. We see this as the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, but it is also familiar in the classical conception of the Underworld. Any cave in the area of Greece has a legend making it the entrance to the underworld.

In C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, the portal to the magical land is through the back of a wardrobe. 

In Norse mythology, or some Irish legend, it is across the rainbow, perhaps using the rainbow as a bridge.

In Greek mythology, it is also at times on top of some inaccessible mountain: Olympus. Or it can be over the impenetrable mountains, in a mountain valley: Shangri-la; the Tibet of popular imagination. 

Or, in Greek mythology, reached by voyaging to the end of the supposedly flat earth, and crossing over into the metaphysical realm. There is a beautiful old print, that I have loved for year, and now feature as the background for my Facebook page, showing a shepherd on a hilltop poking his head through the veil of sky, and seeing the celestial gears beyond the physical.

Of course, all these are metaphors. Nobody should seriously think you can sail beyond the end of the Earth, or find some new world above the clouds. Nevertheless, the power of the concept of there being another world is so strong that many over the centuries have really set sail, or headed west, only, perhaps, in the end, to throw themselves in final despair off the Golden Gate Bridge. 

The next and obvious question: is this world of the imagination real? This is a separate question, after all, from whether you can get there by climbing the Andes, or leaning through a mirror. And a more fundamental one.

“The Matrix,” for one example, proposes the idea that this physical and shared social world is the illusion, and the other world, Wonderland, the green world, is the real one. 

Philosophically, this is just as tenable as the reverse. As Chuang Tzu famously asked, “Am I a man who dreamt last night I was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly now dreaming I am a man?”

That question has remained unanswered for all the centuries.

Plato, in his analogy of the cave, proposes the latter. We are all butterflies dreaming we are men. To him, the portal is philosophy; meditation; prayer, if you like. 

The world’s religions say the same. 

Perhaps more accurately, prayer and meditation or art is the mirror, the looking glass, through which we see the real world. 

But it is as through a glass darkly, or through a crystal ball.

It is death that is the actual portal we pass though, and see it all at last face to face.

One thing is clear: we all have a definite sense that there is this other world; and we all have an inner yearning, stronger in some, weaker in others, for it. This is why we love listening to stories, reading novels, watching movies, playing video games. We are imagining ourselves into this other world. It is seemingly the source of almost everything we call joy or fun. From earliest years, for fun, we pretend to be cowboys, or pirates, or superheroes. We imagine the doll to be alive, and the truck to be full-scale.

One might almost suppose we were programmed for this, for this other place, by our maker.

Not that it is a paradise: it is clearly a place both of extreme good and evil. Dragons live there, and gorgons, and the wicked dead, in their own terrible zone of punishments; as well as the blessed, the saints and angels, the houris, in theirs. 

While the laws of nature no longer apply there, the moral law there is strict, evident, and absolute. In a way it is not in the present world. There is no longer any ambiguity or deceit surrounding good and evil. There is no chaos. There is nothing random about the imagination, although some of us may wish there were.

If Plato and the world’s religions are wrong about this other world, what is this inner sense of it always being just beyond the next bend, and this eternal yearning for it, evident in us all, at least as children? At least before the din of life drowns it out. Where is that coming from?

Bad News, Adam

 

Orestes pursued by the Furies.

In his latest column, friend Xerxes writes that it is important to challenge our fixed notions. This is to introduce the concept of “eternal life.”

As my own body moves inexorably towards its expiry date, I become increasingly convinced that we are bodied people. Not disembodied souls.

            We cannot think, act, or even remember, without our bodies. Our thought processes depend on inputs from every organ. Eyes and ears, of course. Also heart, lungs, guts, skin…

            Without a body, there can be no ‘me’.

            If that conclusion offends you, sorry. You don’t have to believe it. Stick with your own beliefs. But I need to be honest – that’s where I am, at this stage in my life.

            The circle of life shrinks as we grow older. Ultimately, it contains just one person. Me.

