Well, I Guess I Should Talk about Hope Now
I realized I had written a post about love and then about faith and so I thought well, I wasn't planning this, but why not finish out the trio? Unfortunately though, the only thing I have to say about hope is, there is no hope.
Nope. There's no hope. Not in the way I heard the word used in the sayings that linked it to love and faith at least. I heard a lot about the virtues of faith, hope, and love in religious contexts, and while I still find faith and love to be vital to everyday life, I now think that the hope my religious upbringing offered is actually quite a dangerous thing, in addition to not being real. Hope in these contexts ultimately meant one thing: the hope of eternal life. This was a hope that could never be broken because it always looked towards something further ahead than your present circumstances. No matter how badly everything turned out for you, this hope would always remain because you could always tell yourself things would be better after you died.
Speaking as a devout nihilist, I can tell you that hope of this kind has to be abandoned. There is no hope of eternal life. No matter what you do right now, you're going to die and have no memory of any of it, and someday our society, our legacy, and eventually our entire universe will end, will be lost without a trace, without it mattering in the least whether you ever existed, ever suffered, ever enjoyed life, ever accomplished anything. The day is coming when it will be as if humankind had never existed. The pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China, Beethoven's fifth symphony and the Mona Lisa, the memory of what a dog or cat looks like or of how to speak any of the languages that have ever existed on Earth, none of it will last forever.
No matter what great advancements of technology we imagine for the future, this will not change. If medical research were to carry us to a point where no one died of old age, human beings would still live in fear of death, perhaps worse fear than what we know now. There is no way, without magic, to become completely indestructible, and so we would all live burdened with the knowledge of the immensely long life we could possibly have if only we were careful enough, dreading the accident that, given enough time, was sure to kill us and take it all away. And even if this problem too were solved and utter indestructibility were possible without magic, we would still be left facing the fact that the very fabric of the universe is mortal and, even if it were billions of years away, an end to everything would still be coming and nothingness after a billion years of experience would be just as nothing as it is after eighty.
Without the supernatural there is no hope of eternal life. Now, this may affect you in two ways: Either you are the type of person who can easily go day to day without thinking or caring about the ultimate fate of the universe, in which case this really doesn't affect you much at all—unless your lack of interest in ultimate things is somehow hurting people, there's no reason why you should start caring about any of this—or you are the kind of person who can't help but think about these ultimate sorts of things, in which case the only way to find happiness is through acceptance. There's no point in running, denying, dreaming, or in hoping for the miraculous. None of that will make you happy.
Clearly, I fit into the group of people who can't stop extrapolating out to where everything ends. When I was religious, I can't remember a time after I was around 10 years old when I went a single day without thinking about heaven and hell, and since I stopped believing in God there hasn't been a day when I haven't thought about the temporariness of everything, especially myself. I don't know if this is simply part of my personality or if it's due more to the fact that I was trained by almost every adult who had any influence over me as a child to think about eternity constantly and above everything else. My patterns of thought were formed in an environment where I was frequently asked what value anything in my daily life had when compared to eternal life. Needless to say, it was jarring, after so many years of learning to devalue my life now in favor of eternal life, to learn that my life now is actually all I have. But what I wish every person in the world might come to realize is that while it’s startling to lose the “hope” of eternal life after devoting yourself to it, it’s not miserable. In fact, if you let it, knowledge and acceptance of mortality will do more for you than a hope of eternity ever could.
As I distanced myself from my former beliefs, I came to see a few things that changed my ingrained ideas about life and death completely and made me realize I was better off without certain hopes. First, the promise of eternal life makes no sense to begin with and only continues to be seen as a good thing because people choose to ignore its problems. Second, in light of this, our culture could benefit from being less scared of death and less obsessed with immortality. Third, we shouldn’t just overlook the fact that certain denominations or sects of many religions ask people to make real sacrifices now in return for a fake reward later.
When you think about it, the idea of eternal life has a lot of problems—but it’s so easy not to think about it. Growing up in church and Christian school, I heard the people around me say that Jesus rose from the dead to give humanity hope and that his promise of eternal life was the reason for our joy. People who lived without this promise were referred to as hopeless and sad, but the truth is that those who have actually spent time thinking it over realize that eternal life is far sadder a fate than death. A finite being is in some ways always young and in wonder. An eternal being eventually outgrows everything. And the Bible and the churches I know of who placed so much emphasis on the eternal had no answer to concerns raised about whether eternal life could possibly bring with it eternal happiness, eternal satisfaction, eternal purpose, eternal desire to live and to do.
