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By Root 2258 0

as fleeing the difficulties of this world instead of committing to resolving them. One might criticize Islam for claiming universalism while being intolerant of differences. In fact, one might criticize all of them for all the same reasons. And any of these values can be used to reduce the freedom or privilege the rights of one person over another, as we have seen in detail in the previous chapters. Nevertheless, by abstraction we can come to an appreciation of the admirable factors in many religious symbols while bracketing what seems no longer relevant. That is what allows us to continue to find values in religious symbols. But these are intellectual and aesthetic exercises and quite different from practicing a religion and assenting to it in a public communal context. This process of translating religious values into new contexts or finding new hermeneutics (translation principles) to instill them with new meaning is exactly what fundamentalism refuses to do. Or, more precisely, it substitutes its own innovative hermeneutics which claims to be the ancient meaning while actually representing a very modern, very conservative and eccentric one.

In its narrative context, resurrection points to the victory in martyrdom, even when it appears to be an outward failure, the sad end of one person’s life, often in agony, but the valorization of the values for which the person died. The reward of immortality underlines and emphasizes the transcendent value, the victory inherent in what seems at first to be an abject failure. It says there is something transcendent present when the martyr elects to die rather than transgress what she or he thinks is a divine rule. The immortality of the soul outlines the victory that comes in valuing one’s own thoughts, applying one’s life to systematic, intellectual pursuits. The apocalyptic intuition about history affirms that history itself is important because it says that God will bring paradise about as a fulfillment of the historical process. The notion of our transformation into heavenly beings is also a symbol that our persons, represented by our bodies, have a transcendent meaning. These are concepts that we can personally affirm without necessarily affirming the specific claims and propositions of the apocalyptic and philosophical communities of Late Antiquity.

For those who have experienced a Near Death Experience or those who have complete and simple religious faith no further proof is necessary. Their job is to express to others how their doubt and disbelief disappeared.22 After 9/11/01, the naiveté of this position no longer seems charming or innocent. People with naive faith are easily manipulated by political agents. But most of us are not in this category; we become skeptical even of arguments which seem reasonable. We do not have the gifts of previous generations; they could be confident that the dreams and visions proved resurrection or showed that the soul lived without the body. We can see that these were elaborately conceived overly-optimistic conclusions. And what is worse, it seems almost sure that the Near Death Experience is but another jump to an optimistic conclusion, based on physical processes which we do not understand.

Yet our knowledge of the function and relativity of our thoughts does not quench our immortal longings. The professorial community is renowned for its skepticism in matters of religion. In her recent Ingersoll Lectures at Harvard University, Carol Zaleski summarized the university’s objections to immortality in the following succinct way: “Immortality is criticized on moral grounds as self-aggrandizing, on psychological grounds as self-deceiving, and on philosophical grounds as dualistic. Concern for the soul is faulted for making us disregard the body, neglect our responsibility on earth, and deny our kinship with other animals.” From this fair assessment of academic skepticism, Zaleski begins an impassioned defense of the notion of the afterlife as wholesome, important, necessary, even real. Not only is religion still an important value in human