When preparing my post On Faith I was quite surprised to discover that belief in after life is consistently less common than the belief in God.

Worldwide in 1990 it’s 82% for God and 59% for afterlife (according to Religion and Economy, by McCleary and Barro in Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2006). In the USA it’s 95% vs. 82%. And check out the data for European countries in Religion Statistics  (compare with the data I quoted in On Faith, and you’ll realise they are only counting belief in “God” and not “spirit” and the like, so the difference is actually larger).

That is really weird. Belief in afterlife has been around much longer than belief in one transcendental God. People have been burying their dead with useful objects since paleolithic age (over 50,000 years ago) while belief in one god cannot be more than 4000 years old. Also, culturally speaking, afterlife is more common than God: there is not a single human culture that did not develop a belief in afterlife, whereas Chinese and Japanese religions do not include gods at all. And belief in afterlife is just as central to the power-trip of established religions as God. Anyone with half a brain can see that God does not endorse any particular religion, and that in all groups of believers poverty, diseases, accidents and military defeats are equally common. If there is no afterlife ALL world religions immediately lose their pretense to being “the one and only word of God”. So indoctrination and brain washing cannot be the explanation. Furthermore, while near-death experiences can’t be counted as proof to the existence of afterlife, they are nonetheless some sort of indication, which is more than we ever got from God.

Of course, if the belief in God is originally perceptual that would explain this curious fact. But lets look at another explanation. Simply put, the belief in Hell where the souls of sinners are punished eternally is outright ludicrous. Not surprisingly this is the least common of the afterlife notions (check out the data in Religion statistics again). I mean, come on, Suppose a person cheated on their spouse for all of their life together, over 60 years. That’s grave, I agree. But is burning for eternity really a just punishment? An eternity for only 60 years? With our expansion of the times that cosmology may require this trade seems utterly unjust. Maybe when the world was known to exist for 4000 years and expected to end in a 1000 years at the most, and that was the scope of eternity the eternal punishment seemed more reasonable. But nowadays, when we speak unblinkingly of billions and trillions of years in the past and in the future, the span of human sins has become too short to partake in eternity.

Also, it seems that we became too sophisticated for the physicality of the afterlife that was described. To go to heaven to enjoy a hearty meal of Wild Ox and Leviathan on a chair of gold or indulge with 72 virgins seems to us pathetic and laughable.

 Nonetheless, the continuation of some part of the human consciousness after the physical death is a necessary logical derivative from the existence of a good and omniscient God. It is quite obvious that nothing that may be considered as good behavior is consistently rewarded in life on earth as we know it. Good stuff comes to evil men, and horrid disasters come to good people. It is impossible to make sense out of the data without assuming something that happens beyond our limited view. Personally, the idea that makes sense most to me is reincarnation. Specifically multi-level reincarnation, which mean that a soul is born into this world to improve itself in some particular way, and after death it chooses either to return to this earth for a new lesson (or, in a less fortunate case, for the same lesson) or go to another plane of existence to learn higher, or lower, or just completely different lessons.

This sort of reality structure can give meaning to our attempts to do the right thing, to expand our minds and to improve ourselves that would otherwise be meaningless and empty.

And God wouldn’t do that to us, Right?