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By Root 2372 0

is fitted to conversion and mission, very much like Christianity’s end-of-days. Both have in common the tendency to retreat into fundamentalism when challenged by new ideologies. Even Judaism develops fundamentalist sects when challenged in just the right way, as by the secular alternative of Zionism and the prospect of religious reform in Reform, Conservative, and even modern Orthodoxy. But fundamentalism is a religious system that fosters highly motivated, yet parochial converts. It is a defensive strategy that can turn to extremism and violence for self-protection but it attacks enemies before it even makes them. One characteristic of this view is that it believes every inroad it makes on the others is God’s providence but every in-road made against them is Satan’s own imperialism. On the other hand, views of heaven which are culturally plural and nondenominational seem to predominate when all religions view themselves as minority religions and must share political powers with others. In that case, heaven develops a nondenominational character and adds to the culture’s desire to remain tolerant.

Standing Back to Look for Patterns

WITH SUCH an enormous time span to look at, some interesting reassurances emerge. First, the basic questions of life four or five thousand years ago are still the questions of today but our answers are far more comforting to us: We see a refreshing trend to include more and more people within the rewards of the afterlife. In some ways, the history of Egyptian religion is emblematic of the history of the afterlife in the West in general. Over the millennia, Egyptian religion inexorably moved toward the inclusion of more and more people in the rewards of the afterlife. This “democratizing” movement was followed throughout the history of Western religion. Immortality of the soul accommodated more human hope than the Homeric achievement of fame in battle. It was available to all those who had the leisure to study and meditate, male and female.

The rewards of the martyrs in ancient Israel-resurrection and transformation-were also slowly expanded to the society as a whole and then, through Christianity and Islam, to the entire Western world and beyond. But it was not inevitable: Zoroastrian immortality was available earlier but it was not to be a world religion forever. Judaism was a missionary religion to an extent yet its truths were not adopted by many. One might, as a matter of choice, prefer true multiculturalism over universalism, which limits salvation to adopting a single religion viewed as the truth.

Rabbinic Judaism was forced to admit the multicultural prospect of God’s plan, when meditating on its guest status in other cultures. Realizing that they needed tolerance to survive, they posited it as a value that all cultures should adopt. They unilaterally allowed that Christians and Muslims who were righteous were saved as well. By so doing, they hoped that Christians and Muslims would let them live amongst them in peace. And they also downplayed the whole notion of afterlife to a much lower level than the typical missionary religion. This is parallel with their conclusion that missionizing would endanger their position as guests in a political world they could not control.

This merely underlines the contention that afterlife notions are mirrors of our cultural and social needs, available to development and manipulation, and that they tend to mirror our social goals. We need to ask ourselves if multiculturalism is what our society wants. Are we then saying that we need to set down rules as to how missionary religions-including Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism as a bare minimum-should behave with regard to each other? This immediately raises the question of the sense in which we can let toleration of opposing views of the universe into our lives without losing our basic direction. The answer is clear: We all need to behave as if we are minorities needing toleration.

This question is implicit in looking over the history of the afterlife. The first victim is the reassuring notion that