Bittercon: Why an Afterlife?

[starshipcat]

Here's an interesting panel from this year's Capricon. Why does pretty much every human culture have at least some concept of an afterlife? Maybe it's just part of a vague "spirit world," or maybe it's an elaborate system of heavens and hells for different classes of people (Chinese tradition has eight cold hells and eight hot hells, each lasting

Comments

[asher63]

Interesting. Re the Jewish tradition, I know it's been commented on more than a couple of times that explicit references to an afterlife in the Hebrew Scriptures are exceedingly scant. It does seem to become more of a concern in the later Rabbinic writings.

[asher63]

I'm reading in 'The World of Late Antiquity' (Peter Brown) that "the Christian Church had inherited, through Judaism, that most fateful legacy of Zoroastrian Persia to the Western world - a belief in the absolute division of the spiritual world between good and evil powers, between angels and demons." (p. 54)

[whswhs]

All my life, I've repeatedly had the experience of losing consciousness and then regaining it. I'm a strict materialist, with no belief in any afterlife, but I find it hard to imagine that one day I will lose consciousness and not regain it. And yet, since I speak a language that has a future tense, I can speak and therefore think of times later than my greatest possible span of life.

I've thought for some time that many of the tropes of science fiction are ways of addressing this antinomy imaginatively. Time travel is obvious; space travel lets us imagine visiting parts of the cosmos we, and indeed our species, can't live to see; psi powers let us imagine our minds going out on such journeys; mutant supermen may have prolonged lives . . .

[marycatelli]

Babies also learn object permanence but we seem quite able to believe that objects end.