What happens to us after we die? Six Answers

The human race has come up with five basic answers to the question "What happens to us after we die," and God has come up with a sixth.

According to C.S. Lewis in A Grief Observed, the first five possibilities are:

   1. Annihilation. Nothing. Death ends it all, except our reputation, our works, and our children, which live on after us―but we know and enjoy nothing of them if we are annihi­lated forever. This is a typically modern concept, although a few ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, such as Demo­critus and Lucretius, held it. For materialism, death is everything, because in it we be­come nothing.

   2. We survive death, but only as ghosts. We become pale shadows of the living selves we once were. This is the mythic view of shades in Hades. It is the belief of most ancient tribes and cultures, including the early Jews and Greeks. In the mythic view, we become less than we were before death.

   3. Reincarnation. We come back to earth in another mortal body. Belief in reincarnation has been popular in many times and places, including the present. It usually exists together with possibilities 4 or 5 below. In reincarnation, we become the same sort of thing we were before death.

   4. The natural immortality of the soul. Each individual's disembodied spirit, liberated by death, survives as a pure spirit, like an angel. This spirit had been imprisoned in an alien thing, a body, until released forever by death. The concept is grounded in Platonism, but is often confused with Christianity, which teaches supernatural resurrection rather than natural immortality, and of the whole person, not just of the soul. For Platonism, death is nothing, as can be seen in the way Socrates faces death: as indifferently as Buddha. Whether the spirit is a universal impersonal spirit, as in Buddhism, or an individual human spirit, as in Platonism, death does not affect it, since it is radically different from the body. In Bud­dhism the individual body is illusion (so is the individual soul); in Platonism it is a mere prison (soma, "body," equals serna, "tomb").

   5. The only thing that survives death is the only thing that was real before death: cosmic consciousness, the One, Atman, the Buddha-mind, perfect, eternal, transindividual spirit. This is the cosmic consciousness view of Hinduism and Buddhism. For Hinduism and Buddhism, death is nothing, because we already are everything, and death does not change that. It simply occurs within the all-encompassing Everything we are.

And God gives us the sixth answer:

   6. Only in Christianity do we become more than we were before death. It is the startling, surprising idea of a new, greater resurrected body. As C.S. Lewis puts it in Miracles: "The records represent Christ as passing after death (as no one had passed before) neither into a purely . . . 'spiritual' mode of existence nor into a 'natural' life such as we know, but into a life which has its own new Nature. . . ." As described in the New Testament Gospels, the resurrected Jesus in the forty days before his ascension into heaven had a physical body that was solid, a body into which the doubting Thomas could put his hand to feel the wound of the spear of a Roman soldier, yet a body that could pass through solid walls into locked rooms where his frightened disciples hid.

Choosing your path to the afterlife: Religion in America

In my last post, we looked at the popularity of twenty-two religions around the world. That’s twenty-two different paths to the afterlife to choose from for those who seek a religious path. If you’re an agnostic or atheist, that path is included in the twenty-two as well.

The most popular religions worldwide, as I noted in the earlier post, are Christianity (2.1 billion followers), Islam (1.5 billion), secular/agnostic/atheist (1.1 billion), Hinduism (900 million), Chinese traditional religion (394 million), and Buddhism (376 million).

While Christianity has a slight edge in popularity worldwide,  it is far and away the most popular religion in the United States.

Broad-brushing the results of recent surveys, the majority of Americans (seventy-six percent) identify themselves as Christians, with Protestant adherents accounting for fifty-one percent of the U.S. population and Catholics for twenty-five percent. About 3.9 percent to 5.5 percent of the adult U.S. population is affiliated with non-Christian religions including Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and so on. Another 15 percent of the adult population identifies as having no religious belief or no religious affiliation. About 5.2 percent responded to the surveys saying they did not know what religion they were, or more characteristically, refused to reply to a question about their private beliefs. 

According to the American Religious Identification Survey, religious belief varies considerably across the country: fifty-nine percent of Americans living in Western states report a belief in God, but in the South (the "Bible Belt"), the figure is as high as eighty-six percent.

A 2009 online Harris poll of 2,303 U.S. adults 18 and older found that "eighty-two percent of adult Americans believe in God,” the same number as in two earlier polls in 2005 and 2007. Another nine percent said they did not believe in God, and nine percent said that they were not sure. It further concluded, "Large majorities also believe in miracles (seventy-six percent), heaven (seventy-five percent), that Jesus is God or the Son of God (seventy-three percent), in angels (seventy-two percent), the survival of the soul after death (seventy-one percent), and in the resurrection of Jesus (seventy percent). Substantial minorities of adults, including many Christians, reported holding pagan or pre-Christian beliefs such as a belief in ghosts, astrology, witches, and reincarnation.

While more than seventy-five percent of Americans call themselves Christians, many of them are not regular churchgoers, an indication that their beliefs may be held rather shallowly. 

According to a poll by Gallup International, forty-one percent of Americans reported that they regularly attended religious services, compared to fifteen percent of French citizens, ten percent of UK citizens, and 7.5 percent of Australian citizens.

However, the Gallup numbers are open to dispute. ReligiousTolerance.org states: "Church attendance data in the U.S. has been checked against actual values using two different techniques. The true figures show that only about twenty-one percent of Americans and ten percent of Canadians actually go to church one or more times a week. Many Americans and Canadians tell pollsters that they have gone to church even though they have not."

A 2006 online Harris Poll of 2,010 U.S. adults 18 and older found that only twenty-six percent of those surveyed attended religious services "every week or more often,” nine percent went "once or twice a month,” twenty-one percent went "a few times a year,” three percent went "once a year,” twenty-two percent went "less than once a year,” and eighteen percent said they never attend religious services. An identical survey by Harris in 2003 found that only twenty-six percent of those surveyed attended religious services "every week or more often,” eleven percent went "once or twice a month,” nineteen percent went "a few times a year,” four percent went "once a year,” sixteen percent went "less than once a year,” and twenty-five percent said they never attend religious services.