            Then one day I’ll be gone, too.

            And life will go on without me.

Notice that he gives no argument or evidence for this belief. He does not, in other words, challenge it. Just as he is saying we must do.

Notice also the phrase “I need to be honest.” We are obliged to be honest at all times. Therefore, if anyone ever uses the phrase “to be honest,” he is actually admitting he is generally not honest. He is reserving the right to lie.

These are examples of how our conscience works. It will not really allow us to get away with anything. It obliges us to condemn ourselves. Xerxes actually does not believe that consciousness ends at death, and he inadvertently tells us so, if we are paying attention. 

He is whistling past the graveyard, to use an old expression. He is like the child playing peek-a-boo, who thinks that, if he covers his eyes, he cannot be seen. If there is no afterlife, he need not fear punishment after death. A consoling thought to many.

Irrational as this is, it is the common human reaction. Denial is the common human reaction. It is in the Book of Genesis, after the original sin:

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

Yeah; hide from God. That ought to work.

This is actually the ultimate evidence that there is an afterlife. We know there is an afterlife, because we know there is a Hell. We can see that we are programmed, the universe is programmed, by some cosmic programmer, for justice. Anyone who studies history comes to realize, as Martin Luther King says, that “the arc of history bends towards justice.” We see in the lives of those around us, as we see here, that the unjust either soon or eventually turn to self-sabotage.

And yet, we also see that it commonly takes longer than a human life to actually see justice served. Van Gogh was unrecognized in his lifetime. Mao and Stalin died in their beds.

Accordingly, when we do not see individual justice fully served in this world, we must assume the existence of an afterlife, which compensates those here wronged, or who suffered for justice, and punishes those who here do wrong, or profit from injustice. That same cosmic program would have it so.

All the world believes this, as if it is indeed part of our operating system: pagans as much as monotheists. 

For monotheists, it is the divine judgment: 

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

Then the King will say to those on his right, "Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.”…

Then he will say to those on his left, "Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” …

Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.

For Buddhists and Hindus, it is karma.

“As a man himself sows, so he himself reaps; no man inherits the good or evil act of another man. The fruit is of the same quality as the action.” – Mahabharata.

Whatever is not achieved in this lifetime, determines one’s rebirth into a life of comfort or of suffering; or into hell itself. You can’t escape karma.

The ancient Greeks called it Dike, an iron law which even the gods were subject to. Evil deeds evoked Erinyes, Furies, which would pursue you in life to the ends of the Earth. After death, one faced an eternal punishment to suit one’s crimes. Greedy Tantalus, thirsty, could not bend down to drink the water that rose to his chest. Hungry, above him he saw a fruit tree forever just out of reach. 

Hear me, illustrious Furies, mighty named, terrible powers, for prudent counsel famed; Holy and pure, from Hades born and Proserpine, whom lovely locks adorn: Whose piercing sight, with vision unconfined, surveys the deeds of all the impious kind: On Fate attendant, punishing the race with wrath severe of deeds unjust and base. Dark-coloured queens, whose glittering eyes are bright with dreadful, radiant, life-destroying, light: Eternal rulers, terrible and strong, to whom revenge, and tortures dire belong; Fatal and horrid to the human sight, with snaky tresses wandering the night; Either approach, and in these rites rejoice, for you I call with holy, suppliant voice. -- Orphic Hymn 69

So we know the afterlife is real. We know because of many who have risen from the dead, and told us what they saw. We know from saints who have had visions. We know from those who have heard in dreams from deceased relatives. Christians have the warrant of the Bible. But we know primarily because we know from our programming and our conscience, and from our own close observation of the actions of conscience in history and in others, that Hell is real. 

There Are More Things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio...

A Japanese ghost

 

“Those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age

and to the resurrection of the dead

neither marry nor are given in marriage.

They can no longer die,

for they are like angels;

and they are the children of God

because they are the ones who will rise.

