The function of religion in our human experience of death
Many who are religious will take great offence to the idea that religions are a human construct. It often is a deeply personal aspect of their lives, and one that governs many of their decisions. However, it is important that we talk openly and honestly about religion – not just to understand the beliefs of others, but also because beliefs often motivate people’s behaviour. There will inevitably be some truth in every religion, but we can conclude, using logic alone, that the majority of religions are human constructs – not divinely inspired systems of belief.
All religions make metaphysical claims about reality that are all incompatible with each other. They cannot all be true. Therefore, either only one religion is true, or they are all false. For example, Jesus Christ was either the son of God (a claim of Christianity), or he was a prophet – merely a man (a claim of Judaism and Islam). Both cannot be true. Either salvation is attained through accepting Christ as your saviour and confessing your sins (Christianity), or ‘salvation’ is attaining moksha (Buddhism). This is the law of non-contradiction. Two contradictory ideas cannot be simultaneously true. Now, when I speak of religion, I’m defining it in a broad sense. Buddhism is not a religion in the sense that Christianity or Islam are. Regardless, the truth claims made by Buddhism are contradictory to those of Christianity.
The consequences of this simple principle are quite astonishing. Millions are following the wrong religion, assuming that only one religion is true, and so the majority of religious people in the world are believing a lie. It boggles the mind because it is not difficult to realize that most religions are untrue, yet millions of people are utterly convinced that their beliefs are correct. I think there are many underlying principles of religion that tend to convince people of their beliefs so strongly. As humans, we all desire meaning and purpose in life, and we all try to make sense of life. Religion can be a powerful tool for doing this.
There is often a reluctance to recognize the differences between religions and their inherent incompatibilities. Most find the subject deeply personal and emotional, and most are afraid of telling others that their beliefs are wrong. It’s not surprising, since doing so in some cases translates to implicitly saying that one will spend an eternity in hell. Many would rather adopt the view that all religions are the same, rather than simply discuss and contest the ideas.
Perhaps the most practical aspect of the function of religion is to give ourselves a sense of purpose and answers to those things we simply can never know, like death. Death is something that finds us all, and it is something inherently unknowable. So our desire and attempts to understand it through religion are not surprising. Most religions provide a story for after we die, and I suspect the reason for this is the great difficulty we have in imagining a time or world in which we do not exist anymore.
Imagining the time before we were born is perhaps not as difficult. We have the historical record, which provides good evidence that the past probably did exist prior to our birth. But death is in the future, and thinking of a time when we will cease to exist can elude our comprehension. We exist now in the present moment, and we are conscious of our selves and our environment. Our brains are currently processing sensory input of our immediate surroundings, and the world exists colourfully and sharply defined inside our minds. It can be quite difficult or unnerving to imagine this ceasing, perhaps because it is not possible for us to know what a loss of consciousness is like.
To know what something is like, we either experience it directly through the senses, or learn from others. Both are unavailable to us in the case of death. Death is essentially a loss of consciousness. It would be like sleeping without dreaming, I suppose – provided there is no afterlife. But we don’t really know what sleeping is like either. We are not conscious to experience a loss of consciousness. So it is impossible to experience what death would actually be like, since we lose our perceptive abilities. We simply experience a loss of consciousness as a gap in our experience of time. There is nothing, and for the subject, an indeterminate amount of time will pass.
To deal with this somewhat incomprehensible idea of death and the loss of consciousness, religion has the hopeful option of proposing more consciousness after death, in other words: an after-life. At this point in our conscious experience, we can’t know what it is like to not exist while the world runs on without us. All that we know, and ever will know, is awaking, conscious perception of reality (with the exception of dreaming). So religion says, what else must there be but more experience, more awareness, more consciousness, and more life? I do not rule out the possibility of there being an after-life; however, recognizing the role religion plays in this area enables us to understand people’s beliefs and their actions, which are often based on those beliefs.