The story thus far...does a life worth experiencing exist beyond death?
Question first: would a thorough study suggest, if not prove, that the more ancient cultures, closer to creation, would produce greater awareness of life after death? Persuaded of the possibility, but willing to be corrected, I proceed to fact: As an example of other ancient societies, the Egyptians asked the question and, in response, built massive mausoleums we call pyramids. (The earliest were ancient with Abraham entered Egypt.) They housed the corpse AND paraphernalia the dead would need in the after-life. Omitting other examples, history produced only two men who could speak with authority about the after-life—and only one did. Moses, the greatest of all legislators in history, stood in the Very Presence of God to receive the Ten Words. To this day they provide the legal basis of western culture. But he offered no definitive instructions about the after-life. Then Jesus Christ, Very God himself, came to earth as the embodiment of the eternal life he IS before he came, HAD while here, HAS now—the beginning-and-never-ending Great I AM. He proved we can live after death by personally rising from the dead on the third day. Indeed, that’s the truth Paul stated, argued and defended in I Corinthians 15. Next...ideas that may give us clues to the GLORY of that eternal life. End Part II
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Ralph Waldo Emerson’s education began at age two, his dwarf Aunt Mary the teacher. She dressed in a hand-made shroud, as if preparing for death. She wore it all day at home, used it as pajamas at night, even publicly as a dress on the streets of Concord. Great Diaries, 219.
We don’t need to obsess with death to prove our mortality. It’s all around and within us. We do need to KNOW if, after death, life continues. And, if it does, will it be worthwhile? Biographer David Boswell once told philosopher David Hume that life did indeed survive death, offering the most delightful prospects. Which Hume vehemently denied as a baseless fantasy. Historian/philosopher Will Durant agreed with Hume. Which we understand since both adopted Greek philosophy as their model of the next world. Greek religion postulated at best a SOUL—a soul, not a body—wandering aimlessly through a darkened underworld. Who could get excited by that? To be desirable and inviting, a future life must be something else, somewhere else. In a dimension we cannot presently calculate. Where we avoid the limitations our flesh imposes and acquire the pleasures our forgiven spirits anticipate. Is there such a life? The question burns with Bessemer heat in every language. It’s posed in a thousand ways in 10,000 cultures world-wide, history-long. End Part I |
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