That the dead will rise

even Moses made known in the passage about the bush,

when he called out 'Lord, '

the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob;

and he is not God of the dead, but of the living,

for to him all are alive."

- Today’s Mass reading. Luke 20:30-38

Xerxes, my muse, observed in his latest column that it is a bit absurd that we continue to celebrate Hallowe’en, because no one any longer believes we commune with the dead, that the dead participate in our lives.

I called him on that. No one? 

All Catholics are supposed to believe it. That is what the communion of the saints is about. I think of Chesterton’s definition of tradition as true democracy, because it includes a vote for the dead. Chinese folk religion also believes the dead remain in contact—the famed “ancestor worship.” All shamanic systems believe so—that is who the shamans talk to. 

We are getting up to a large chunk of the world’s population by this point—quite possibly a majority.

I begin to suspect Xerxes does not get out much. Perhaps he speaks only with mainstream Protestants and atheists.

But I want to go further. One of the biggest lies of modern life is that only the physical world is “real,” that spiritual beings do not exist. I remember in first year philosophy, a visiting professor dismissing some branch of philosophy with the comment that it would allow that unicorns exist. In other words, the non-existence of unicorns was insisted on a priori. No arguments allowed.

That bugged the heck out of me at the time, and has bugged me ever since. That is not philosophy. That is blind faith.

But a grossly materialist blind faith.

In the real world of philosophy, Berkeley has demonstrated that the very existence of the material world is an arbitrary hypothesis, and one that violates the principle of Occam’s Razor, which we take as given in science. Plato posited and argued, I think convincingly, that the material world is just a reflection of an “ideal” world, a world of ideas. Were this not so, mere sense perceptions could never spontaneously form themselves into ideas.

It seems to me that unicorns exist. They exist as a coherent image, which we can discuss. Everyone knows what I mean when I say “unicorn.” They exist as an idea; and a transpersonal idea, an idea that exists objectively.

So too with other spiritual beings: the classical gods, fairies, djinn, and the souls of the dead.

To be seen is not to exist. To exist is not to be seen. Otherwise love too does not exist. Neither does justice, or happiness, or freedom, or any other of the important things of life.

So suck it up, unicorn-deniers.

The Promised Land

 

Heb 11:1-2, 8-19:

Brothers and sisters: Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen. Because of it the ancients were well attested.

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; he went out, not knowing where he was to go. 

By faith he sojourned in the promised land as in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs of the same promise; for he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and maker is God.

By faith he received power to generate, even though he was past the normal age—and Sarah herself was sterile—for he thought that the one who had made the promise was trustworthy.

So it was that there came forth from one man, himself as good as dead, descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sands on the seashore.

All these died in faith.

They did not receive what had been promised but saw it and greeted it from afar and acknowledged themselves to be strangers and aliens on earth, for those who speak thus show that they are seeking a homeland.

If they had been thinking of the land from which they had come, they would have had opportunity to return.

But now they desire a better homeland, a heavenly one.

Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

This was the second reading at last Sunday’s mass. The motto of the Order of Canada, “they desire a better country,” comes from the antepenultimate line.

Ironically, the “better country” referred to is clearly heaven. Not Canada. And anyone who supposes Canada is the goal is scorned here as without faith. “If they had been thinking of the land from which they had come, they would have had opportunity to return.” The goal is no earthly 

The passage points out that the things God promised to the patriarchs of the Old Testament did not come true during their lifetimes. So did he break his promise? Should they care about what happens to others after their death?

They did, and they accepted the promises, because they considered themselves aliens on earth. This is the essence of faith; as defined in the first lines here. “The realization of what is hoped for, and evidence of things not seen.”

Their true home was the eternal; which is among us at all times as the imagination, and in which we live forever. This is the “promised land” or land of promise.

I Ain't Afraid of No Ghosts

 

There is a common misconception that Christians do not believe in ghosts. See the video clip.

