Belief in life after death precedes religious belief

Religious believers, of whom I used to be one, so I know what I'm talking about, like to view tenets of religiosity as being a higher form of knowledge than ordinary knowledge of this world. 

But from my current more enlightened atheist perspective, it's much more likely that the actual situation is reversed: religions make use of how people view things before religion comes along, which helps explain the appeal of religiosity. It feels natural.

Here's a good example. Death. Not the cheeriest topic, but a important one, since death arrives for everybody.

The October 14, 2023 issue of New Scientist has an article called "The legacy paradox: Why do people spend time, effort and money to be remembered after death? And can we use this quirk for good, wonders Conor Feehly [the author]."

The article notes that if you believe in an afterlife, "a desire for a positive legacy makes some sense because, in a way, your soul will be around to see how your legacy unfolds." But what about people who don't believe in life after death, who can be termed extinctivists?

Maybe, Feehly writes, they cultivate their legacy to lessen their death anxiety by creating a sort of symbolic immortality through what they produce in the world that will live on after them. However, the article goes on to say:

But there could be a simpler explanation for why extinctivists are motivated to build a legacy: perhaps, deep down, we all entertain some sort of notion of life after death. After all, nobody can consciously experience the absence of consciousness, making it effectively impossible to imagine your own death without being a conscious spectator. 

Indeed, research by [Jesse] Bering and his colleagues suggests that belief in continued existence of the mind following death is a default state for all of us. 

In one study, for example, children watched a puppet show where an alligator ate an anthropomorphised mouse. Older children were unlikely to ascribe any psychological functions to the dead mouse.

However, the youngest children, who were 3 or 4 years old, took a different view. While they understood that the dead mouse no longer had biological needs, they stated that it still had emotions, contradicting the notion that afterlife belief is something we learn.

The findings, which have been replicated across both secular and religious schools, suggest that belief in the continuity of consciousness after death is an intuitive position, with religious belief systems taking advantage of this quirk in our thinking. "I think a lot of [legacy motivation] has to do with these cognitive [processes]," says Bering.

So instead of religious founders bringing back the good news that they've experienced the reality of life after death, there's good reason to believe the opposite: from a young age we humans intuitively view consciousness as surviving bodily death, then that view is used in religious teachings.

But this could be just one source of the widespread assumption among people that death isn't the end of our existence, but a transition to another form of life. Wishful thinking probably also plays a role in this.

The November 20, 2023 issue of The New Yorker has a story about deepfakes, videos, photos, or whatever that are skillfully manipulated to fool others into believing they are true. Here's excerpts from "Your lying eyes."

In the midst of writing his Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle grew obsessed with photographs of two girls consorting with fairies. The fakes weren't sophisticated -- one of the girls had drawn the fairies, cut them out, an arranged them before the camera with hatpins.

But Conan Doyle, undeterred, leaped upon the express train to Neverland. He published a breathless book in 1922, titled "The Coming of the Fairies," and another edition, in 1928, that further pushed aside doubts.

...The most effective fakes have been the simplest. Vaccines cause autism, Obama isn't American, the election was stolen, climate change is a myth -- these fictions are almost entirely verbal. They're too large to rely on records, and they have proven nearly impervious to evidence.

When it comes to "deep stories," as the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild calls them, facts are almost irrelevant. We accept them because they affirm our fundamental beliefs, not because we've seen convincing evidence.

This is how Arthur Conan Doyle fell for fairies. He'd long been interested in the supernatural, but the First World War -- during which his son and brother-in-law died -- pushed him over the edge. Unwilling to believe that the dead were truly gone, he decided that an invisible world existed; he then found counterevidence easy to bat away.

Were the fairies in the photograph not catching the light in a plausible way? That's because fairies are made of ectoplasm, he offered, which has a "faint luminosity of its own." But why didn't the shots of them dancing show any motion blur? Because fairies dance slowly, of course.

If Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales describe a detective who, from a few stray facts, sees through baffling mysteries, his "Coming of the Fairies" tells the story of a man who, with all the facts in the world, cannot see what is right in front of his face.

Comments

[Ron E.]

“But there could be a simpler explanation for why extinctivists are motivated to build a legacy: perhaps, deep down, we all entertain some sort of notion of life after death. After all, nobody can consciously experience the absence of consciousness, making it effectively impossible to imagine your own death without being a conscious spectator.”

This doesn’t surprise me at all, in fact, I’m reckon we don’t realise how strong our biological survival instinct is and how this instinct has evolved to become a prominent feature amongst the contents that comprise the mind. It seems (as the article states) that we don’t have to think about having a continuous existence as “. . . continuity of consciousness after death is an intuitive position.”

It may all stem from the fact that all creatures have a necessary sense of being a ‘me’, helping it to differentiate from ‘not me’ for purposes of mating, finding food and avoiding predators. Perhaps with us humans the sense of ‘me’ has progressed from the biological survival instinct to include the contents of mind that define what is my identity, my sense of ‘me’, ‘I, or my ‘self’.

I would say that the experience (feeling) of having a conceptual or mental sense of ‘me’ has acquired so much importance that such a self-structure would intuitively feel it will continue for ever. To maintain it’s apparent identity it must ensure the contents that comprise the ‘me’ (which include my culture, national and religious beliefs, values, various affiliations, knowledge etc.) are protected. A criticism of any of the foregoing can feel as threatening as a physical attack.

Saying that, a sense of self is obviously important and is the basis of navigating this world, but it could be liberating to know that actually a ‘self’ is just a mental creation, a construction of thought.

The Buddhist saying: - “To study Buddhism is to study the self; to study the self is to lose the self” sounds implausible. Perhaps lose the assumption and thereby all the associations that go with being a special self that expends lot of mental thought and energy in maintaining its illusionary nature.

[Sant64]

"But from my current more enlightened atheist perspective, it's much more likely that the actual situation is reversed: religions make use of how people view things before religion comes along, which helps explain the appeal of religiosity. It feels natural."

Indeed, belief in God does feel natural, perhaps because it is objectively natural to believe that life somehow carries on after death. The earliest archeological digs all show that to be human comes with the inherent intuition that life has transcendent meaning.

I note that you've cited 25% or so of the public as "Nones," i.e., people who don't subscribe to any standard religion. You're implying of course that these people are atheists like yourself. But they're not atheists at all. 72% of American "Nones" believe in God or a Higher Power. The "None" response is more of an indicator of lacking affiliation than an active measure of irreligiosity, and a majority of the "Nones" can either be conventionally religious or "spiritual".

Seems to me that most of your essays advocate for the un-natural as being somehow "enlightened." Hard atheism, hard determinism, extinctionism, vegetarianism, gender fluidity...these are all fringe beliefs, they don't have anything close to wide acceptance, either popularly or by the scientific community.

"What's un-natural is good for us" encapsulates the woke ethos. Maybe it's time to rethink that.

[what do we know about death]

Brian being the atheist you are and since this post is about death listen to this story

https://youtu.be/-IuJKabyx_g?si=3KVCZ74aN9KLlLzD

[Appreciative Reader]

Great post, Brian.👍

Puts things in clear perspective. Agreed, religions don't "create problems and then solve them", at least not to start with, although it may amount to that in retrospect.

And yes, some charlatans, like Moses, and Jesus, and Mo, offer lies as solution. Others, like the Buddha, offer real solutions. But solutions to problems existing only in the mind.

Specifically how it applies to the last, is what I appreciate. The Buddha's elaborate teachings make sense only in backdrop of a belief system based in endless rebirth. Otherwise, to go to those extremes, including monasticism, to find release from what death, in any case, releases each one of us from, that simply does not make any kind of sense.

