Afterlife?

AFTERLIFE?

1. I was raised by family and church to believe in an afterlife. It has become part of my psyche and my conceptual framework.

2. During my formal education this belief was affirmed. In my studies and critical thinking I confirmed my acceptance of this belief.

3. Therefore, this is my bias. It is such a part of me that it is the default position in my believe system.

4. I have a desire to maintain a belief in an afterlife.

5. The sense of hope that has come with my ingrained acceptance of an afterlife sustains me.

6. The concept of Transcendence I was given as a child and during my higher education is one of a Reality (God) that/who is eternal. No beginning or ending. Infinite. Therefore, the concept of eternity has been part of my spiritual framework.

7. Having accepted the reality of an Eternal God who has created the universe and given a special place to human beings as creatures with consciousness; and believing in the truth of Justice, it makes sense that God would not leave life incomplete for those who had no “finished” life, and for those who suffered major injustices. An afterlife completes the picture. It is part of my belief in Justice.

8. The resurrection of Christ has given my hope. My study and investigation of the resurrection appearances in the Gospels appear to me to be historically authentic and historically accurate, given the fact that the language used and the strange nature of the appearances, leave room for interpretation.

9. The phenomenon called the Church, a two thousand year old institution, which has its beginning in the resurrection narratives, is a brute fact. The Church exists. Though there are attempts to explain this phenomenon sans resurrection, I find them lacking in persuasiveness. It makes perfect sense to explain the existence of the Church and its martyrs by the reality and empowerment of an actual event called the resurrection.

10. The tens of thousands of Near Death Experiences (NDE) that are reported all over the world are, to me, convincing reports of the reality of another dimension of existence after death. The main themes of light, unconditional love, and out of body knowledge seem to be strong and consistent marks of what has been intuited by religions all over the world for centuries.

11. I personally have never experienced any paranormal phenomena. Therefore, my belief in afterlife is based on tradition, study, reason, intuition, faith, logic, testimony of others, and an emotional and existential feeling.

written on Sept. 30, 2019

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Providence

  August 25, 2020   Providence.   In a selection of John Chrysostom's reflections on "providence," he says:   Our fathers in the Old Testament times saw events contradicting he promises of God , yet they were not shocked or worried. They trusted in a Providence beyond their understanding. Knowing the richness and skill of the divine wisdom they awaited the outcome and endured all the adversities, giving thanks to God. (from Drinking from the Hidden Fountain. reading for Oct. 13)   Paul Tillich , in a sermon on Providence, says:   Faith in divine Providence is the faith that nothing can prevent us from fulfilling the ultimate meaning of our existence. Providence does not mean a divine planning by which everything is predetermined, as is an efficient machine. Rather, Providence means that there is a creative and saving possibility implied in every situation, which cannot be destroyed by an event. (from The Shaking of the Foundations)   In a sermon on th...
Read more

the middle eastern sage

January 15, 2019  From the beginning humans have   perceived or imagined unseen powers and forces which spooked and awed them; and the humans tried to influence those unseen powers to be friendly.   Dying and rising gods and goddesses were already imagined way before the birth of Christianity.   Sagas of an ancient couple named Abraham and Sarah, and their descendants, also tell of a small clan of Semitic people held as slaves in Egypt. These people have a memory of being liberated from the tyranny of a Pharaoh by the power of their God, YHWH. They had stories of tribal leaders, then kings and prophets, followed by forced exile from their homeland in Palestine to Babylon. They eventually return to their homeland and rebuild.   The Christian religion has its roots in the Jewish story. A Jewish man named Jesus was born in Palestine in around the year 4 BCE (which is numbered as year ‘0’ by a historical slippage).   While some people in our time speculate that...
Read more
    I believe in the Cause that calls. There is a Voice… I live “as if…” (We all live as if.) God is not a thing, but a movement. To participate in the Movement is our calling. As Tillich said, God is “the power of being.” Which is to say: the power of life. God is life-ness. God is Being which is always Becoming. As Dante said, there is the Love that moves the planets and the sun and the other stars. Faith has a vagueness to it. We see in a vague mirror (1 Cor. 13). The ultimate reality is reflected to us in a fuzzy faith. A fuzzy faith. Gas lighting— fundamentalism— believe what I say, don’t believe what you see.  
Read more