No religion that denied the existence of ghosts would be worthy of attention. My own misunderstanding that Christianity did not believe in ghosts held me back from full-hearted commitment to Christianity at one point. Of course there are ghosts. People all over the world report encounters. This denial made Christianity look less like a conduit to the next world than a charade in defense of philistinism. It looked like trying not to think about the next life. It looked like whistling past the graveyard.

Gerald, the resident Christian voice in the clip, explains that there is a prohibition in the Old Testament against trying to consult with the dead.

If so, Jesus is guilty of this sin.

Matthew 17: 1-3: 

After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James and John the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus.

The event is in three gospels, and referred to in the fourth.

What is prohibited is necromancy. That is, divination: calling upon the spirits to tell you the future. This implies a lack of trust in God, and in divine free will.

This has been cooked into a prohibition on contact with the dead by Protestant theologians who want to discourage prayer to the saints and a belief in purgatory, ultimately because this allows for indulgences, which Martin Luther saw as corrupt. So some protestant groups do not believe I ghosts. But most Christians are Catholic or Orthodox, and do.

Gerald then explains that communication with the dead is not possible: “there is no coming back.” Apart from the Transfiguration, already cited, the prophet Simon is successfully summoned from the afterlife in the Old Testament (1 Samuel 28). Not to mention Lazarus. Or, er, Jesus Christ.

Gerald cites the story of the rich man and (the other) Lazarus, as his evidence. There, he submits, it is not possible for Lazarus to return to earth to warn the rich man’s relatives. 

But this is not what the story says. 

He said, ‘Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father’s house—for I have five brothers—that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.’ Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.’ He said, ‘No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

Abraham’s refusal makes it clear that Lazarus could go. But it would be futile. If there were capable of ignoring the Mosaic law, they will ignore a ghost. As many do in the modern world. God gives us what we need to know; he does not pressure or bully us. Nor should we do right merely from fear of punishment.

This passage endorses Judaism as a perfectly sufficient religion. The “someone rising from the dead” is surely a reference to Jesus.

Why doesn’t the rich man go himself to war his brothers?  Asking Lazarus to go implies that he understands Lazarus is in a different position. Souls in hell cannot appear to those on earth, it seems. But souls in heaven can.

Stephen Crowder then chimes in to deny that one’s dead relatives look down on you from heaven. “Angels are not human.”

They can be. As St. Augustine points out, “angel” is not a class of being, but an office, that of messenger between heaven and earth. There are various classes of spiritual beings: seraphim, cherubim, and so forth. But there are also the spirits of the dead, and there is no reason they cannot perform this function. 

Indeed, this is the function of the saints, and to deny it happens is to deny the saints.

And when he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and with golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. – Revelations.

Even if they are not emissaries between earth and heaven, why wouldn’t the sainted dead continue to be interested in those they love on earth?

If heaven is the fulfilment of our desires, how could heaven be heaven for a good, unselfish man or woman if they could no longer see or know what is happening with their loved ones still in the world below, and, indeed, could not help them in some way?

Crowder avoids the problem by suggesting that everyone enters heaven at the same moment, because this is the nature of eternity. 

This is not the teaching of the Catholic Church; otherwise there would be no distinction between the particular judgement at death and the general judgement at the end of time. Nor does it work conceptually. Time is something of value: without time, there is no music, no prayer, no deeds, no games, no stories, no poetry, no art, no thought. All require duration. Therefore, heaven would be a profoundly inadequate place, not heaven at all, if there were no time. Rather, time is to heaven as space is as seen from a mountaintop—one reason why heaven is pictured as above us. You can observe any moment, past or future. Just as you can the three dimensions of space.

So a good Catholic believes in ghosts. The beings we encounter as ghosts might in any instance be angels or demons. But they might also be what they appear to be, or claim to be: the spirits of the departed, speaking to us from heaven or from purgatory.

You Will Live Forever. Deal with It.

