‘I’ve been to other side, mate, and there’s fuckin’ nothin’ there.” The crafted words are those of Australian media mogul Kerry Packer, revived after being dead for six minutes following a massive heart attack.
They pose rather serious difficulties for those who believe life continues after the grave-faced men in white coats pocket their stethoscopes and agree it is over.
It is true that during near-death experiences some people claim to have heard ineffable music and seen beckoning lights at the end of tunnels. But why not Packer? Are Australians considered unsuitable material for the choir invisible?
One solution is to argue that, by definition, death is a one-way ticket and that Packer could not truly have popped his clogs. Six minutes without a pulse seems suspiciously dead to me. But in any case, by the same argument one should lend no credence to near-death revivalists who return with tales of Christmas lights and Rebecca Molope.
The problem is partly an epistemological one. How can one tell whether near-death visions correspond to ”something out there”, or represent the last electro-chemical flickerings of nervous system shutdown?
More than 50 years ago George Orwell remarked that the belief in personal immortality had suffered a significant decline. He was talking about the British, a notoriously unspiritual people. But it is a fair bet that scepticism has spread since his day.
In some part, it is an issue of evolving aesthetics. Orwell remarked tartly that the conventional Christian conception of heaven was ”incredibly vulgar, like a choir practice in a jewellery shop”.
St John’s description of the New Jerusalem, with its jasper, sardonyx and pearly gates, sounds to the modern imagination more like one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces than the realm of the blessed.
Hell offends modern sensibilities on both aesthetic and moral grounds. Historians tell us the notion was already in decline in 17th-century England, when religious radicals could no longer accept that God could create millions of men and women only to condemn them to eternal torment.
The terrifying horned demons of medieval iconography have been reduced in our age to the comic-book character Hot Stuff, and Cow and Chicken’s endearing bare-bottomed mischief-maker, the Red Guy.
But this should not obscure the fact that when it meant something, hell was the most pitiless doctrine ever devised by a major faith.
The infernal phantasmagoria of the Christian Middle Ages seem dredged from the subconscious mind of a serial sex murderer. Devils with horns, tails and cloven hooves — derived from Pan, the rutting goat-deity of the proto-Greeks — were conventionally depicted roasting naked long-haired maidens over the fires of lust.
At least the Catholic Church offered the solace of purgatory, implying that one could be less than a saint and still win salvation. By rejecting this dogma as unsupported by the scriptures, the Protestant Reformers made heaven the preserve of a tiny elite.
The English religious dissenter Lodovick Muggleton evokes how dreadful the threat of damnation seemed to our ancestors: ”I did not so much mind to be saved as I did to escape being damned,” he wrote. ”If I could but lie still in the earth for ever, it would be as well with me as if I were in eternal happiness.”
What has also evolved since the days of the medieval schoolmen is the Christian outlook on the non-Christian world. In the Europe of 500 years ago, ignorance and xenophobia (not to mention legitimate fear of the armies of Suleiman the Magnificent) made it seem quite natural that the unbaptised hordes of the heathen should burn in hell.
How many 21st-century Christians would still endorse this view — or the Spanish inquisitors who, with pious intentions, offered Jews recantation of their heresy or the agonies of the stake?
The question of what happens after death to the countless millions who adhere to other faiths, or were born before Christ’s redeeming sacrifice, remains a grave intellectual difficulty for orthodox Christians, particularly Protestants.
The Catholic answer is the strange doctrine of limbo, a place of ”natural happiness” on the borders of Hell, originally set aside for unbaptised children and ”virtuous pagans” (including the prophets and patriarchs of the Old Testament) who died before the ascended Christ re-opened the gates of Heaven to fallen Man. Limbo, too, was denounced as unscriptural by the Reformers.
Oscar Wilde’s fable The Hall of Judgement raises the interesting question of how well the mass of ordinary believers would fit into the heavenly kingdom. In it, a man offered salvation tells God he cannot accept because ”never, and in no wise have I been able to imagine it [heaven]”.
In contrast with the Islamic para-dise, a place of gardens, running water, food, wine and good company, the Christian heaven is projected as a state of pure spiritual bliss flowing from timeless adoration of the Godhead.
This is fine for the blessed company of saints, martyrs, monks and mystics. But what about the ”sensuous man in the street”, who counts himself among the faithful but whose highest happiness is playing with his children, gardening or watching cricket?
Hence the cartoon in the satirical weekly Private Eye, which shows two disconsolate dogs, winged and haloed, sitting on a cloud. ”I don’t call it heaven when we can’t sniff one another’s bottoms,” the one is muttering.
And so to the doctrine of the soul, which in Christianity survives the death of the body, in fact is imperishable — and which dogs are not supposed to have.
