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By Root 2109 0

as it is a filter to leave out those things that most keep us from achieving them.20 If we also had a description of hell then we could see more clearly all the things which Americans feel are contrary to these values, and how given a heavenly economy, they should be punished. It is just as significant that we no longer excel in descriptions of hell or damnation. If we look at earlier conceptions of heaven and hell, we may be able to perceive similar correlations with earlier social structures and policy. Dealing with other cultures’ concepts of the afterlife historically will yield the same important information, but will involve historical attention to details that are not nearly so well known or easy to discover.

We have seen that Americans-liberal or conservative, mainline church, sectarian or even unchurched-have significant beliefs about an afterlife. Indeed, more Americans believe in an afterlife than believe in God. These beliefs range from literal resurrection of the body to immortality of the soul, to deathless existence with flying saucers in the stars, to nothing specific beyond the confidence that we will have something to enjoy. Immortality of the soul, as opposed to the resurrection of the body, is inherent in most of our descriptions. Individuals within the mainline churches believe in an afterlife but they tend to feel comfortable with a range of individual opinions. They normally feel that their more conservative confrères have mistaken the literal Biblical formulations for the underlying truths behind it. Conservative churches believe in immortality of the soul in addition to belief in the literal resurrection of the body. They report that they believe it with certainty and that their liberal coreligionists are dangerously incorrect.

So in spite of our sophistication, pragmatism, and economic dominance of the world, American culture is full of significant depictions of an afterlife everywhere. We seem to live with these depictions and the attendant contradictions that come with them without difficulty, as have cultures everywhere in the past. Although some of us forcefully maintain that there is no afterlife, most of us take at least an agnostic and, more likely, a positive view towards our survival of death.

Is fear the source of contemplation of the end? Even the elderly see that the saying, “There are no atheists in foxholes,” is not true. Approaching death sometimes makes some people more convinced of the falsity of religious teaching about the afterlife. What seems to be universally true is that atheists are likely to keep their beliefs quiet at religious funerals. Their comments might appear impolite and cruel to the mourners. Even the doubtful or disbelieving bereaved can find comfort in the rites of the occasion. Most people find the familiar language and ritual of funerals to be themselves consoling, if not immediately, then after their grief has receded. In general, we have a good social understanding of where we should use the language of departed souls, of resurrection and millennial expectations, of ghosts and goblins, or of nothing at all. Society teaches us to keep these notions from contradicting each other.

Our mass media culture has only made these differing beliefs more available to us and has given us pictorial representations of them that would have been impossible only a few years ago. In my seminar on afterlife, we annually list all the recent films which have been significantly concerned with afterlife or depicted it in some graphic way. We usually fill the board with over a hundred movie titles in minutes. Children’s cartoons are full of violence as well as depictions of ghosts and spirits, together with visual images of cartoon characters surviving their comic and very frequent deaths. Books, films, and TV talk shows are replete with depictions of Near Death Experiences (hereafter NDEs) and endlessly discuss whether or not they are demonstrations of the truths of the afterlife, as they appear to be. Sincere and seemingly sane persons of impeccable credibility relate