What kind of Question is this? Are you Nuts? You might as well as ask a windy person, say, what’s the answer to: what’s the ultimate goal in life? why are we here? what’s the meaning of life? and so forth. Don’t you all find it rather Sisyphean to ask such question considering how all those before you weren’t able to find an “answer” to this intractable philosophical, theological inquire.
However, a bestseller book called “Life After Life” just might shed some dim light on this thousands-of-years old, corner-stone question to mankind, bring us closer to the “Holy Grail,” and give us more meaning, value, and hope to our everyday living.
“A man . . . hears himself pronounced dead by his doctor. He begins to hear an uncomfortable noise, a loud ringing or buzzing, and at the same time feels himself moving very rapidly through a long dark tunnel. After this, he suddenly finds himself outside of his own physical body . . . and sees his own body from a distance, as though he is a spectator. . . . Soon other things begin to happen. Others come to meet and to help him. He glimpses the spirits of relatives and friends who have already died, and a loving, warm spirit of a kind he has never encountered before—a being of light—appears before him. . . . He is overwhelmed by intense feelings of joy, love, and peace. Despite his attitude, though, he somehow reunites with his physical body and lives.”
This passage from Raymond Moody’s bestselling book Life After Life is a composite near-death experience. Near-death experiences are more common than one might suspect. Several investigators each interviewed a hundred or more people who had come close to death through physical traumas such as cardiac arrest. In each study, 30% to 40% of such patients recalled a near-death experience.
When George Gallup, Jr. (who contributed an essay to this volume) interviewed a national sample of Americans, 15% reported having experienced a close brush with death. One-third of these people—representing eight million people by Gallup’s estimate—reported an accompanying mystical experience. Some claimed to recall things said while they lay unconscious and near death.
Moreover, a near-death experience may change people in different ways than a drug trip. Those who have been “embraced by the light” become kinder, more spiritual, and more devout in their life-after-death belief. And even if the near-death experience is hallucinatory, might it not also be a genuinely mystical, authentic, and rare opportunity for spiritual insight? Skeptics reply that these effects stem from the death-related context of the experience. When near death, people worldwide often report intuitions of another world.
Almost all religion capitalizes on the afterlife for enduring hardship and altruistic behaviors in this life time.
Therefore, it’s like Market Economy: the more stable and solid the capital of the after life proves to be, the more value and demands are placed on it in this life time.
So, to find anything that can prove divinity, afterlife, and value of life, it reinforces the supply-side currency used on the Market Economy of Religion, Morality, and Ethics.
So things like Universal Morality (David Humes), Universal Grammar (Noam Chomsky), Bombardier Beetles, and how every civilization had a religion that they believed in, since its dawn, and Jesus’ 12 disciples wouldn’t have allowed them to be crucified for a lie that they are spreading, these evidences (and more, like what this essay is about) solidify and cement the currency of the afterlife. And thereby, achieving leverage over our behaviors and beliefs of the current life by capitalizing on the afterlife.
Leave it to the Sisyphean Gallop boys to be able to ask such a question and then claim an estimated 8 million people in 1/3 of 15% of a national sample (±1200). Sixty people, actually, who agree to some form of a mystical experience and/or remember what they said while they were unconscious or even in a coma.
What did our ancestors, not to mention their ancestors before them, ever do without this insight?
And stitched into such a nice, tight package, categorized and set up for all to see and exclaim over.
Parody is the short form of paradise.
What’s my point, you ask. Is a point necessary – it’s a satire site with satire played against ‘serious commentary’.
Is the subject of some mythical being, worshipped by cultures across the Earth since time immemorial, in a variety of guises, not worthy of parody?
Let me quote his biography:
‘after our minds were satisfied, we would try every sexual position possible until every inch of our flesh was satisfied…’
You know what? I’m also reminded of an average person who spends all night at the bar, buying random women drinks, and then getting their “game” on and carefully move in to try to get laid, (after much practice with paid prostitutes and strippers-in-need, of-course).
They spend the “dough” that they don’t have, to buy cloth, watches, car, and other status symbols that they don’t need, to impress 21 year old who are easy and jaw-droppingly shallow, in order to try to “mount them while their drunk…”
So, what’s your point? ’cause I’m missing it…
People have different needs and different utility-scales.
What’s wrong with someone who likes “intellectual-intercourse” better than sexual-intercourse?
C.S. Lewis was virgin most of his life until he met a communist woman in his mid 40s. They talk all evening on the “question of God” and politics and then have wild and ecstatic mid-night sex, all night.
Ontological proof of the existence of God? It all comes down to Faith and needing Him to exist.
I’m reminded of the intellectual Irish agnostic who suffered not only from insomnia but also dyslexia and would stay up all night pondering the existence of Dog.