After Death, then what?

This is a question that confronts everyone, whether young or old, rich or poor, male or female, including in today’s parlance, black or white! I might as well add high caste or low caste, Brahmin or Dalit! It is one phenomenon that equalizes every one. In this world of uncertainty, one thing is certain that is, every one of us will, one day or the other, die.  

World religions and philosophies have tried their best to answer this question from ages past, but without great success. Why is it so difficult? Mainly because no one who has gone to the other world or the netherworld has come back to tell us as to what it is or how it is.

Though these days YouTube abounds with videos of people who swear that they have gone to hell and come back to warn us or gone to heaven and described the beauty of it. How far these accounts are reliable, we do not know. One may have to take in these with a liberal pinch of salt!

Then there are people who are declared clinically dead, but are revived after a few minutes. Such people describe their spirits or souls rising above their mortal remains, hovering over their dead bodies and witnessing their relatives crying over their bodies or doctors struggling to revive them. Many such people have felt that they were travelling at tremendous speed through a hole or a tunnel of light, before reentering their bodies and living again to tell the story.

In Hinduism, after death the soul rises up and according to the accumulated karma or deeds it had committed during the previous lives and that life, takes a suitable body and returns to earth and takes its place in the hierarchy of the caste system. The soul or Atman is indestructible and keeps on going in the repeated cycle of life and death, until it exhausts all its bad karma/deeds and attains mukti or liberation from the worldly life and merges with the all pervasive Brahman or God or Paramatman.   

When one does not believe in God or creation by God, an atheist, life is just an accident of evolution and after death there is nothing, nothing at all. This leaves them in a very comfortable state as there is nothing to be elated about enjoying in heaven or worry about burning up in hell. Life just ceases at death; there is nothing more to it.

Buddhism takes on the law of karma and reincarnation from Hinduism, but believes that the cycle of birth and death should be avoided by achieving nirvana, or nothingness. This is also another type of extinction of life. They do not hold that there is an eternal soul.

Muslims believe that after death the souls go to a sleep state and are awakened to face judgment by Allah, who judges the resurrected souls according to their deeds on earth and assigns them either to hell or heaven. Souls after purgation in the purgatory are released into heaven.

Catholic Christians also believe in purgatory, where the souls after death spend some time according to the bad deeds committed by them during their life on earth, and then are released to heaven after judgment.

Among Protestant Christians, the belief is that the souls, after death, leave the earthly ‘tent,’ the body and go either to the paradise, if it is a good soul or hell-type of place, if it is a bad soul. On the judgment day, the souls enter the resurrection bodies prepared for them and Christ will judge the nations and assign good souls to heaven, where they enjoy the company of God and Christ forever and bad souls to hell to be tormented forever.

So which one of these narratives is true? Is there rebirth, life after life, at infinity? Or do we just cease to exist? Or do we languish in a purgatory till we pay off for our bad deeds? Or reach heaven or hell after judgment day, according to our deeds on earth? Soul searching questions!

What I believe is the biblical perspective. To read that you may have to wait till 15^th February, when I post my next blog, but I assure you, you will not be disappointed!