But Don't All Religions Lead to God?: Navigating the Multi-Faith Maze by Green Michael

Author:Green, Michael [Green, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780801064395
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2002-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

No Other Great Teacher Broke the Final Barrier–Death

On April 27, 1783, Lieutenant General Sir Eyre Coote, KB, Commander of the British Forces in India, died. I have seen and marveled at the vast monument celebrating his achievements, which concluded “but death interrupted his career of glory.” It tends to do that! “The first two minutes of life are critical”, declared the notice on the surgery wall. Underneath someone had added, “The last two are pretty dicey as well.” As another joker put it, “The most dangerous thing in the world is living. There is a 100 percent mortality rate.”

This is a somber thought. For most of the time we manage not to think about it, until perhaps we attend a friend’s funeral or ourselves suffer a stroke. Then we wonder if there is life after death. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes expressed our attitude well: “When I die, worms will devour my body and I will commit myself to the ‘Great Perhaps.’ ”

People have been doing that since time immemorial. I shall never forget visiting Lebanon and seeing some of the oldest tombs in existence. The skeletons were buried in a highly suggestive position. Their knees were tucked up under their chins, and they were encased in an earthenware egg. In other words, the men and women of that far-off day cherished the hope that new life would break out of the “egg” of death. They dared to hope that when they were dead, they might somehow live again. I recall being fascinated, during a visit to Italy, by the ancient Romans’ preoccupation with death. There are many mosaics dealing with death and the afterlife at Herculaneum and Pompeii, the Italian cities overwhelmed by the terrible eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. There are pictures of skeletons with jugs in their hands, of skulls lurking behind the revelers at a feast and inscriptions such as, “Remember you must die”. One of the most remarkable pictures is of a phoenix, the mythical bird that was supposed to come to life again after it had been burnt on the funeral pyre: underneath it the artist had written, “Phoenix, how lucky you are!”

What have the great religions to say about the ultimate barrier, death? On the whole, they do not handle it very satisfactorily.

Both Hinduism and Buddhism believe there is an afterlife. But it is nothing to look forward to. In Hinduism your atman, your spirit, is reincarnated in another body and you start paying for the bad things you have done in a previous existence. Buddhism prefers the word “rebirth” to “reincarnation”, believing that another consciousness which is saddled with your moral indebtedness emerges after your death. So karma has the last word in both religions, unless you are fortunate enough, after many lives, to find that the good you have done outweighs the bad, in which case there is hope of nirvana, where all consciousness ends and you return to the fundamental One or Monad that underlies and embraces everything in the universe.

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