I understand why people take joy from the idea of living forever. For a long time, I never looked past the surface of the claim myself. I simply thought, “I don’t really have to worry about any time limits. Great!” But once you start trying to picture the practical implementation of eternal life, the details of what it would be like, you realize that it’s an unworkable concept. As I’ve already mentioned, if you’re talking about achieving immortality within the confines of our physical universe, it’s simply not possible. Religion, of course, promises something beyond the physical world, something that can’t be explained, but the fact is that supernatural immortality still has unaddressed problems.
The preachers and teachers who taught me to place my hope in eternity said that the afterlife was a place with no tears, pain, or suffering, but it’s awfully hard to imagine living with any sense of intrinsic purpose if you have no need to help yourself or others escape suffering. In this case, you must live for pleasure and discovery. These are good things that can take you a long way, but how far? Will zero-stakes pursuit of enjoyment and knowledge keep you fulfilled and satisfied with your existence for a thousand years? A million? A billion? A billion years is roughly one-fourteenth the age of the universe, best as we can figure, but it’s nothing compared to eternity.
In the past, when I asked my Christian friends what they thought of the problem of eternal purposefulness, they said it scared them. I was in my third year of college when I started asking this, and I had never thought about it before then, but it wasn’t a new concern to any of the people I talked to; apparently they had all been more inquisitive than me on the topic. Once or twice I’ve heard pastors raise the issue of the fear people feel when thinking about eternity, but their conclusions were always that we can’t understand how eternity will be good and we need to simply trust that God knows what he’s doing.
I think it’s strange that the great hope so many people are living for is something that actually scares people when they think about it critically. While it’s true that some individuals can propose ideas of what eternity might be like that they feel they would literally enjoy forever—and perhaps they’re correct; it’s not like we can test it—the fact remains that the information the Bible provides about eternal life describes an experience that lacks the intrinsic motivators we can’t imagine human beings functioning without and simply leaves it at that. We’re told that this works because it does and as usual are expected to accept that the all-powerful God who could easily communicate about any subject in a way that would be accessible to anyone just doesn’t want us to have a reason to feel confident that the thing we’re supposed to sacrifice everything else for is actually good.
Despite its problems, the hope of eternal life is something that Christian-influenced cultures (among others that I’m no expert on) have held dear for centuries. While I can’t explain all the reasons for this, my guess would be that it has a lot to do with many people never having a reason to delve below the nice-sounding surface of the idea, or thinking of it primarily in terms of deceased loved ones not really being gone, or being highly aware of all the things they wish were different in this life and not very aware of how stupefyingly “long” a time eternity really is, or feeling so concerned about ending up in heaven instead of hell that they never ask themselves what heaven would actually be like.
Whatever the reasons, I also have to wonder if Western culture would benefit from losing the idea that immortality is humankind’s true destiny and that death is the result of sin, something unnatural, an enemy to be destroyed as one passage of the Bible says (I Corinthians 15:26). I wonder if we would be more humble somehow and if we would be able to talk about the fact that nothing goes on forever without euphemisms and embarrassment. Would the statements I made at the beginning of this post about all the things that seem so permanent to us eventually vanishing be completely ho-hum, no different from remarking that the sky is blue?
People have a natural fear of death for good reason: We might not be here in the first place if we weren’t descended from ancestors who had a distaste for putting their lives in danger. However, the fact that we don’t want to die doesn’t mean that living forever would be the best possible arrangement for us anymore than the ability to limitlessly feed any other appetite or run from any other fear in all circumstances would be. The fear of death is only useful as long as it is actually doing something to keep us alive, but in the world we live in we know that it can’t keep us alive forever, and we have strong reason to suspect that if we were to escape the need to exert effort in order to keep ourselves alive, avoid suffering, and help others, we would be less happy overall than we are in a limited lifetime where these concerns are always present.
In short, we know of no realistic way to avoid death and we have no reliable reason to think that immortality is better than death, and yet talking factually about the impermanence of our lives, of civilizations, of worlds, is socially and linguistically taboo. If we use plain words, our statements sound harsh and insensitive. If we treat the subject as routinely as we treat any other, instead of dancing around it, it comes across as a downer. In these Christian societies where a total outsider might think that talking about death should be no big deal since people are so focused on the afterlife, people instead alter even their word choices to avoid thinking about the fact that the life we know now doesn’t go on forever.
