Free of the After-life

(or, Why I Enjoy Being Agnostic)

Religious belief is a source of comfort to a huge number of people across Ye Globe. The mysterious (some might say questionable) nature of faith and the fervent self-sacrifice of devotion are not only interesting, but (I would venture to say), downright appealing to the remote eye.

Why people turn to religion, and why they have Faith, is not an easy matter to determine, resting as it does on several things. One of these is the classic existential crisis; people get tired of having to exercise their free will all the time, and turn towards organised religion in search of a framework upon which they may base their decisions. It gives them a context in which they exist; they are no longer alone, they have relations of shared faith and a history and genealogy of worship and devotion. I have heard it said of the Koran, for instance, that it is like 'a guidebook on how to live life.' Fair enough.

The second reason is equally classic; the ol' 'I don't know what's going to happen after I die!' panic. Religious people insulate themselves from the all-too-human fear of death, and in most cases, effectively acknowledge their mortality by, er, acknowledging their immortality. They will die in order to ascend to a better life; or they will be reborn until they can prove themselves worthy of Heaven. There are the views that you may be chosen to go to Heaven before you were even born, and that you might just be beyond saving and go to hell, but these have become unfashionable for obvious reasons...

This is where I intervene to say that, funnily enough, I do not see the after-life as particularly comforting - but nor do I find the atheist view of 'Ah, you'll just be eaten by maggots. Or fire' much better. No, I am a Shifty One - I subscribe to the middle view, that of agnosticism. I sit perched on the fence like a Christmas-card robin, proclaiming that all I really know is that I DON'T KNOW.

The idea of an after-life presents an enslavement and a fundamental denial of human nature, it seems to me. Whether we like it or not, we are firmly programmed to want to survive at all costs. No doubt ascetics and religious folk see their view of the world as a transcendance of this notion; a sort of reclaiming-in-nihilism of death as something to not only not fear, but desire even.

Yet the irony! This manifestation of an after-life is simply a distortion of that biological view, if you ask me; a hypocritical continuation, not a divergence. You want to survive - you will survive at all costs! You will be reborn in order to live beyond the decay of your mortal body! People force themselves to 'do good works' in order to increase their divine brownie points (some don't have to, admittedly), letting their fear of death fester even as they try to put the inevitable off, with good intent.

You don't know what comes next. I find that liberating. We have so many great and small worries in our lives, and assorted tidbits of new knowledge escaping through all the time. Death is a painful process for the ones left behind, but it is also a process of maturation for humanity. It serves to make us appreciate life and our behaviour towards one another more. Why can we not respect this? Why must we undermine it as a stepping-stone to something else, or by viewing it only in its biological function?

I am not enslaved to the notion of an after-life where everything will be how I want it, or however I need it, or whatever (seeing as how we humans can't even reconcile what we want and what we need half the time, I find the suicide-bomber version of Heaven particularly amusing). I would venture even to say that the few unknowable areas of existence - like the aftermath of Death - make us appreciate the knowledge we do have even more.

So, I don't want to think of myself as a greying corpse, mouldering slowly in the ground; nor do I want to think of the 'essence' or 'spirit' of myself flying off to infuse itself in someone/thing else. I choose unknowability. For God's sake (;-)), I've got enough to worry about as it is!