[Trez]

Religious leaders like Gurinder Singh Dhilion of Radha Soami cult.
Teach everyone that all roads lead to Rome, Gurinder Singh Dhilion says this all of the time.meaning that all Religious people worship the same God but through other religions.

That Exposes Gurinder for telling us all subliminally who we worship through religions and its not God but we all know who KAAL the Devil

That's the reality of Radha Soami and Gurinder Singh Dhilion

They are evil in nature and in it for only themselves
Gurinder Singh Dhillon is the deceptive Baba who misleads the souls to Hell for Kaal his Father.
He uses the 5 names which are kaal given too and gives at the time of initiation to the unoblivious person who's soul only at the time of death goes to Hell.

They reincarnate them here in hell in other species and torture and torment them by killing each other through not having the intelligence not to.

Gurinder Singh Dhillon has created a hell with his father so they can enjoy and live like Kings in they're hell

[Kranvir]

Warning !!! ...Gurinder Singh Dhillon initiates sangat using 5 satanic mantra. The first name is Jot Nirunjan, which means light of the devil. The others are onkar, rarunkar, sohung, satnam (satan). Do not repeat them. Do not get initiated into the RSSB cult. This fake baba does black magic, is a fraud and a reincarnation of kaal.

[um]

@ Kranvir

You make me think of the people that go on stating that the earth is flat and the sun turns around the earth.

Your repeating this mantra, doesn't make it true.
By shouting that trees are blue they do not become blue

Your words are even more empty then a bucket .. they are like a bucket without a bottom.

Personalty I suppose that you know nothing of the things you write about and you just do it to TROLL and annoy people for fun

[Trez]

@um

Christmas is here get a turkey, look forward to a New you and a New year.
Leave your old problematic lost self behind and grow buddy grow
Stop stabbing the dead trees, you get me...

[um]

@ Trez

No I don't
Feel free to explain.

[um]

@ Trez

For quite some time now I have wondered what drives you and Kranvir over and over repeating the same message.

To me .. it is like somebody in panic shouting that a house is in fire and when I look I see just an house and only dancing and shouting somebody before it, "warning" people for something that is not there.

[um]

@ Trez

You and your friend Kranvir must have [experimental] "knowledge" of the things I go on to repeat, Devil, kaal, black magic or believe them based upon HEARSAY.

I do not know anything about these things

Nor do I have an idea what makes a religious group a cult and what a cult actual is.

Above all you make the impression that "outside" powers can influence people .. that sounds like aliens, green men etc., tictoc science

[Trez]

@um dum

Lonely unfriended on here looking for something nothing found nothing gained all knowing everything . So can we learn maybe from you just ego isn't the way and as for any knowledge about anything that you may have you're EXPOSED as clueless cuckoo lol

[um]

@ Trez

if you want we to understand you have to give it more your best.

Telling me how you look upon me, is not going to make me understand what problem youi have with GSD, kaal, the devil, black magic etc etc.

Until a clear answer what you and kranvir do is just TROLLING

[um]

@ Trez

Feel free to enlighten me .. maybe others too can profit from it, instead of being offered that old LP that you offer that slips again and again in the same grove.

[umami]

Wouldn't it be funny if we were already in the afterlife and didn't know it? Maybe this is Purgatory.

[Appreciative Reader]

Our capacity at credulity never ceases to amaze me. Yesterday I'd been to dinner with a friend, who teaches at University --- quite a bit older than me, and fairly senior, an Assistant Professor I think (and one incidental subject she teaches is critical thinking!) --- and she told me, with a straight face, about this spiritual teacher who's taught her to harness "energy" from the sun by ...well, forget the details, but it's all woo woo woo.

I started dismantling her house of woo, but then, after awhile, let it go. Not my business, particularly given that she, at any rate, was harming nobody, not even herself (beyond wasting a half hour each day, for as long as this "practice" takes her fancy).

Come to think of it, it's no different, really, than what folks do in church.

It's ...weird, this capacity we have to believe random unevidenced things that shysters and delusionals unload on to us.