It's Not All Fire and Brimstone

[bionarydata]

An interesting short essay concerning different views of the afterlife by one of my favorite contributors to the On Faith section of the Washington Post.  If you read the below linked article at all, please read all the way through the end.  Stopping only part of the way through misses the better part.

Edit: Having read Sasha's comment and realized

Comments

[bionarydata]

I will respond to some of your assertions in turn.

1. The doctrine of heaven and hell devalues life into a “vale of tears.”

The Christian doctrines of the afterlife as such in no way impugn the value of this present life. A preoccupation with the afterlife may diminish an individual’s quality of life, but this is true of any preoccupation or obsession, religious or otherwise. The belief that one will encounter some kind of existence after death in no way reduces the joys of the present life in the same way that expecting that one will make love to one’s spouse at some future point in no way devalues the experience of eating supper together and holding hands now; the expectation of a future good does not undercut a good presently enjoyed. Further, if we observed an individual who forwent enjoying time with his spouse now for the sole reason that he expected to do so at some later point, we would quite naturally regard him as foolish for not doing both inasmuch as the enjoyment of one does not preclude the enjoyment of the other. These things having been said, however, a doctrine of the afterlife does affirm that our sufferings do not have the last word on the quality of our existence. To the individual who suffers in this life through no fault of his own and without the possibility of obtaining relief by way of his own efforts or those of others, the Christian doctrine of the afterlife holds out the hope that the story of his life doesn’t read something like this, “I endured a life of unremitting challenge and no small amount of pain as a result of blind chance so that I could perish without the hope of justice, peace, or joy.” To the person who responds to the hope of future succor with indifference to the possibility of alleviating what suffering they can in the here and now, following C. S. Lewis, I regard such a person as having fallen far from the compassionate teaching of “love thy neighbor as thyself” and wholly out of harmony with both God’s will and human decency.

2. “…people have begun to reject it [the doctrine of heaven and hell], and with that rejection have started to throw away morality as a whole…”

According to Ellis, it is precisely because people have not thrown away both heaven and hell that the demoralizing of the afterlife has facilitated a demoralizing of the present life. By tossing the belief in hell altogether and degrading heaven from a place of moral harmony into an “amoral utopia” in which people have fullness of joy quite apart from right conduct and love, some people have conceived the idea that morality does not pertain to human happiness. They can have their cake and eat it, too, not because there is no heaven or hell, but because everyone gets heaven. The irrational idea with which Ellis takes issue and that underlies the “amoral utopia” view of heaven is the belief that living according to the golden rule is not a necessary condition for the wellbeing and happiness of human individuals and communities.