First a confession. I'm pretty wicked and sharp tongued, as can be seen from what I write. I don't live up to it. Imagine how bad I'd be if I was still ignoring the Gospels and Epistles, the Law and the Prophets.
Ever since then, both Christians and non-Christians have been faced with a clear alternative in the direction they lead their lives.
There is the possibility that we die into nothingness. I would not deny my respect for anyone who adopts this position. This is a view which sometimes demands heroism, and can certainly not be refuted. Of course no one has proved it positively either. There has never yet been anyone who could prove that we die into nothingness, that all our living, laboring, loving and suffering ends in nothingness and was ultimately for nothing. And to me this possibility does not seem reasonable; under no circumstances does it seem reasonable.
Since, as Hans Kung says, there is no ability to positively prove the idea of surviving death either in the negative nor the positive, I think the most useful thing about it to think are the circumstances that the two positions tend to lead to in how people conduct their lives. As the great Jewish theologian and scholar, Abraham Joshua Heschel said, Jews like him believed in an afterlife but there was no information as to what that would be like, they tended to not think about it much. But I do think there are important effects that come from believing different things.
Far from what is often claimed, that those who embraced the rejection of an afterlife leading to a great and positive focusing on the here and now problems of humanity, selflessly devoting themselves to the betterment of this one and only life we have, I have seen that choice of life is far more likely to be associated with someone who accepts The Law, The Prophets and the moral teachings of Jesus than among conventional atheists. I've mentioned before how I saw a discussion at a Center For Inquiry blog, on a post congratulating atheists on founding a charity and was able to congratulate them on finding a practice that had been a part of the Christian tradition going back to Apostolic times. It was at the same blog that there were angry comments made by atheists rejecting the idea of "atheist charities" because a. it implied a moral obligation that couldn't be demonstrated by reason, b. it wasn't anything atheists had any business doing.*
If the criticism that Christians who did good things were selfish because they expected to be rewarded in heaven for it is legitimate, at least if that is true it was leading them to do good things. Figuring that there is no ultimate price to be paid other than what you can't get away with doing in this life doesn't seem to tend to the doing of good works, no matter how much more admirable it might make good works done by such ultimate nihilists, for my political purpose the relative rarity of such eventually extinguished beacons isn't something you can build egalitarian democracy and economic justice on. It's my experience that when Christians do bad things or fail to do good things, it's because they don't believe enough, even if it's just a fear of punishment like the rich man who let Lazarus starve to death on his doorstep.
I am also reminded of a remark Walter Brueggemann made about a janitor at one of the great universities he taught at asking him about the fashion of either denying there is an afterlife or not talking about such things in theology who said that without the hope of that future, poor people like him had no hope at all. I'd rather hope for a heaven which I won't miss because I won't exist anymore than to live in denial of that possibility in the dull, hopeless, purposelessness that such a thing leads to. I don't find that latter state of mind conducive to getting up and doing what needs to be done beyond my own creature comforts. It's my experience that such periods in my life have not been my best ones. And that experience leads me to suspect there are social consequences, political ones, certain negative consequences for economic justice when such ultimate nihilism becomes general. I'd rather have them afraid of going to hell for sinning than figuring that anything they can get away with is permitted.
That this tendency to act better isn't a strong one, anything that discourages it is far more dangerous than we might casually believe. I think the Trump regime has proven just how dangerous that discouragement of believing in ultimate consequence of evil is for a society and a nation and the world.
* I can say that if Christians said some of the things those atheists did not only would atheists use that against Christianity but Christians would mount a quick and strong internal criticism of their fellow Christians because they were opposed to the teachings of Jesus. The internal criticism in religion fills libraries of books. I don't recall any such internal criticism mounted by atheists being much in evidence.
Christians who do bad things are, notably, acting more in line with the atheist doctrines of Mandeville, Nietzsche, Haeckel than anything Jesus said. They are being thoroughly bad Christians, they are violating nothing in atheism in their badness. They certainly aren't demonstrating a strong belief they are risking going to hell for it.
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