I can’t help but think that it would be better to practice an attitude of acceptance. Since death is part of life and, as far as we can tell, is necessary to maintaining some of the good in life, wouldn’t it be an improvement if we could become more comfortable with the concept of mortality? It’s tragic when people are killed by violence or disease without getting to live full lives, but it’s not a tragedy that each of us is going to die someday. As far as we can tell, a temporary life is the best form of existence possible (the only way that your existence has the potential to consist mainly of enjoying life and not mainly of being tired of it), so instead of hoping to live forever, and then hoping on top of this that living forever will actually be good somehow, wouldn’t we be better off learning to appreciate the way things are?
I’m sure there are many people who live with a positive view of finiteness and mortality already, so I suppose I’m talking to people who, like I was, have been somewhat cut off from this way of thinking: people who have been taught to feel sorry for those who don’t believe in heaven or people who have absorbed a vague assumption that some sort of afterlife exists and feel uncomfortable examining it. Circumstances can arise in anyone’s life that make them doubt or reject the “hope” of eternity, and I hope that anyone who goes through that experience will discover that this is a loss that can simply be mourned and moved on from. Yes, it’s sad that we’re not going to live in a perfect world and that we have to die, but it’s not a reason to be miserable.
Personally, I came to feel a sense of relief that there was no afterlife. This wasn’t instant—it did take me a while to accept the loss of something I had placed so much importance in—but with more acceptance and more time to get used to the new realization, I felt lighter and happier until I reached a point where my general mood was better than it had ever been. I kept thinking about a phrase I had heard in a French class years earlier: Ce n’est pas grave. I believe a good translation of this phrase would be something like, “It’s no big deal,” but I dwelt on the most similar-sounding translation possible: It’s not grave.
It’s not grave. It’s not serious. It’s not weighty. It’s not heavy. I felt like I could say these things about anything in my life now. When I believed in eternity, everything was grave. Everything mattered so damn much. I was afraid of the enormity of the consequences I was gathering with every choice I made. And I was often sad for people I cared about who were nice people but didn’t accept Jesus as God, because this meant they were going to hell despite all their good intentions. It felt better and happier to know that no one was going to hell than it felt to think that I was going to live forever. I’ve come to see eternal life as a burden no one should have to bear: Pain and death are serious enough realities already; people shouldn’t have to carry the fear of hell or of never-ending consequences to their choices.
And, ideally, people shouldn’t be ripped off either. They shouldn’t be asked to make their whole life revolve around a reward they will never actually receive. They shouldn’t be told that a fake future is more important than their children, their parents, their dreams, or anything real for that matter.
When I look back from my current vantage point on how I was raised, it all feels uncomfortably like an immortality cult. The words of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels summarize it perfectly: “ ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it?’ ” (Luke 14:26–28, NIV). When this passage was referred to in sermons, it was explained that Jesus didn’t really mean that a person should feel hatred for others but that they should prioritize nothing, even their family, above him, no matter if this seemed like hate to others. A person needed to consider the responsibility to “bear their cross” (in other words, do whatever God might ask of them just like Jesus faced crucifixion because that was what was asked of him) before declaring themself to be a follower of Jesus, just like an architect would think about whether they could afford the cost of building a structure before declaring they were going to build it. The high "cost" of living for Jesus was supposed to be acceptable because by following Jesus a person gained eternal life, which was worth more than anything they might have to give up in exchange.
It's important to understand that the hope of gaining something whose value far exceeds everything in normal life is not a nice, safe hope. It skews people's priorities in ways that can become rather grotesque. As a vivid example of this, adults who taught me and my classmates at school and Sunday school felt it was important to advise us children from an early age, just in case the situation ever arose, that if someone put a gun to your head and threatened to kill you unless you renounced your faith in Jesus, you were better off taking the bullet than giving in to their demand. I was in second grade when the Columbine shooting happened, and I don’t even know how accurate this story is, but people said at the time that the shooters had given one girl that exact ultimatum and she had been murdered after refusing to comply. This made her a hero in the eyes of our church, and I suppose it is heroic to do what you believe is right even when threatened with death, but it’s also tragic that there are adults teaching children that their lives matter less than their religious allegiance.
