Sunday, February 10, 2008

Life after Death

Is there life after death? Theists believe there is. Atheists, Agnostics and some philosophies say otherwise. Members of non-theistic religions such as Buddhism believe in reincarnation. But is there really is life after death?
Plato, in his Dialogues of Plato, defines death as the separation of soul and body. He believes that true philosophers live for the sake of dying – that is, philosophers must live thinking about the death they deserve and then spends the rest of his life preparing for it for him to obtain the greatest good in the other world after he dies. He also stated that our body is a source of endless trouble, making us impure and thus, increases the need of the soul to be separated for it to be purified. For he also believed that one can only find wisdom in his purity. Based on his thoughts, I can infer that he believes in life after death for he believes in the separation of the soul from the body and that there can be no life without soul. But the problem with his statements is this: Where do the souls go when they get separated from the body?
On the other hand, David Hume doesn’t believe in afterlife. He believed that everything is common between soul and body, that the organs of the one are all of them the organs of the other. Therefore, the existence of the one must be dependent on the other. He believed that nothing in this world is everlasting or perpetual, and that includes the body and soul. Thus, he believed that there’s no life after death. But we know that one thing leads to another. So, if afterlife doesn’t exist, how come the thought of it existed? Was it just imagination? We know that the mind cannot produce an idea without a basis. So where does the idea of afterlife came from?
Immortality means immunity from death. And this is what Soren Kierkegaard believed. He stated in his Concluding Unscientific Postscripts that immortality couldn’t be proved at all. That the fault does not lie in the proofs but in the fact that people will not understand that this question is nonsense. He believed that immortality is subjective. But then again, people differ in beliefs. So, simply put, there’s no absolute or general answer to the question.
*Philosophical Problems, pages 223-232.

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