The idea of an entity that animates but is independent of our physical being is very ancient and widespread. In animist Africa, the spirits of the dead are absorbed into, and continue to be accessible through, the natural environment. The Ugandan musician Geoffrey Oryema, whose father died at the hands of dictator Idi Amin, poignantly captures the idea:
Late in the evening I went down, down to the river.
Putting my hand in the water, I felt the spirit moving …
In Hinduism and Buddhism, the soul is conceived as an impersonal life force that moves through successive incarnations up the great ladder of animate being, from the lowliest blade of grass to the highest avatar.
But the idea of a quasi-judicial process in the hereafter, and thus of an accountable soul that retains the personality and consciousness of the person in life, and seems unique to the near Eastern faiths of Judaeo-Christianity and Islam.
Philosophically, it is very troublesome. The body is conceived as a material object among other material objects, subject to natural laws but somehow enlivened by a super- natural spark. How do these two entities, one of this world, the other transcending it, connect and interact?
But there are more mundane snags than what philosopher Gilbert Ryle sarcastically termed ”the Ghost in the Machine”.
Both personality and consciousness are clearly physiological processes that can be transformed by physical damage or mind-altering drugs. Drink notoriously alters people, and brain injury can trigger permanent personality change, often making the victim less ”moral”.
Why should bodily structures survive the body’s demise? And while we’re at it, what happens to the many souls rendered incapable of accounting for themselves, and therefore of being judged, by extreme youth, cerebral stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia or congenital mental incapacity?
Indeed, how many of the struggling mass of human beings are clear candidates for the heroic alternatives of hell and heaven? Most lives are compounded of petty vices and even pettier virtues; most ordinary folk are neither sceptical nor devout. They get on with the lives they have, without much thought of the life to come.
And even if one buys the notion of the soul, perhaps as the Aristotelian ”substance” that guarantees each person’s individuality, why should it be unique to human beings, and impervious to death?
The most enduring damage inflicted by Charles Darwin on Christian theology was not the debunking of the Babylonian creation myth found in Genesis, but the location of the human species four-square within the animal kingdom.
Modern life sciences show us how close we are to the higher animals — that there is a continuum, as in Hindu belief, rather than the absolute disjunction suggested by the Bible. Chimpanzees share 98% of our DNA.
When, in our long evolution from other animal species, did we develop this immortal soul? If it is an evolutionary development, the fruit of genetic mutation, how can it be non-material? Or did God, like the mysterious monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey, alter the course of human evolution by breathing souls into our hairy, shambling forbears?
Indeed, the Judaeo-Christian belief that humans were ordained masters of nature by God, above and different in kind from the animals that perish, is arguably a root cause of the ecological havoc Western ”civilisation” continues to visit on our planet.
At this point dogmatists may take refuge in protestations of faith: we should accept and not presume, with our feeble reasoning powers, to fathom the designs of the Almighty.
But if we are to decide matters by unreasoning ”leaps of faith”, all metaphysical systems become equal. Why not leap at Scientology, Satanism or the cosmology of the ancient Egyptians? Besides, why should God expect human beings to suspend the gift of reason on this life or death issue?
More potent is the argument that if the afterlife is a pious misconception, it is an expedient one — that if heaven and hell did not exist, one would have to invent them.
If there is to be no final reckoning, one could argue, there would be no just desserts for villainy and little point in striving to be good. How do we confront personal extinction and the idea of eternal separation from people that matter to us? Would it not, indeed, ”be better never to have been, than ever to cease to be”?
There are other ways of viewing the issue. For the Stoics of classical Greece and Rome — who believed the spark of the soul was reabsorbed into the great fire of the cosmos — the goal was the intrinsically honourable and dignified life, stripped of comforting illusion. One of the many 21st-century features of Stoical thought was its approval of suicide when life with dignity becomes impossible.
The ”secular sainthood” of writer Albert Camus represents, in ways, a modern equivalent. In pursuit of the ideal, the doctor in Camus’ novel The Plague remains in a North African city gripped by a deadly epidemic to minister to the sick, without the solace or motivation of religious belief.
Goodness seen as its own reward, or that springs from love or spontaneous human solidarity, is considered worthier than the virtue that looks forward to some celestial payback.
And if one really internalised the fact that there is no ”beyond”, if one ”existed unto death”, as the existentialist thinker Martin Heidegger puts it, the present life might seem charged with infinitely larger significance.
We might see it as a privilege, a fleeting opportunity, not as a dry run for the real thing. Each second would be experienced as irrecoverable. The petty and inessential — greed, score-settling, dishonesty, self-importance — might be ruthlessly purged from our dealings with others, particularly those closest to us.
Two South American Indian chants, quoted by science fiction writer Harry Harrison, catch the flavour of the idea:
Shall we live again, perhaps one more time?
In your heart — you know!
We live but once.
and …
In vain was I born,
In vain was it written
that here on earth
I suffer.
Yet at least
it was something
to be born on earth …