Perhaps the weakest argument deployed by the Church for becoming a Christian is the promise of eternal life for the faithful. This immediately begs a question as to a partial God only favouring those souls acknowledging Him.
The alternative Christian view is an even greater concern as to the nature of God, that everyone has eternal life, but only the favoured few will be welcomed into heaven. For the rest, the vast majority, it is everlasting damnation in hell.
Such are the traditional claims of the Church in its many denominations, with perhaps variations on those themes. Today, the promise of eternal life still figures in church services, but as to what that means is not clarified so much.
Recent surveys suggest about 30% of the British populace still believes in God. This will be the theistic God of the Abrahamic faiths as deist views are barely known or considered presently in Britain.
Interestingly, it appears over 50% still subscribe to a belief in an afterlife, even if that cannot be asserted any more forcefully than being a “feeling”. This could almost be a re-emergence of pre-Christian pagan views as the influence of the Church declines.
Someone who would be considered by the Church to be a pagan was the stoic Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius. He had this to say about death,
“The person who fears death either fears the total loss of all consciousness or the onset of new sensations. But, if you have no consciousness you will not feel any pain, and if you acquire new sensations, you will just be a different kind of living creature and so will not cease to live.”*
What Aurelius alludes to, but does not make explicit, is that we don’t know what, if anything, happens after death. Whichever way it is beyond our control; either way there are positive benefits.
Deists assert the existence of God, but not the anthropomorphic deity of the Abrahamic faiths. Indeed, many deists insist that God as the ultimate creator is far beyond human comprehension and may well not be particularly aware of, or concerned with, human existence.
Religions have traditionally promoted mankind into a privileged position as being cast in God’s image. Whereas it seems Man has rather expressed a deep seated religious instinct by casting God in human form.
Ideas about an afterlife have tended to reflect the society engendering them, as have the attributes of the prevailing deity. This does not mean that such notions can be dismissed as mere social constructs. Rather they have been ways to express the ineffable.
Some deists, Thomas Paine for example, favour the notion of there being an afterlife. What form this takes is unknown and perhaps unknowable in this life, but if God has imbued the universe with the possibility of life and consciousness, then trust God to have taken care of whatever might come next.
However, others such as Anthony Flew, the almost life long atheist who became a deist in the final years of his life, insist that while there is God this does not imply an afterlife. The finite nature of life being just another aspect of a creation that is in constant flux.
Deism does not make any promises on behalf of God, only that the order and discernable laws governing the universe are reasonably suggestive of something that is referred to as being God.
The significance or otherwise of individual humans or humanity as a whole lies beyond our determining, apart from significance we can impart to ourselves by living this life as well as we can, rather than worrying about a next one.
As Marcus Aurelius wrote,
“Death brought Alexander the Great and his stable-boy together; for they were either received by the same life-giving principles of the universe, or they were both scattered equally among the atoms.”**
So,
“Why not just sit in tranquillity and wait for the end, whether it’s extinction or transformation?”***
Source
“The Spiritual Teachings of Marcus Aurelius.” Edited by Mark Forstater. Hodder and Stoughton, 2000.
* Page 129
** Page136
*** Page 135
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