Death

John Hick, “Death and Eternal Life”

Death and Religions• Death is a central concern of all religions. We cannot

refrain speculating about death, as we cannot refrain speculating about life.

• Because death is not an empirical reality, a number of very different conception of the after-life are theoretically possible.

• Views of death:• A. Materialistic and Humanistic: denial of a personal survival.• B. Western and Semitic conception of a survival of identity.• C. Eastern belief in a continual rebirth.

Axial Age• Most of our metaphysical conceptions were forged

between 800-200 BCE.

• It is the time when the great world-faiths arose out of the experience of Hebrew prophets, brahaminical sages, Upanishads, Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius, Baghavad Gita, Socrates and Plato.

• Today we live in a post-metaphysical age, largely introduced by new ways of experiencing the world (genetics, quantum physics, psychology, etc.)

Origins of beliefs in after-life and immortality• Humanity has done what no other

species does: it buries the corpses of its own kind (and other species as well).

• In Paleotlithic and Neolithic times (10,000 to 5,000) we find burials with the fetal position.

• Probably the original idea was that of a “double” that survives. Not in a paradisiacal state, but in a ghostly or shadowy existence.

• Probably death was considered not as something natural, but due to magical action (spells, curses, etc.)

Myths

• As the universality of death became recognized, myths developed to explain how humanity has become subject to death, and how this could be overcome. Cfr. The Epic of Gilgamesh.

• Beliefs in an after-life may have been related to the inability of thinking of vividly-remembered persons as non-existent. This was reinforced by dreams of the departed.

• Attitudes towards the dead was not of envy, but rather of fear or pity (Sheol, Hades).

Egypt

• Thoughts and beliefs about a good after-life arose in connection with a wider vision of humanity’s situation in which value (symbolized by gods) determines one’s destiny.

• In Egypt, around the 3rd millennium BCE, there was a strong belief in the judgment of the dead on moral as well as ritual grounds: one’s behavior in this life could decisively affect one’s condition after death.

• Book of the Dead: vivid images of the judgment of Osiris before whom a person’s heart is weighted against a feather.

• Facing Maat, the moral principle of justice, it is declared one’s innocence: I have not robbed, killed, plundered, lied.

Changing sociology of death• Until the 19th century death

was openly talked about, while sex was repressed. Today it is the other way around.

• Death was considered a public event; the scene is crowded with the priest, doctors, friends and neighbors, family.

• Death was a ritual organized by the dying person (and his/her family) who presided and knew the protocol.