Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [2]
Hamlet ponders life at its hardest moments. But for the dread of death and fear of what may come afterwards, he would end his life, avoiding the troubles he has inherited. His decision against suicide, and for revenge, is made reluctantly, in full knowledge of the terrors of death that his ghostly father has intimated for him. He now has a supernatural reason to believe the spirit’s message, both about posthumous punishment and about his father’s murderer.
Hamlet’s solitary revenge has been sharpened to a fine point by the World Trade Center disaster of September 11, 2001, a mass murder evidently also motivated out of revenge and driven by supernatural justifications. Nineteen extremist Muslims, indoctrinated with a caricature of Muslim martyrdom, perpetrated one of the most callous slaughters of innocent civilians in human history, not in spite of divine retribution but convinced that their deed would ensure their resurrection and bring them additional eternal rewards before the Day Of Judgment. The horrible waste of more than 2,800 innocent lives was directly driven by notions of sexual felicity after death: A group of virgin, dark-eyed beauties awaited each of the suicidal murderers. “You cannot kill large numbers of people without a claim to virtue.”1 Surely such desperate men, intelligent, sophisticated, and coordinated enough to have planned a global outrage, would not be persuaded by such a naive and adolescent vision of heaven? Every significant public commentator has stressed that there were more important political, economic, social, and personal motivations for the attack. But, in the end, the visions of an afterlife quite different from our own have awakened us to the original meaning for our phrase “holy terror.”
In the minds of Israeli settlers, those religiously motivated few among the Israelis who want to live in the land designated for a projected Palestinian state, pious Jews who have died at the hands of Arabs are also martyrs whose special reward will commence in heaven. To their loved ones, these Jewish martyrs look down on their surviving families from the heavenly Talmudic academy (the Yeshiva shel Ma’ala), encouraging the pioneers of a new nation to continue to settle and live in the occupied territories. While these Jewish views of the afterlife are considerably less sensual than the Muslim ones, the faith of the religious settlers is no less intense. Like the Islamic extremists in this respect, the settlers have innovated on traditional views of the afterlife to give meaning to their own political purposes.2
This book will attempt to put these modern tragedies into historical context. I had already researched the sociology of the afterlife for a decade when the World Trade Center disaster focused our national attention on jihad. The tragedy convinced me that this study of the relationship between heaven and social agendas had an importance beyond the scholarly community. This book has become a study of Western Religions.
Shakespeare called death and the afterlife “the undiscover’d country” from which no one returns, a sensible metaphor to Shakespeare’s own “Age of Discovery,” as the New World, still largely unexplored, was not yet completely mapped. Taking my cue from Hamlet, this study will attempt to see the relationship between “being” and “not being,” between “sleeping” and “dreaming perchance,” between the undiscovered land of the afterlife and those who imagine what lies within it.
This book is not a study of death, how to cope with it, what the process of dying is, nor how we may best accomplish the work of grieving. A great many books have recently focused on these ultimate moments of life, and, where relevant,