Similarly, the first time I remember being told about human rights violations in North Korea I was at an elementary school chapel. The speaker told us about horrific ways in which Christian prisoners had been murdered after refusing to denounce their beliefs (the detail that stands out in my mind is a claim that one group of people was run over with a steam roller), and he said that we too should value our relationship with Jesus so highly that we would never back down from it no matter what we had to stand up to or sacrifice for it. In sixth grade, our teacher once asked us how much we loved Jesus and if we had really thought about what it meant to put him above everything. She said it wasn’t so far-fetched to think that the US and China might be at war someday and asked what we would do if the Chinese invaded and a soldier told us at gunpoint to “deny Jesus.” Did we love Jesus more than our very lives, as we should?
People do strange things when they think they're going to live forever, that much is clear, and encouraging children to mentally prepare for martyrdom (better safe than sorry) isn't the only instance of mixed-up priorities that deserves to be examined. Drawing only from examples I’ve personally seen in the lives of friends and acquaintances, another of the most problematic trends is the willingness to sacrifice dreams, goals, and desires in order to follow what one believes to be God’s supernatural guidance. I’ve known people who spent years in a particular job or ministry field because they thought God was calling them to do it, despite their dislike for the occupation and their desire to do something else. I myself often felt like I was letting goals slip away from me by giving so much of my time to church and devotional pursuits when I would rather have been using it to practice skills I valued. My acquaintances and I put up with these things largely because we thought that whatever we would have liked to enjoy or accomplish now would only be temporary while living for God would lead to an eternity in which we could focus on those things.
The apostle Paul himself, writer of much of the New Testament and founder of churches all around the Mediterranean, wrote, “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable” (I Corinthians 15:19, NKJV). This would seem to suggest that the typical Christian life is less desirable than the typical non-Christian life in ways that can only be compensated for by the hope of an afterlife. The churches I’ve been part of embraced this evaluation, preaching that God called people to a difficult way of life but a rewarding one and that belief in physical resurrection from death was absolutely necessary to the Christian faith. I hate the idea of people putting off their dreams for a lifetime chasing this goal that doesn't exist—although I'm glad the ones who feel confident will experience a sense of purpose and never have to regret any of it. I guess what bothers me most is the thought of the people who struggle through it all in spite of their doubts and feelings of distance from a higher power and finally die with an "I hope..." at the forefront of their mind. I want better for them.
Stepping back from the hot pursuit of immortality has allowed me to see how problematic the hope I was told to celebrate really is. From the beginning the idea comes with difficulties that make many people wonder if they really hope for it to be true at all, and on top of that it teaches people to devalue the life they live now and put their dreams on hold, always for a promise of getting something better in a poorly-defined future paradise.
Considering all that the hope of eternal life brings with it, I’m perfectly happy to label myself a nihilist and say that I have no hope. What I have instead of hope is fact. Instead of hoping that I get the future, I already have the here and now. I'm free to value this world and the people in it and to pursue what I want in life to the best of my ability. I’m not left hoping that something good comes after death: I know that nothing good lasts forever, but neither does anything bad, and I'm okay with that neutrality.
There is no hope, and that's not a bad thing. I think it's a reason to enjoy life more, to have more fun. It makes all the difference between living like an exhausted high schooler pouring everything into the effort of someday becoming what their parents have declared will make them happy, and living like a wide-eyed five-year-old who has never seen anything more amazing than the fuzzy caterpillar crawling across a twig in front of them and doesn't care that they won't remember it tomorrow. I'm not saying that planning for the future or delaying gratification is bad, but the delay period really shouldn't span your entire life. We shouldn't have to take ourselves that seriously or require a hope of cosmic importance in order to find joy in life. Reality would seem to have decreed that we get a limited amount of time only (enough to experience thrilling happiness if we're lucky, but not enough to become anyone of importance beyond the tiny snippet of time and space human history has touched) and after that, no regrets. Admitting that this is so doesn't feel like hopelessness to me; it just feels like freedom. There is a biblical phrase, “prisoners of hope,” originally a rather ambiguous phrase from an obscure Old Testament reference, but one I heard tossed around now and again imbued with various inspirational meanings, and it seems fitting here, albeit with a rather different understanding. Since I don’t feel hopeless, I could say instead that I’m free of hope, not constrained by the fear and obligation a loaded hope brings with it. This is a good place to be. It’s lighthearted, and it’s straightforward, and it’s real.
