Occam’s-Razoring the Afterlife

Belief in an afterlife (survival after the death of the physical body, to live by the right hand of God in some nice place in a parallel universe), to put it bluntly, is evil. It devalues the one life that you really have: the here and now.

Why “evil”, you may ask? Because “afterlifers,” like the common Pinoy or that suicide bomber sitting oh-so-nicely right next to you on a TAS Trans bus, think it’s more important to ensure your place in an afterlife. Thus, they work, think, act, and speak in the best interests of their lives in the Great Beyond. They have a value system that inevitably shortchanges and devalues their life here and those of around them.

Maybe you can understand me if you’ve already met somebody who is so passionate about hell and demons and hands you eternal damnation each time you commit any arbitrary “sin.” Oh my, you’ll go to hell if you say “fuck” or lustily look at the yum-yum smoothly-shaven armpit of that girl next door. On the other hand, if you live your life by the Good Book, your place is assured in Heaven after you die and got eaten by maggots—which also means living your life against human nature.

Maybe you can understand me much better if you’ve been closely following what has been happening in places like Israel and Iraq, where fundamentalists believing in the eternal rewards they’d get in the afterlife willingly blow themselves up—including those women and children who happen to be around them when they pull the pin.

But there is no afterlife. Human consciousness is material, dependent on a material brain. The fact is that people only want to believe that their consciousness will continue to exist—like some desperate coping mechanism. They usually do this through some sort of reverse logic: conclusion first (there is an afterlife), then selecting comfortable “evidence” (near-death testimony by people guesting in shows like Mel and Joey, ancient scriptures—the very same ones that say diseases are caused by demon possession)

But to quote another honest atheist, Aaron Kinney:

“Religion is often referred to as a ‘crutch’ and I believe the same thing applies to the afterlife. It is a crutch for the weak minded. It is a comfort for those without the stomach to face the evidenced truth…Discarding the afterlife belief makes this life much more important; it raises the stakes; it puts more responsibility on a person to make this life the best life possible, when most people would rather not have such responsibility.”

I used to walk around Makati in a white T-shirt with a message, “Live. Here. Now.” It also has a quote from Filipino poet Eric Gamalinda: “I will comb the city’s streets and wrestle the Evil One until finally, quoting Rene Char, disappear without too much paraphernalia.”

I still have that shirt (it’s six years old now), and I’m selling it for ten thousand pesos—I need the money to help me “live the good life, here, now.” Call me if you want to buy it.

The first sucker can have it for a good discount.

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