Is this life really all there is?

According to the beliefs of a majority of people currently and throughout history: no. The conviction that death isn’t the end of a person’s life crosses cultures and spans centuries, leading some to wonder what exactly it is that makes people so certain life as we know it isn’t the end of the story.

“Most cultures historical and contemporary do have some idea of an afterlife in some form,” says Dr. Stephen Morris, an assistant professor of philosophy at Missouri Western State University. “There just is something to being human that drives human beings to have this belief.”

Some find an answer for this in the Bible in Ecclesiastes 3:11, which says God has “set eternity” in the heart. And today, Dr. Morris says, neuroscientists are studying the brain in an effort to find a possible biological basis for spiritual beliefs such as those about an afterlife.

But despite the fact that human beings are almost universally similar in believing life doesn’t end with death, the views of various belief systems — including several of the most-followed ones — about life after death and what determines a person’s destiny differ significantly.

Christianity

According to Christian teaching, every human is an eternal being who will live forever either in a joyful existence with God or in an existence of suffering apart from him. What determines where a person spends eternity is not how good or bad he is in this life but, rather, whether he has a relationship with God’s son, Jesus Christ.

“One of the strong points for understanding Christianity is to understand that everyone is an enemy of God because of sin nature,” says the Rev. Jeremy Fruechting, associate pastor of CrossPointe Community Church in St. Joseph, “and the only thing that can save us is for God to change our hearts by joining us to Christ.”

For those who do have this relationship, life after death is in heaven and, after a resurrection of the bodies of the dead, will take place on a perfect, recreated earth — not “somewhere just up floating around in the clouds,” the Rev. Fruechting says. Those who don’t have this relationship also will spend eternity in a real, physical place: a hell described in the Bible as a “fiery furnace where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 22:13).

Islam

Islam also teaches that everyone spends eternity either in paradise or in hell. According to the Koran, how much good a person does in this life plays a part in determining his destination: “they whose balances shall be heavy with good works, shall be happy; but they whose balances shall be light, shall lose their souls, and shall remain in hell forever” (Sura 23:104-05).

But good works alone aren’t enough to guarantee salvation. A person also has to believe in Allah, the god of Islam; and in Allah’s prophet, Mohammad; and must wage jihad, or holy war, against non-Muslims. Only those who show bravery and die during jihad are guaranteed paradise; all other Muslims must simply hope they’ve found favor with Allah.

Those who do earn paradise spend eternity “busy in their rejoicing, they and their spouses, reclining upon couches in the shade; therein they have fruits, and they have all that they call for” (The Koran Interpreted 36:55-57). Those who go to hell will have “garments of fire ... and there shall be poured over their heads boiling water” (The Koran Interpreted 22:19-22).

Judaism

Judaism also teaches that death is not the end of human existence, citing the Torah’s accounts of a righteous person being “gathered to his people” (such as in Genesis 25:8) and of an unrighteous person being “cut off from his people” (such as in Genesis 17:14) as indications of what happens after death.

But unlike Christianity and Islam, Judaism doesn’t go into much detail about what eternity is like or how decisions made in this life affect a person afterward.

“For the most part, it doesn’t dwell on what the afterlife is,” says Bob Ott, president of Temple B’nai Sholem in St. Joseph. “The focus is on living a good life now, without thought of reward or punishment.”

Because of the lack of a focus on the afterlife in Jewish books such as the Torah and the Talmud, he adds, different beliefs about it have arisen in different Jewish traditions. Among these are a belief among some Jews in a kind of reincarnation and a belief among others in a resurrection of the dead at the coming of the Messiah.

Eastern religions

Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism place an emphasis on a person dissolving individual personality in order to permanently become a part of something bigger than himself, thereby escaping the suffering of this life.

Buddhism’s answer to reaching this kind of existence is found in the doctrine of the Four Noble Truths, which say that life is suffering, that the origin of suffering is craving, that the cessation of suffering is possible through the cessation of craving and that the way to stop craving — and to thereby escape continual rebirth — is to follow meditative practices that lead a person to lose a sense of himself.

Similarly, Hinduism emphasizes achieving salvation from a continual cycle of reincarnation by practicing meditation, worship and selfless good works in an effort to lose individual personality in that of Brahman, the supreme deity.

Lifestyles reporter Erin Wisdom can be reached at ewisdom@npgco.com.