What’s your answer?

I’m still unsure of mine….

Does Anyone Believe In An Afterlife? (Susan Jacoby/The Spirited Atheist blog/The Washington Post; May 17)

A 90-year-old friend of mine – an atheist raised as a Roman Catholic – recently visited her younger sister, who is dying of cancer. “She told me she wasn’t afraid,” my friend recounted, “because she knew that the moment she drew her last breath, she would see her husband again. I felt envy for the first time, because I don’t have any such faith to sustain me. But then I thought that if she really believes what she’s saying, there is no reason for her to be putting herself through horrible cancer chemotherapy at the age of 88. Why hang around here and put off the reunion?”

This question has long puzzled me too. I have often been asked by believers how it is possible for an atheist to live with the conviction that this life is the only life we have. But most human beings, whatever their religious beliefs, will go to immense lengths to continue in this vale of tears. For me, the evidence that people will do almost anything to go on living another day raises the question of whether anyone facing the inevitable end truly believes that his or her last breath is only the portal to another, better plane of existence.

[To learn how devout theists in the process of dying are apparently more likely to insist on extraordinary medical measures to stay alive than dying atheists are, see the entry I posted on May 3, 2009.]

It has frequently been argued, and not only by religious believers, that explaining faith in the supernatural as the ultimate defense against fear of dying is too simplistic. I think that the need to find more elaborate and complicated explanations for religion, whether in anthropology or genetics, actually supports the idea that the denial of death explains the fundamental appeal of religion. If the whole edifice of religion serves mainly to insulate us from the terror inspired by certain knowledge of our own extinction, that also explains the ferocity of the anti-evolution sentiment professed by nearly one-third of Christians in this country. Belief in eternal life, or the resurrection of the body, requires that humanity be placed in a special category above, beyond and outside nature.

And I think that my friend, with her 90 years of experience, is absolutely right in her conclusion that belief in life after death, even among people who profess it most strongly, is always undermined by doubt and fear. To have faith in reunions beyond the grave is to continuously deny the evidence of one’s own senses, to ignore the ultimately unignorable knowledge that our dead loved ones return to us only in dreams – a natural phenomenon. That is why the atheist, who accepts the knowledge of future extinction, is seen by many fundamentalist believers as a threat rather than an object of bemused tolerance. To all who deal with the knowledge of their own mortality by telling themselves that another, richer life awaits them, the atheist gives voice to their greatest fear by saying, “This is it, our one time around.”

Need to Know, a new PBS program filling Bill Moyers’s much-mourned slot on Friday nights, recently aired a segment featuring the proceedings of the Texas State Board of Education. The elected Texas board, having already creationized the biology curriculum, is about to give final approval to new social studies standards that Christianize American history. The most interesting part of the segment was an interview with Dr. Don McElroy, a dentist and leader for the past few years of the conservative faction on the Texas board. Dr. McElroy, who presumably spends a good deal of his life fighting natural decay in a part of the body especially prone to erosion, talked about the incompatibility of his belief in a divine creator with evolution. I actually found myself sympathizing with his consistency, since he was recently defeated for a new term by a lobbyist who believes both in God and evolution. In a sense, the McElroys are more logical, within their frame of reference, in their view of the world. They say, in essence, “If man is a special creation of God, then evolution has to be a crock.” What liberal believers say is that the evolution described by science is real, but God stepped in (or extended his finger) at some point to make man the one exception in nature. And man must be an exception in nature in order to support belief in life after death. Liberal religion, which requires its adherents to hold conflicting beliefs, poses a much more formidable (though for humans, entirely possible) psychological task than right-wing religion, which rejects any science that challenges the nature-defying concept of immortality.

The point is not that atheists are any more eager to shuffle off this mortal coil than religious believers are; it is that religious believers are no more eager for bodily death, even though they claim to believe in an afterlife, than atheists are.

Over the centuries, one of the more comical spectacles has been that of Catholic and orthodox Protestant churches condemning spiritualism as a form of superstition. The idea that communicating with the dead is any more superstitious than believing that a god-man rose from the grave and will come to decide our fates at the Last Judgment makes sense only if one upholds a particular religion as the route to eternal life. Organized religion loses its main reason for being if it cannot maintain its status as the single pathway to life beyond the grave. If all you have to do is consult an ouija board or turn out the lights and tap on a wall to talk to the dead, why bother to tithe? I should say here that I am speaking primarily of western religion, particularly of Christianity and Islam (the relationship of Judaism to the afterlife being more complicated than the space of this column allows). Many eastern religious concepts, such as reincarnation as members of another species, are just as contrary to scientific evidence as bodily resurrection, but they do not offer the same emotional promise of continuing consciousness that could facilitate reunion with loved ones.

The desire of certain churches to control the eternal life franchise also explains the new emphasis of the Catholic Church, and some right-wing Protestant sects, on opposition to physician-assisted suicide and, in the case of the Vatican, to the right of terminal patients to refuse artificial feeding tubes. The ticket to the afterlife offered by such religions is good only if you live this life according to their rules – and one of those rules is that only God has the right to decide when earthly suffering should end.

In “Patrimony”, Philip Roth’s account of his father’s death from a brain tumor, the author describes his father’s anger at this diagnosis. “…maybe he was furious over that question he had not bothered to ask Dr. Benjamin or Dr. Meyerson or me, the writer son, because he knew that none of us, even with all our schooling, our degrees, our smooth sentences and clever words, could make any more sense of it than he did. Why should a man die? It was enough to put anybody in a rage, that question. He was indispensable, goddamnit, if no longer to others than to himself. So why should he die? Someone with brains answer that!”

The exigency of nature does not answer the question why – only how. And so it is easy to understand the appeal of an answer maintaining – contrary to all evidence of reason and flesh-and-blood experience – that death is only temporary. Like my friend, I might envy that faith – if I thought that anyone, fighting to draw one more breath, really believes that his or her last breath is not the last.