The Afterlife: do we wait to start living till then? Everyone seems to have their own version of what’s going to happen when we die, especially in organized religion. All the interpretations of the Afterlife tend to confuse me the same way that religion does, I always end up asking: “So, who’s right? What’s really going to happen?”
Christians say that if we behave we’ll end up in heaven with God singing his praises and if we are bad, we will end up in hell with the Devil being tortured for all eternity.
Muslims seem to have the same Hell/Heaven idea, as well as a Day of Judgment. Their hell is referred to as Jahannum and is not necessarily permanent.
The Jews don’t have a hell; Hindus say that one will be reincarnated according to how good a person was during their life. I don’t know if that means that I will be coming back to earth as a frog.
Sometimes the impression one receives from religions is that the Afterlife is used as a tool in order to keep people heading on the right path (almost like the carrot/stick method), a means of keeping people faithful and in places of worship.
The Afterlife is the reward and sometimes it seems as though the reason we live our lives at all is to get to the end of it.
Everyone is always saying you must live your life well so that you don’t regret it later, and that we must endure for better things after death.
As a result, like the sweet center in a piece of candy, we seem to chew through our lives with the hope that what follows the surface will be better if we follow certain rules.
I think the Afterlife is necessary because people need for life to have meaning, to serve a purpose in some greater plan. It doesn’t make sense to have gone through all of this for nothing. When a person follows a God there needs to be an afterlife, because without it having faith all of your life would be meaningless.
My question is: isn’t life enough? Why does there have to be an afterlife?
I respect the fact that people feel there needs to be something else, and I understand that people find it comforting to look to the future and know that death is not the end of it.
There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact the faith in it is admirable.
But we must see that being on earth is already an afterlife in itself. Heaven is in the moments when we live and feel that love, happiness, peace and fulfillment have all be squashed together in the amazing moments in life.
Hell is in the everyday, the things that make us sad, the evil in the world: genocide, tragedy, disease, deception, war, strife, heartbreak, suffering and discrimination.
So my question again is—isn’t life enough?
Does there really have to be more (whether worse or better) when life as it is is already so packed with experiences?
When we bury people at funerals we say “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” which implies that we have returned to our mother, to the womb of the Earth.
For me, the idea of once again being as one with the Earth is enough.
I urge people to ask themselves if the paths they have chosen for their lives fulfill their personal needs and hopes for their future, if belief in the afterlife fulfils you then more power to you.
For those whom it doesn’t, I hope you find the answer that you’re looking for.
But for everyone, my message is this: live the life you’re living today as if there wasn’t anything else.
Don’t let fear hold you captive, we only have one life that we are given and whoever our maker may be, I believe that they intended for us to live it without fear.
To live with joy and embrace the bare necessities, to love and know that at the moment of our death we have taken and enjoyed everything we wanted to from life.
I am sure we have all heard it said that, “The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.”
Life doesn’t begin in the afterlife—it has already begun. Don’t wait until after life to live it.
Philippa Hatendi can be reached at phatendi@ut.edu.