 

Friend Xerxes has made a declaration in his most recent column:

“Nor are we, as some like to believe, immortal souls temporarily housed in human bodies.”

He does not explain this claim.

To Christians, the Bible is a final authority. The Bible seems utterly definitive in saying this is exactly what we are. 

“And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

But the Bible also agrees with all other ancient authorities. The pagan Romans and Greeks also held this to be so—that the soul goes on to an afterlife. The Egyptians, Chinese, and Hindus held it to be so. The native people of North America held it to be so. The aborigines of Australia held it to be so.

An appeal to authority is not definitive. But if you are going against all authority, the onus is on you to make your case. As Chesterton observed, you cannot tear down a fence simply because you do not understand why it is there. Nobody has the right to tear down a fence until they do understand why it is there. If you were to proclaim that there was no such place as Africa, you would need to explain why all the atlases are wrong.

Xerxes perhaps hints at an argument in the parenthetical comment, “as some like to believe.” This suggests that people believe in an immortal soul and an afterlife because they find it comforting. This is a familiar claim from Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.

But why is it not at least as comforting to suppose that at death, consciousness simply ends? What sounds bad about eternal rest? This is the very goal of Buddhism: nirvana, “extinction.” It is the goal of Advaita Vedanta Hinduism: moksha, “release.”

The afterlife, on the other hand, Christian, pagan, Hindu, or Buddhist, implies judgement and just punishment. This cannot be comforting to those conscious of having done wrong. And, according to Christian teaching, we are all worthy of condemnation; nobody can assume salvation.

Remember Hamlet’s famous soliloquy.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep

No more; and by a sleep, to say we end

The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks

That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,

To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there's the rub,

For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come..

 

It is he who denies the afterlife who is indulging in wishful thinking—whistling past the proverbial graveyard.

Beyond the voice of universal authority, there is empirical evidence—scientific evidence--here and now of the immortality of the soul.

First, it is all but conclusively proven by some “Near Death Experiences” that consciousness continues after physical death, and in the absence of detectable brain activity. There are also examples of people with virtually no brain tissue who nevertheless are conscious and can function normally—suggesting that consciousness is not dependent on the physical brain. The brain may only be, more or less as Descartes suggested, a conduit between consciousness and the physical world, more or less as the eye or hand is. Second, “ghost stories” are common all over the world: encounters with disembodied souls.  Many are purely empirical accounts: people see things, people hear things, people feel things. If we do not accept these claims, or accept the simplest explanation for them, isn’t it often only for the unscientific reason that they do not fit materialist preconceptions? They are common all over the world: encounters with disembodied souls. And note that we do not, on the whole, find ghost stories comforting. Believing in an afterlife is not wish fulfilment. Our most natural reaction is fear. 

Hamlet suggests the analogy of sleep and dreams. We know that consciousness persists when the senses shut down in sleep. Why wouldn‘t it persist in physical death, when the senses shut down permanently? We all have the experience of consciousness continuing without our physical senses. By contrast, do any of us have any kind of empirical experience of ceasing to exist?

In our experience, sensed objects die or decay or disappear, but thoughts do not. I see a hummingbird at my feeder. After a few minutes, he is gone. Nevertheless, I am still able to see a hummingbird in my mind. Everything is immortal in memory, in thought form: sensations, thoughts, emotions, urges. We may no longer feel the emotion. We may no longer consent to the idea. Yet we can still summon them to consciousness; we are aware of them.

You might object that memories too fade over time. Perhaps this is what Buddhists are counting on. But is it true? Over time, we may have trouble retrieving a particular memory; but it does seem it is always still there somewhere. The taste of a madeleine, as Proust relates, can bring it all back vividly. A smell, a familiar melody—returning to a place. Wilder Penfield could stimulate vivid memories with electric probes.