Nope. There's no hope. Not in the way I heard the word used in the sayings that linked it to love and faith at least. I heard a lot about the virtues of faith, hope, and love in religious contexts, and while I still find faith and love to be vital to everyday life, I now think that the hope my religious upbringing offered is actually quite a dangerous thing, in addition to not being real. Hope in these contexts ultimately meant one thing: the hope of eternal life. This was a hope that could never be broken because it always looked towards something further ahead than your present circumstances. No matter how badly everything turned out for you, this hope would always remain because you could always tell yourself things would be better after you died.
Speaking as a devout nihilist, I can tell you that hope of this kind has to be abandoned. There is no hope of eternal life. No matter what you do right now, you're going to die and have no memory of any of it, and someday our society, our legacy, and eventually our entire universe will end, will be lost without a trace, without it mattering in the least whether you ever existed, ever suffered, ever enjoyed life, ever accomplished anything. The day is coming when it will be as if humankind had never existed. The pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China, Beethoven's fifth symphony and the Mona Lisa, the memory of what a dog or cat looks like or of how to speak any of the languages that have ever existed on Earth, none of it will last forever.
No matter what great advancements of technology we imagine for the future, this will not change. If medical research were to carry us to a point where no one died of old age, human beings would still live in fear of death, perhaps worse fear than what we know now. There is no way, without magic, to become completely indestructible, and so we would all live burdened with the knowledge of the immensely long life we could possibly have if only we were careful enough, dreading the accident that, given enough time, was sure to kill us and take it all away. And even if this problem too were solved and utter indestructibility were possible without magic, we would still be left facing the fact that the very fabric of the universe is mortal and, even if it were billions of years away, an end to everything would still be coming and nothingness after a billion years of experience would be just as nothing as it is after eighty.
Without the supernatural there is no hope of eternal life. Now, this may affect you in two ways: Either you are the type of person who can easily go day to day without thinking or caring about the ultimate fate of the universe, in which case this really doesn't affect you much at all—unless your lack of interest in ultimate things is somehow hurting people, there's no reason why you should start caring about any of this—or you are the kind of person who can't help but think about these ultimate sorts of things, in which case the only way to find happiness is through acceptance. There's no point in running, denying, dreaming, or in hoping for the miraculous. None of that will make you happy.
Clearly, I fit into the group of people who can't stop extrapolating out to where everything ends. When I was religious, I can't remember a time after I was around 10 years old when I went a single day without thinking about heaven and hell, and since I stopped believing in God there hasn't been a day when I haven't thought about the temporariness of everything, especially myself. I don't know if this is simply part of my personality or if it's due more to the fact that I was trained by almost every adult who had any influence over me as a child to think about eternity constantly and above everything else. My patterns of thought were formed in an environment where I was frequently asked what value anything in my daily life had when compared to eternal life. Needless to say, it was jarring, after so many years of learning to devalue my life now in favor of eternal life, to learn that my life now is actually all I have. But what I wish every person in the world might come to realize is that while it’s startling to lose the “hope” of eternal life after devoting yourself to it, it’s not miserable. In fact, if you let it, knowledge and acceptance of mortality will do more for you than a hope of eternity ever could.
As I distanced myself from my former beliefs, I came to see a few things that changed my ingrained ideas about life and death completely and made me realize I was better off without certain hopes. First, the promise of eternal life makes no sense to begin with and only continues to be seen as a good thing because people choose to ignore its problems. Second, in light of this, our culture could benefit from being less scared of death and less obsessed with immortality. Third, we shouldn’t just overlook the fact that certain denominations or sects of many religions ask people to make real sacrifices now in return for a fake reward later.
When you think about it, the idea of eternal life has a lot of problems—but it’s so easy not to think about it. Growing up in church and Christian school, I heard the people around me say that Jesus rose from the dead to give humanity hope and that his promise of eternal life was the reason for our joy. People who lived without this promise were referred to as hopeless and sad, but the truth is that those who have actually spent time thinking it over realize that eternal life is far sadder a fate than death. A finite being is in some ways always young and in wonder. An eternal being eventually outgrows everything. And the Bible and the churches I know of who placed so much emphasis on the eternal had no answer to concerns raised about whether eternal life could possibly bring with it eternal happiness, eternal satisfaction, eternal purpose, eternal desire to live and to do.
