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.

On Halloween, ghosts, the soul and the afterlife

With Halloween just around the corner on October 31, it seems appropriate to take a break from the serious topics I’ve been discussing to talk about something lighter.

According to various surveys, eighty-two percent of adult Americans believe in God and in an afterlife. One recent survey found that more Britons believe in ghosts than believe in God. Other surveys find that from thirty-three to seventy percent of Americans believe in ghosts. The main reason people state for believing in ghosts is that they’ve either had an experience with one themselves, or know someone who has.

The closest I think I’ve ever come to seeing a ghost is in a photograph I took at dusk of the Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, Florida. The Castillo is one of the oldest structures in the United States, dating back to the Spanish occupation of Florida after Columbus “discovered” America. When that exposure came back developed, there were four transparent soldiers in red and white uniforms, one with a drum, marching beside the Castillo. The photo is not a double exposure, and I hadn’t seen any transparent soldiers marching in the camera viewfinder when I took the picture.

One of our daughters lived for a time in rural Georgia in an old farmhouse. At various times, she, her husband and both of their children saw the ghost of a young boy. Sometimes the boy would be looking through farmhouse windows from outside. Sometimes the ghost would appear in the house, looking into a bedroom or another room. These apparitions occurred so often that it would be difficult to term them hallucinations.

So, is it possible that some souls linger here on earth for a time, unable to find their way to the afterlife where they belong? And are ghosts, which are recognized in almost all major cultures across time, evidence that a part of us—our spirit or soul—lives on after death, in a form that is devoid of matter, but in appearance resembles the body we had in life?

The Catholic Church has its own take on ghosts. The Church believes that ghosts, or spirits, do exist. There are times when spirits appear to our benefit, but we are warned against attempting to contact these spirits—especially the spirits of departed loved ones—through occult means such as séances. 

As for children going out on Halloween to “trick or treat,” dressed up as ghosts, zombies, vampires and the like, the Church has no objections. Father Gabriele Amorth, a Vatican-appointed exorcist in Rome, has said, "if English and American children like to dress up as witches and devils on one night of the year that is not a problem. If it is just a game, there is no harm in that.”

Catholicism holds that we must not attempt to conjure or control spirits. But that doesn’t mean we’re forbidden from asking one or another of the saints to intercede for us. When our Siamese cat Sadie escaped the house in pursuit of a neighborhood cat she dislikes, I asked for the intercession of Saint Anthony, the patron of lost items. There’s a little prayer Catholics say, “St. Anthony, please look around, something lost has to be found.” I said it multiple times, and after three days of searching,  we successfully found the cat, who had gone into hiding. Did St. Anthony intervene? I’ll probably never know that, but I’m grateful the cat was found before harm came to her.   

Getting back to the discussion of ghosts … “Ghost” is simply another word for spirit. (Geist means “spirit” in German.) There are three kinds of spirit: the human spirit which, combined with body, make up a human being; the defined spirit that has no body, such as angels; and the infinite Spirit, or God, of whom the third person is the Holy Ghost. 

When someone asks about ghosts, he or she usually has in mind the first kind, a human spirit or soul that may be incorporated in a body, or may have departed the body.

Not just Catholicism, but Christianity in general, believes that God may, and sometimes does, permit a departed soul to appear in some visible form to people on earth. Allowing for legend and illusion, there is enough authentic evidence, in the lives of the saints for example, to indicate that such apparitions occur. The purpose of the ghost may be to teach or warn, or request some favor of the living.

The history of Halloween’s evolution from a pagan to a Christian observance is an interesting one. Antecedents can be traced to the Roman observances of Pomona (goddess of fruits and seeds) and Parentalia (festival of the dead), and the Celtic observance of Samhain (summer’s end). For more information on Halloween, visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween

For more on ghosts, visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost

For an excellent article on why people believe in the paranormal, or in God, go to: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/10/24/why-we-believe.html

For more on surveys about people who believe in ghosts, visit:

http://www.standard.net/topics/events/2010/10/28/do-you-believe-ghosts

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/10/29/opinion/polls/main994766.shtml

http://www.gallup.com/poll/17275/onethird-americans-believe-dearly-may-departed.aspx