So it looks as though all things, once created, continue to exist forever in some metaphysical place, the “storehouse memory,” or “storehouse consciousness,” to use the Buddhist phrase. This is perhaps also where abstract eternal concepts reside: the truths of mathematics or logic, the concept of justice, moral good and evil, beauty, truth, and so forth. Plato’s realm of ideal forms, the Bible’s Kingdom of Heaven. 

Berkeley pointed out that this realm is more immediate, clear, and certain than the physical world. The existence of the physical world is a mere hypothesis, and an unnecessary one. As Christians, we hold it to be real, on authority. Most cultures do not.

We are immortal souls, temporarily housed in human bodies. At the end of time, we will again be housed in physical bodies, but perfected ones.

What Dreams May Come

 

John Singer Sargent

One argument against the proposition made here recently that dreams are visions of an eternal world, in which we will live after death, is that most of us have both good and bad dreams. So are we bound for heaven, or hell? Shouldn’t good people have only good dreams, and bad people only nightmares?

But that would not be useful. If one had only good dreams, one might stop making an effort. And one might seek death, life by comparison seeming unbearable.

True, those who commit evil are more likely to have nightmares. MacBeth, having murdered Duncan, speaks of “these terrible dreams that shake us nightly.” Lady MacBeth sleepwalks, acting out her sense of guilt. We treat others well so that we sleep soundly at night. 

On the other hand, some good people too seem plagued by nightmares.

The point is presumably to warn us that something is wrong. It may be that we have done evil, and are bound for the pit unless we repent. Or it may be that evil is being done to us, and that we must do something to protect ourselves from it. This, after all, is what bodily pain is for.

To know which requires a careful consideration of the dream. 

A Ghost Story

 

Darkmoon, Pixabay.

Xerxes has seen a ghost. He had a vivid experience one night recently, while lying fully awake, of the weight of his wife getting out of the other side of the bed, shuffling off to the bathroom, then returning.

His wife died a year ago.

He also sometimes hears her speak.

Xerxes dismisses, although he cannot explain, the experience:

            “Tradition says that there is a soul, distinct from the physical body. The body ends, but the soul carries on.

            Reason balks at that distinction. We are embodied souls. All that makes us unique individuals depends on the combination of body and spirit. Our minds need sensory input from our bodies; without bodies, our minds cease to function, even to exist.

            Once we are gone, reason says, we are gone. Period.”

He gives no reasons he think this—he just says “reason.”

Many important philosophers reason the opposite: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Leibnitz, Descartes, Berkeley. Most of the world’s cultures reason the opposite.

Are they all wrong? Perhaps; but one at least needs to present one’s reasons.

“Our minds need sensory input from our bodies.”

This is easily shown to be false. We can think in a darkened room. We can dream while asleep.

You mean we need original sense-impressions at some point in order to form these mental images? Aristotle or Locke thought so. But Plato, for example, thought sense-impressions merely reflected ideal forms already in the mind. Berkeley pointed out that we have no idea whether the physical senses exist except in our mind—let alone the things we imagine they perceive. All perceptions, for all we know, are purely mental.

“without bodies, our minds cease to function, even to exist.”

All the evidence goes the opposite way. Everything mental seems to be eternal; only the physical can die. Anything that dies or disappears physically persists mentally. We call this “memory.” And aside from memories, abstractions, mathematics, emotions all seem immortal. You will say a memory or an emotion may “fad.” Yes, fade; but not die. It is always still there somewhere, and something as trivial as the taste of a madeleine or a particular smell may bring it all flooding back.

No need to even go into ghosts. Or so-called “near-death experiences” in which the consciousness survives clinical death, or out-of-body experiences. They are no doubt evidence, but they are needless evidence of the almost self-evident.

Some atheists claim that belief in an afterlife is merely “wishful thinking.” That might be true, if you invented a religion that believed only in a heaven, and not purgatory or hell. None do.

Essentially every human culture has come to the same obvious conclusion, based on the hard logic and the evidence.

