Life, Death and Afterlife?

Life, Death and Afterlife?

This is a speech that I wrote on the novel Looking for Alaska by John Green. It is what I have been wanting to write a blog on for ages. I hope you like post thoughts in the comments. Do you agree? Do you disagree? Have you read the book? Which are your favourite quotes. DFTBA.

“How do I get out of this labyrinth?”
These are the quoted last words of Simon Bolivar and feature prominently in the novel Looking for Alaska by John Green. This quote; like the rest of the book, looks at life, death and the concept of the afterlife and how religion tries to approach these problems. Throughout the novel the protagonist (Miles Halter) considers how religions differ in their views on death and the afterlife, specifically Islam, Christianity and Buddhism. And why so many people around the world follow these religions.

“What will become of us when we are no longer?”
Dr Hyde a teacher of Miles, teaches Miles about life after death in the Islam, Christian and Buddhist faith. The concept of afterlife in the Christian and Islamic religions is strongly based around the concept of judgement and admittance into heaven or hell – depending on how well the believers have lived their lives. The Buddhist religion on the other hand teaches the idea of Karma which is based around the idea of ‘what goes around comes around’. This relates directly to the Buddhist afterlife belief of how you are reborn as a creature worthy of how you have acted during your lifetime. This is also known as reincarnation.

Miles is fascinated by these ideas as he feels it encourages people to live better lives but also that it provides hope of there being more than a life on Earth. I am personally also very interested in the concept of life after death and after much thought I have come to the same conclusion as Miles. “People believe in the afterlife because they can’t bare not to.” As humans we cannot imagine nothing, we cannot imagine not being able to think, we cannot bare the thought of the world continuing on without us and our existences fading into nothing because we are just another dead human being. We cannot conceive these ideas much the same way as we cannot imagine a new colour.

Why is the belief in an afterlife so prevalent in religion? Humans grasp onto the hope that there is something more, anything more than merely life and death. We need to be assured that after death our souls will be conscious and we will receive our entitlement. This hope makes pain, loss and the certainty of death bearable. “What is the best way to go about being a person?......What are the rules of this game, and how might we best play it?” Miles then talks about how these themes relate to religion. He shows the reader that religion is about hope, the hope and promise that if one leads a productive life and displays good qualities, they will later be rewarded in the afterlife. This serves as an incentive for humans to better ourselves.

So how does science relate and fit into these concepts? Towards the end of the novel Mile concludes that no matter what science states it is best to believe in an afterlife. “I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in a back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home.” I have reflected on this view this view and I personally agree with Miles, that to maintain hope on the matter was to believe in the afterlife. It is too hard to conceive the idea of nothingness and also the hope it provides is so sweet. “I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts.”

Yes, I believe these views are important to everyone. The afterlife is important in religions because it provides an incentive to live a life according to moral ‘good’ but it also gives us all something to believe in. Something to hope for when all else seems lost. “Thomas Edison’s last words were: ‘It’s very beautiful over there.’ I don’t know where there is, but I believe it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s beautiful.”