Chapter 12 the Mystery of Afterlife.Pdf
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Faith and Critical Theology Richard B. Wells © 2019 Chapter 12 The Mystery of Afterlife 1. Transcendental Antinomy Regarding This Topic The idea of afterlife has for its Object a pure noumenon beyond the horizon of possible living human experience. By definition, if there is an afterlife you can only know it after your life if it can be known at all. In the context of religion, the dictionary definition of "mystery" as "a religious truth that man can know by revelation alone and cannot be fully understood" is quite applicable to the idea of afterlife provided that by "man" one means "living men and women" as we know them. Against the thesis, "there is an afterlife," can always be set the antithesis, "there is no afterlife," and this thesis-antithesis pairing is one of our transcendental antinomies. Therefore, anything that can be said in this chapter in regard to afterlife can only be a product of unprovable premises and can be reached only through logical dialectic based upon premises of faith. Its concept is not made less important by this limitation of human nature, though. Rather, through such dialectic explorations one can gain a fuller appreciation of the primacy of faith over belief and the pertinence of Anselm's maxim: faith seeking to understand. Some people use the mystery of afterlife as a reason to adopt a maxim of prudence, viz., "I had better conduct my life in such-and-such a way just in case there really is an afterlife." There is nothing wrong with this maxim per se because a person can thereby choose to make it a Duty to himself, and without Duties to oneself there never can arise reciprocal Duties in regard to the situation of others. Without the latter there are no conditions for moral duties pertinent to the idea of divine Community to stand under. The maxim of prudence in relationship to a person's humanity is neither moral nor immoral per se, but the use of this maxim, and the subordinate duties standing under it that a person constructs, can be made contrary to Duties of Community if a person does not undertake to understand them from a basis in one's articles of faith. Pernicious usages of this sort have been repeatedly demonstrated in history by pogroms in which one Community of people have rationalized persecutions and slaughters of another. One of the best known infamous examples is when Christians invent a ghost community – Christ killers – to stereotype Jewish people. But this is far from the only example. Others have included the ghost community of "Papists" to justify persecution of Catholics by Protestant sects, "bigamists" to justify persecution of Mormons, "pagans" to justify slaughters of Celtic and Germanic people during the European Dark Ages, and "infidels" to justify killing people of other religious sects; and this list does not exhaust the supply of examples. One historical phenomenon seen again and again is that in which a religious sect preaches tolerance when they are in the minority but practice extreme intolerance when they attain to the majority in communities. And yet, at the same time, most major religions condemn this as hypocrisy. In Christianity this is made a moral lesson: If someone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar for the one who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. [1 John 4:20] In the absence of any immediate and clear experience of divine revelation, a living human being has no possibility of knowing what an afterlife will be like or if there even is one at all. Noumenal afterlife is beyond the horizon of possible human experience not withstanding the fact that some individuals have told stories of having "near death experiences" and reported that during it they received a revelation of an afterlife. What is at issue for those of us who have had no such experience is whether these revelations are actually divine revelations or if they are merely subjective phenomena resulting from "disturbed bodily multisensory integration" that occurs during life-threatening situations, as neuroscience holds them to be. While I personally think the latter is more likely to be a correct explanation of near death experiences, I must also point out that the neuroscience explanation is speculation rather than fact – as is interpretation 251 Chapter 12: The Mystery of Afterlife Richard B. Wells © 2019 of them as divine revelations. If you have had a near death experience, I will not argue your interpretation is either right or wrong because there is simply no way, no possibility, of proving either opinion beyond a reasonable doubt and with Critical objective validity. The divine revelation thesis and the neuroscience antithesis set up another unanswerable transcendental antinomy, and to argue about it is to argue about a matter of pure faith. In Critical theology, holding the Dasein of afterlife to be true is an article of faith. If there is no afterlife then death is the oblivion of the individual and life is without any ultimate meaning or purpose. There are some people for whom the latter is a satisfactory article of faith. For others this idea is repulsive. Faith, again, is holding-to-be-true on a subjectively sufficient ground with consciousness of doubt, and doubt is consciousness of the possibility that the contradictory opposite of an objective judgment is true. Doubt is an affective perception of a disturbance to equilibrium that faith serves to equilibrate. If you find that, for you, the thesis of personal oblivion at death and of uttermost meaninglessness of life is not merely repulsive but, indeed, abhorrent, then for you faith in the Dasein of afterlife is made a necessary holding- to-be-true and made necessary by practical regulation of Reason under the categorical imperative. The necessitation is because the regulation of Reason will not tolerate a perpetuated state of disequilibrium. Doubt about the Dasein of afterlife and doubt about the Dasein of personal oblivion-at-death are affective perceptions that stand in real opposition (Realentgegensetzung) to each other. This means these two affective perceptions tend to cancel each other out in sensibility [Wells (2009), chap. 5 §5]. Speaking for myself, I find I have no difficulty in putting their opposition in perfect balance such that I feel no disturbance to my equilibrium as a result, leaving me free to choose between the alternative opinions of afterlife vs. personal oblivion in whatever way I find to be the most subjectively satisfying. A person's mental health and well-being depend on learning how to live with doubt. I deal with doubt my way, you learn how to deal with it in your way, and, because this is a subjective matter, there is no universal right or wrong way to do it. Speaking for myself, I choose to have faith in the Dasein of afterlife. Accepting the Dasein of afterlife as a theological article of faith, the question of the Existenz of afterlife still remains open. Again, Dasein refers to existence in the context of that-which-exists. Existenz refers to existence in the context of the-manner-in-which-something-exists. Earlier in this treatise the many ways different religions view the Existenz of afterlife was surveyed. The doctrine of method for Critical theology is to examine human nature and try to glean from this understanding what logical dialectic can be inferred about supernature given the premises of Critical articles of faith. Those articles that are most immediately pertinent to the question of the Existenz of afterlife are: 1. God exists. 2. God created human beings and the temporal universe and did so for some divine purpose. 3. Human beings are a reflection or image of God. 4. Faith takes priority over belief. 5. God values never-ending striving for perfection. 6. God values freedom. 7. God is a supreme and supremely sublime benevolent leader. 8. No human being can thwart a divine purpose. 9. Divine purpose is fulfilled by humanity overall, not by individuals, and finds its expression in divine Community. 10. Every person unchosen for membership in divine Community has unchosen himself. 11. Life is an apprenticeship for afterlife; its lessons of virtue and morality are necessary preparations for afterlife Existenz for a being possessing free will. The goal of this chapter is to logically assess implications of the Critical articles of faith above. The method of approach is to examine the subject of afterlife in terms of the four heads of representation in Critical epistemology: Quantity; Quality; Relation; and Modality [Wells (2009), chap. 2]. Every representation is a unity which is regarded as the synthesis of a composition that provides it with its 252 Chapter 12: The Mystery of Afterlife Richard B. Wells © 2019 matter of representation and a connection that provides it with its form of representation. This analytic division produces what is called a "first level analytic representation" or 1LAR. A 1LAR can be analytically divided a second time into a "form of the matter" of combination (Quantity), a "matter of the matter" of combination (Quality), a "form of the form" of combination (Relation), and a "matter of the form" of combination (Modality). This second division produces what is called a "second level analytic representation" or 2LAR. This division process can be repeated indefinitely to understand any concept in greater scope and depth by representing it in 3LAR, 4LAR, 5LAR, combinations. It is sufficient for this treatise, however, to limit ourselves to 2LAR description of afterlife. In terms of representational manifolds, Kant described his mathematical methodology in the following way: All combination (conjunctio) is either composition (compositio) or connection (nexus).