Satan Not So Cool Any More

At first this story seemed too perfect; I thought it might be a hoax. But GQ seems like a neutral source. It's not the Onion, not the Babylon Bee.

Thrash metal drummer visits hell, not so keen on Satan anymore.

The Rich Man and Lazarus

There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.

The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’

But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’

He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’

Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’

‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’

He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’

Jesus’s story of the rich man and poor Lazarus is interesting for several reasons.

For one thing, it looks superficially like a parable, yet is not a parable. A parable is a made-up story given as an illustration of some philosophical point. People never have names in parables, to make the point that they are not actual people. Places and times are also not given. Lazarus in this story is named, and so apparently is a real person.

Parables also always contain some shocking or improbable element. There seems to be no such reversal in the tale of the rich man and Lazarus. 

So it is to be read literally.

And this is very interesting, because it is a description of the afterlife, and of hell.

So, no, if you are going to accept the Bible as authority, you cannot fudge this one. Afterlife and hell are not metaphors or symbolic or figurative language. They are real places, and, contrary to Bishop Barron and von Balthazar, there are real people there. And there is real suffering.

Gustav Dore

 

And, according to the story, once you are in hell, there is no way out.

Also interesting—this story says that Judaism remains valid into the New Covenant; there is no point in a Jew converting to Christianity. If you will not follow the law and the prophets, you will not follow Jesus any better.

The other interesting thing in the story is that Lazarus does not go to heaven because of his good deeds. One can say that the rich man goes to hell for immorality; not obvious or aggressive immorality, not bad deeds, but for a lack of concern for a poor man at his door. A frightening warning for the rich. But there is no act of Lazarus’s, on the other hand, that establishes his own concern for others. For all we know, if he possessed riches, he would act just like the rich man in the tale. 

Abraham actually says plainly that Lazarus goes to heaven not because of his merit but because of his suffering: “But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony.’”

Suffering, then, is redemptive. 

How Can There Be a Hell?

The Circles of Hell

The Christian duty of forgiveness is, sadly a club many non-Christians like to use against believers. “You are obliged to forgive your brother seventy times seven times, right? So what right have you to complain of any injustice? You hypocrite!”

This charge misses an essential element in the equation. The most relevant passage is:

3 Take heed to yourselves. If your brother sins against you, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him. 4 And if he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times in a day returns to you, saying, ‘I repent,’ you shall forgive him.” -Luke 17:3-4

Dante's Hell

Did you catch the missing element? The transgressor must repent. If he does, sincerely, we indeed have a duty of forgiveness. If he does not, “forgiveness” is just moral cowardice. Which is no doubt what the non-believers wish to believe of Christianity in any case. It is denying the difference between right and wrong, a profound sin in itself.

Don't fall for that trap, believers.

An Angel Leading a Soul to Hell--School of Bosch.

This is the reason for the Sacrament of Confession (Reconciliation) as well. We must honestly admit our own shortcomings in order to be able to expect forgiveness. If we do not, forgiveness would be a moral lapse on God's part, and that is not going to happen.

And this is the reason why there must be a hell.

A friend recently expressed the view, common these days, that heaven might be real, but surely not hell. After all, God is all-merciful, isn't he? How could he ever choose to commit one of his children to eternal torment? Hell is some primitive, vengeful conception we need to grow out of.

A Romanesque View of Hell.

Not. If God is going to give us free will, we are going to be able to sin. If we sin and do not repent, God can do nothing for us, without violating his own nature, which is good. If we persist in our refusal into eternity, or if our choice is somehow irrevocable, our sojourn in hell must be eternal.

God had nothing to do with it. We did it to ourselves, despite his best efforts.

Hindu Hell.

An honest repentance for our sins also implies an honest desire to do restitution for them in any way possible. Hence the need for purgatory as well.

And this is how God's perfect justice conforms with his perfect mercy.

The Newsweek Cover Story

Remarkably egocentric, but one more bit of evidence for the afterlife.