Religion deals with questions of life’s meaning and purpose, and death and how we relate to it—especially to our death or the death of loved ones—is certainly one of those “big questions” that all of humankind’s religions, spiritualities and philosophical systems have addressed, as has science.
The COVID-19 pandemic that is currently ravaging the world and particularly now the U.S. with no clear end in sight has led many people—and I expect some of us—to revisit the question of our own mortality and that of our loved ones. Even if we ourselves have escaped, and even if no one close to us has been stricken, just the magnitude of the death toll around the world is emotionally shattering. We are, psychologists tell us, experiencing a period of collective grieving, along with everything else.
One way of interpreting religious and spiritual beliefs about death and what comes after is to look at them as attempts to demonstrate that the significance of human life is such that it simply does not—cannot—end with the death of the body. In other words, views about life after death are in essence views about life before death and its meaning. Join me as we explore this idea.
