Reply #40: Afterlife is wishful thinking.

[ozone_man]

I completely agree with Varkham's (somewhat dark) reply. It's a destructive idea that has been very bad for civilization, since it offers the promise of rewards beyond our natural existence. Rather than seek justice on earth, sustainable life for future generations of plants, animals, and people, we look toward heavenly fulfullment. It's not only a childish and selfish concept, it's perpetuated by the controlling powers, the church and state, to keep the masses under control (opiated), to prevent uprisings, revolutions, dissent, from demanding earthly fulfillment. It's a delusion, but one that has been used for great effect by TPTB.

But, religion may also have been a necessary, or inevitable step in civilization. Before we had the answers, or at least the powers of reason and scientific method to think of alternative explanations, it was plausible to believe in supernatural causes for existence, life after death, someone who listens to our prayers. As we mature as a civilization, these things can gradually be left behind, like the teddy bear in our crib.

"Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect."
From The Future of an Illusion, (1927)

"Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. <...> If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity."
(Sigmund Freud / 1856-1939 / Moses and Monotheism / 1939)

Here's an excerpt from an essay by Italian Marxist Enrico Ferri (1894) that addresses the issue of the deferred promises of religion, i.e., to the afterlife.

It is for this reason that science and religion are in inverse ratio one to the other; the one diminishes and becomes feeble in the same measure as the other increases and is strengthened in its struggle with the unknown.

And if this is a consequence of Darwinism, its influence on the development of socialism is perfectly evident.

The disappearance of the faith in something beyond when the poor will become the elect of the Lord, and when the miseries of this “valley of tears” will find an eternal compensation in Paradise, gives more vigour to the desire of a little “terrestrial Paradise” down here for the unhappy and the less fortunate who are the most numerous.

Hartmann and Guyaul<2> have shown that the evolution of religious beliefs can be thus summarised: all religions have within themselves the promise of happiness, but primitive religions admit that the happiness will be realised during the life itself of the individual, and later religions, by an excess of reaction, transport it outside this mortal world after death; in the last phase this realisation of happiness is again replaced in human life, no longer in the short moment of individual existence, but in the continued evolution of the whole of humanity.

On this side again, socialism is joined to religious evolution and tends to substitute itself for religion because it desires precisely that humanity should have in itself its own “terrestrial paradise” without having to wait for it in a “something beyond,” which, to say the least, is very problematical.

Also it has been very justly remarked that the socialist movement has numerous characteristics common, for instance, to primitive Christianity, notably its ardent faith in the ideal which has finally deserted the arid field of bourgeois scepticism, and certain learned men, not socialists, such as Messrs. Wallace, Laveleye and Roberty, etc., admit that socialism, by its humanitarian faith can perfectly replace the faith in the “something beyond” of the old religions.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/ferri/1894/religion.htm

I think IMModerate intended this to be a light hearted thread, but it's one of those subjects that can go either way. :)