by Brian Griffith.
When monotheists speak of “salvation from death,” it seems to imply that only saved souls can live forever. But that phrase reflects the ancient Zoroastrian and Jewish belief in resurrection of the body, which held that the righteous will be raised on a day of the Lord, leaving others to lie in their graves forever. In the later versions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that prevail today, it’s usually assumed that all souls are eternal. The difference in their fates is that some gain an everlasting reward, and others receive never-ending punishment. In either case, the soul inevitably lives forever.
In a somewhat similar way, many monotheists claim that the kingdom of God is all around us, but only some have the eyes to see it. For example, Viktor Frankl reported that while he was imprisoned in a Nazi death camp, a dying Jewish woman told him that a nearby tree was speaking to her, saying “I am life—eternal life” [1]. In a more doctrinal way, the Church of Christ, Scientist teaches that Jesus’ resurrection revealed a universal truth, namely that spirit transcends all illusory limits of the flesh. In the Scientology version of the story, Jesus demonstrated the reality that there is no death. Once people escape the illusion of mortality, they experience eternal life [2].
To many traditional people around the world, it has seemed obvious that we’re naturally part of something eternal. As a Ming Chinese official explained, “Man is born from amidst heaven and earth, which means that his origin is fundamentally the same as Heaven” [3]. In that case we’re already in heaven. We don’t have to qualify to get there, and it’s only a question of how well we live in it now. I personally favor environmentalist George Monbiot’s rather non-egocentric view of eternal life: “It seems to me that we [humans] are the happy ones: we, alone among organisms, who perceive eternity, and know that the world will carry on without us” [4].
From draft for “How to Qualify for Immortality”
Sources:
(1) Frankl, Viktor (2006) Man’s Search for Meaning, pp. 40–41.
(2) Follis, Elaine R. (1998) “Christian Science,” in Johnson, Christopher J. and McGee, Marsha G., How Different Religions View Death and Afterlife, p. 70.
(3) Holland, Tom (2019) Dominion, p. 350.
(4) Monbiot, George (2008) Bring on the Apocalypse, p. 21.