The Afterlife Revealed by Michael Tymn

Author:Michael Tymn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907661914
Publisher: White Crow

6

MANY MANSIONS

The principal difficulty confronting the survival hypothesis is an intelligible Hereafter.

— H. H. Price, Oxford professor of logic

As the last few ounces of life force drained from the hunched, weary bodies of my parents, I helplessly watched them struggle to overcome the fear, the anxiety, the depression, and the strife so often associated with dying. I could feel their inner turmoil, their heavy hearts, their imprisoned souls. I could see clouds of despair over them. I could sense them blindly groping in the bondage imposed on them by their religious indoctrination. Their obligatory attendance at Sunday Mass provided them no comfort, no enlightenment, no hope. I wanted so badly to share with them the hope, the freedom, the splendor, the harmony, the beauty, the happiness, and the love I had come to associate with the life that awaited them after death, but the fetters that bound them to the walls of superstition were much too strong.

That superstition includes a horrific hell, a humdrum heaven, and in between, a painful purgatory in which souls must spend time – probably years, possibly decades, perhaps even centuries – purging their sins. It is in purgatory where my parents expected to reside when they transitioned; however, their belief that purgatory is preferable to hell offered them little solace. The Catholic Church had indoctrinated them with the idea that this in-between state is just as terrible as hell, the “flames” just as searing, the anguish just as great. The only difference is that they will someday be able to escape that inferno for heaven, where they might then aimlessly float around on clouds. Only a saintly few supposedly stand any chance of avoiding purgatory and going directly to heaven.

How can anyone anticipating such torment not approach death with great dread? Is it any wonder that so many people consider the loss of earthly consciousness as a morbid, chaotic, and depressing event and live their final years in a morass of doubt and fear? Why can’t the Church see what a cruel, capricious, vindictive, and wrathful God it offers? Why doesn’t the Church grasp the reason so many thinking people have abandoned it?

Apparently, some liberal thinkers in the Church have backed off the hell-like environment of purgatory, but they still see it as a place of suffering. Whatever the views of the Church liberals these days, it has not been effectively communicated to the faithful. After two-thousand years, the Church continues to use fear as a weapon to maintain its flock.

As mentioned in the Introduction, Martin Luther certainly didn’t care much for purgatory. It was the primary issue giving rise to his break with the Catholic Church. Luther rebelled against the corruption involved with buying indulgences to shorten one’s sentence in purgatory. Rather than attempt to make sense of purgatory, Protestantism has offered us a black and white afterlife, a dichotomy that is even more difficult to swallow than the Catholic view. Good and evil are absolutes.

Had my parents been Protestants, they might not have

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