The journey to self-consciousness

The biggest self-serving lie perpetrated by the Church has been that if we are obedient believers we will, after death, reside in heaven as opposed to hell. While the reformation was a partial correction of this, many or most believers on both the Catholic and Protestant denominations still believe in a conscious life after death, although hell has become distinctly unpopular. I have witnessed two sermons in the Anglican church that promised that we will go to a better place.

The Church's original mistake was to take over mind-body dualism from Greek philosophy and hence to the idea of the immortality of the soul that makes this construction possible. I would argue first that this is not the primary message of the gospel and secondly, that the neurological sciences have pinned consciousness to the function of the brain. When the brain dies and becomes disorganised, consciousness is lost, permanently. This understanding has become so current in our day that many see the Church as being a vehicle of false hope.

However, the Church has something to say about future hope. The secular understanding of eternity is just more and more time until the heat death of the universe. It is no wonder that many understand their lives in terms of "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die". Death is approached with numerous "bucket lists" that make sure we have lived life to the full. This, of course, is a recipe for despair because we all know that we, rich and poor, famous and obscure march towards the day that we will die, our "deathday" as opposed to our "birthday". Any society that relies on these notions will be subject to nihilism, overconsumption, and rivalry.

On the other hand, the Church offers hope that is not seen, not created by us by our many achievements, is not formulated in terms of the immortality of the soul but in eternal truth about the substance of human living and dying. This has the power to assure us that despite our death and the death of our loved ones, death is not the final victor even though it seems that way. Human life is supported by the experience that the providence of God, to use an old and misused phrase, is that the chasm of death has been overcome by truth that is eternal. Equanimity is possible when we know that all is not for nothing.