I saw a political cartoon earlier that kind of irked me. It showed a person sitting alone in a small, characterless room. The caption read, “The afterlife for atheists.”
I believe there are two rather large and probably unexamined assumptions that were made by the cartoonist.
Many might believe in an afterlife, but no one really knows there is one, and if they think they know, they can’t prove it. I hope that we go on in some way after we die. I don’t like the idea of disappearing, and I like to imagine that my parents are out there somewhere enjoying themselves. But I don’t claim to know that there is an afterlife. I can’t even say I believe there will be one. I hope. That’s what I do, I hope.
The second assumption is that you will either be rewarded or punished in the afterlife depending on what you believe in this life. According to orthodox Christianity, you’re supposed to believe Jesus died for your sins in order to be worthy of heaven. This strikes me as very odd. Many people believe Jesus died for their sins, but that’s mainly because they were brought up with the idea. But many of us who have reflected on this tenant find it to be peculiar.
Assuming there is a god and this god is loving, would a loving god make someone live alone in a small windowless room for eternity for not believing a rather bizarre and unlikely story from 2,000 years ago? That doesn’t make any sense to me.
I hope there is an afterlife, as I said. I hope it’s pleasant. If there is, I can’t imagine anyone being shut out of it, or shut in a small, windowless room, or thrown into a lake of fire for not concretizing an ancient myth and accepting it as fact.
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