I understand why people take joy from the idea of living forever. For a long time, I never looked past the surface of the claim myself. I simply thought, “I don’t really have to worry about any time limits. Great!” But once you start trying to picture the practical implementation of eternal life, the details of what it would be like, you realize that it’s an unworkable concept. As I’ve already mentioned, if you’re talking about achieving immortality within the confines of our physical universe, it’s simply not possible. Religion, of course, promises something beyond the physical world, something that can’t be explained, but the fact is that supernatural immortality still has unaddressed problems.
The preachers and teachers who taught me to place my hope in eternity said that the afterlife was a place with no tears, pain, or suffering, but it’s awfully hard to imagine living with any sense of intrinsic purpose if you have no need to help yourself or others escape suffering. In this case, you must live for pleasure and discovery. These are good things that can take you a long way, but how far? Will zero-stakes pursuit of enjoyment and knowledge keep you fulfilled and satisfied with your existence for a thousand years? A million? A billion? A billion years is roughly one-fourteenth the age of the universe, best as we can figure, but it’s nothing compared to eternity.
In the past, when I asked my Christian friends what they thought of the problem of eternal purposefulness, they said it scared them. I was in my third year of college when I started asking this, and I had never thought about it before then, but it wasn’t a new concern to any of the people I talked to; apparently they had all been more inquisitive than me on the topic. Once or twice I’ve heard pastors raise the issue of the fear people feel when thinking about eternity, but their conclusions were always that we can’t understand how eternity will be good and we need to simply trust that God knows what he’s doing.
I think it’s strange that the great hope so many people are living for is something that actually scares people when they think about it critically. While it’s true that some individuals can propose ideas of what eternity might be like that they feel they would literally enjoy forever—and perhaps they’re correct; it’s not like we can test it—the fact remains that the information the Bible provides about eternal life describes an experience that lacks the intrinsic motivators we can’t imagine human beings functioning without and simply leaves it at that. We’re told that this works because it does and as usual are expected to accept that the all-powerful God who could easily communicate about any subject in a way that would be accessible to anyone just doesn’t want us to have a reason to feel confident that the thing we’re supposed to sacrifice everything else for is actually good.
Despite its problems, the hope of eternal life is something that Christian-influenced cultures (among others that I’m no expert on) have held dear for centuries. While I can’t explain all the reasons for this, my guess would be that it has a lot to do with many people never having a reason to delve below the nice-sounding surface of the idea, or thinking of it primarily in terms of deceased loved ones not really being gone, or being highly aware of all the things they wish were different in this life and not very aware of how stupefyingly “long” a time eternity really is, or feeling so concerned about ending up in heaven instead of hell that they never ask themselves what heaven would actually be like.
Whatever the reasons, I also have to wonder if Western culture would benefit from losing the idea that immortality is humankind’s true destiny and that death is the result of sin, something unnatural, an enemy to be destroyed as one passage of the Bible says (I Corinthians 15:26). I wonder if we would be more humble somehow and if we would be able to talk about the fact that nothing goes on forever without euphemisms and embarrassment. Would the statements I made at the beginning of this post about all the things that seem so permanent to us eventually vanishing be completely ho-hum, no different from remarking that the sky is blue?
People have a natural fear of death for good reason: We might not be here in the first place if we weren’t descended from ancestors who had a distaste for putting their lives in danger. However, the fact that we don’t want to die doesn’t mean that living forever would be the best possible arrangement for us anymore than the ability to limitlessly feed any other appetite or run from any other fear in all circumstances would be. The fear of death is only useful as long as it is actually doing something to keep us alive, but in the world we live in we know that it can’t keep us alive forever, and we have strong reason to suspect that if we were to escape the need to exert effort in order to keep ourselves alive, avoid suffering, and help others, we would be less happy overall than we are in a limited lifetime where these concerns are always present.
In short, we know of no realistic way to avoid death and we have no reliable reason to think that immortality is better than death, and yet talking factually about the impermanence of our lives, of civilizations, of worlds, is socially and linguistically taboo. If we use plain words, our statements sound harsh and insensitive. If we treat the subject as routinely as we treat any other, instead of dancing around it, it comes across as a downer. In these Christian societies where a total outsider might think that talking about death should be no big deal since people are so focused on the afterlife, people instead alter even their word choices to avoid thinking about the fact that the life we know now doesn’t go on forever.
I can’t help but think that it would be better to practice an attitude of acceptance. Since death is part of life and, as far as we can tell, is necessary to maintaining some of the good in life, wouldn’t it be an improvement if we could become more comfortable with the concept of mortality? It’s tragic when people are killed by violence or disease without getting to live full lives, but it’s not a tragedy that each of us is going to die someday. As far as we can tell, a temporary life is the best form of existence possible (the only way that your existence has the potential to consist mainly of enjoying life and not mainly of being tired of it), so instead of hoping to live forever, and then hoping on top of this that living forever will actually be good somehow, wouldn’t we be better off learning to appreciate the way things are?
I’m sure there are many people who live with a positive view of finiteness and mortality already, so I suppose I’m talking to people who, like I was, have been somewhat cut off from this way of thinking: people who have been taught to feel sorry for those who don’t believe in heaven or people who have absorbed a vague assumption that some sort of afterlife exists and feel uncomfortable examining it. Circumstances can arise in anyone’s life that make them doubt or reject the “hope” of eternity, and I hope that anyone who goes through that experience will discover that this is a loss that can simply be mourned and moved on from. Yes, it’s sad that we’re not going to live in a perfect world and that we have to die, but it’s not a reason to be miserable.
Personally, I came to feel a sense of relief that there was no afterlife. This wasn’t instant—it did take me a while to accept the loss of something I had placed so much importance in—but with more acceptance and more time to get used to the new realization, I felt lighter and happier until I reached a point where my general mood was better than it had ever been. I kept thinking about a phrase I had heard in a French class years earlier: Ce n’est pas grave. I believe a good translation of this phrase would be something like, “It’s no big deal,” but I dwelt on the most similar-sounding translation possible: It’s not grave.
It’s not grave. It’s not serious. It’s not weighty. It’s not heavy. I felt like I could say these things about anything in my life now. When I believed in eternity, everything was grave. Everything mattered so damn much. I was afraid of the enormity of the consequences I was gathering with every choice I made. And I was often sad for people I cared about who were nice people but didn’t accept Jesus as God, because this meant they were going to hell despite all their good intentions. It felt better and happier to know that no one was going to hell than it felt to think that I was going to live forever. I’ve come to see eternal life as a burden no one should have to bear: Pain and death are serious enough realities already; people shouldn’t have to carry the fear of hell or of never-ending consequences to their choices.
And, ideally, people shouldn’t be ripped off either. They shouldn’t be asked to make their whole life revolve around a reward they will never actually receive. They shouldn’t be told that a fake future is more important than their children, their parents, their dreams, or anything real for that matter.
When I look back from my current vantage point on how I was raised, it all feels uncomfortably like an immortality cult. The words of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels summarize it perfectly: “ ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it?’ ” (Luke 14:26–28, NIV). When this passage was referred to in sermons, it was explained that Jesus didn’t really mean that a person should feel hatred for others but that they should prioritize nothing, even their family, above him, no matter if this seemed like hate to others. A person needed to consider the responsibility to “bear their cross” (in other words, do whatever God might ask of them just like Jesus faced crucifixion because that was what was asked of him) before declaring themself to be a follower of Jesus, just like an architect would think about whether they could afford the cost of building a structure before declaring they were going to build it. The high "cost" of living for Jesus was supposed to be acceptable because by following Jesus a person gained eternal life, which was worth more than anything they might have to give up in exchange.
It's important to understand that the hope of gaining something whose value far exceeds everything in normal life is not a nice, safe hope. It skews people's priorities in ways that can become rather grotesque. As a vivid example of this, adults who taught me and my classmates at school and Sunday school felt it was important to advise us children from an early age, just in case the situation ever arose, that if someone put a gun to your head and threatened to kill you unless you renounced your faith in Jesus, you were better off taking the bullet than giving in to their demand. I was in second grade when the Columbine shooting happened, and I don’t even know how accurate this story is, but people said at the time that the shooters had given one girl that exact ultimatum and she had been murdered after refusing to comply. This made her a hero in the eyes of our church, and I suppose it is heroic to do what you believe is right even when threatened with death, but it’s also tragic that there are adults teaching children that their lives matter less than their religious allegiance.
Similarly, the first time I remember being told about human rights violations in North Korea I was at an elementary school chapel. The speaker told us about horrific ways in which Christian prisoners had been murdered after refusing to denounce their beliefs (the detail that stands out in my mind is a claim that one group of people was run over with a steam roller), and he said that we too should value our relationship with Jesus so highly that we would never back down from it no matter what we had to stand up to or sacrifice for it. In sixth grade, our teacher once asked us how much we loved Jesus and if we had really thought about what it meant to put him above everything. She said it wasn’t so far-fetched to think that the US and China might be at war someday and asked what we would do if the Chinese invaded and a soldier told us at gunpoint to “deny Jesus.” Did we love Jesus more than our very lives, as we should?
People do strange things when they think they're going to live forever, that much is clear, and encouraging children to mentally prepare for martyrdom (better safe than sorry) isn't the only instance of mixed-up priorities that deserves to be examined. Drawing only from examples I’ve personally seen in the lives of friends and acquaintances, another of the most problematic trends is the willingness to sacrifice dreams, goals, and desires in order to follow what one believes to be God’s supernatural guidance. I’ve known people who spent years in a particular job or ministry field because they thought God was calling them to do it, despite their dislike for the occupation and their desire to do something else. I myself often felt like I was letting goals slip away from me by giving so much of my time to church and devotional pursuits when I would rather have been using it to practice skills I valued. My acquaintances and I put up with these things largely because we thought that whatever we would have liked to enjoy or accomplish now would only be temporary while living for God would lead to an eternity in which we could focus on those things.
The apostle Paul himself, writer of much of the New Testament and founder of churches all around the Mediterranean, wrote, “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable” (I Corinthians 15:19, NKJV). This would seem to suggest that the typical Christian life is less desirable than the typical non-Christian life in ways that can only be compensated for by the hope of an afterlife. The churches I’ve been part of embraced this evaluation, preaching that God called people to a difficult way of life but a rewarding one and that belief in physical resurrection from death was absolutely necessary to the Christian faith. I hate the idea of people putting off their dreams for a lifetime chasing this goal that doesn't exist—although I'm glad the ones who feel confident will experience a sense of purpose and never have to regret any of it. I guess what bothers me most is the thought of the people who struggle through it all in spite of their doubts and feelings of distance from a higher power and finally die with an "I hope..." at the forefront of their mind. I want better for them.
Stepping back from the hot pursuit of immortality has allowed me to see how problematic the hope I was told to celebrate really is. From the beginning the idea comes with difficulties that make many people wonder if they really hope for it to be true at all, and on top of that it teaches people to devalue the life they live now and put their dreams on hold, always for a promise of getting something better in a poorly-defined future paradise.
Considering all that the hope of eternal life brings with it, I’m perfectly happy to label myself a nihilist and say that I have no hope. What I have instead of hope is fact. Instead of hoping that I get the future, I already have the here and now. I'm free to value this world and the people in it and to pursue what I want in life to the best of my ability. I’m not left hoping that something good comes after death: I know that nothing good lasts forever, but neither does anything bad, and I'm okay with that neutrality.
There is no hope, and that's not a bad thing. I think it's a reason to enjoy life more, to have more fun. It makes all the difference between living like an exhausted high schooler pouring everything into the effort of someday becoming what their parents have declared will make them happy, and living like a wide-eyed five-year-old who has never seen anything more amazing than the fuzzy caterpillar crawling across a twig in front of them and doesn't care that they won't remember it tomorrow. I'm not saying that planning for the future or delaying gratification is bad, but the delay period really shouldn't span your entire life. We shouldn't have to take ourselves that seriously or require a hope of cosmic importance in order to find joy in life. Reality would seem to have decreed that we get a limited amount of time only (enough to experience thrilling happiness if we're lucky, but not enough to become anyone of importance beyond the tiny snippet of time and space human history has touched) and after that, no regrets. Admitting that this is so doesn't feel like hopelessness to me; it just feels like freedom. There is a biblical phrase, “prisoners of hope,” originally a rather ambiguous phrase from an obscure Old Testament reference, but one I heard tossed around now and again imbued with various inspirational meanings, and it seems fitting here, albeit with a rather different understanding. Since I don’t feel hopeless, I could say instead that I’m free of hope, not constrained by the fear and obligation a loaded hope brings with it. This is a good place to be. It’s lighthearted, and it’s straightforward, and it’s real.
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