I remember the answer to this question from personal experience, from remembering my earlier self.
Modern people are indifferent to eternal life because it is pictured as "more of the same - but forever"...
As nothing more than a continuation of this-life, as it actually is experienced by modern people...
Which life is purposeless, meaningless; and ultimately isolated and disengaged.
Why, asks a modern Man, would it be regarded as good thing, eternally to continue a meaningless and purposeless existence?
In other words, when my personal Life is already pre-assumed to be something that Just Happened as a culmination of science and randomness...
When my life exists against a backdrop of "the universe is dead and going-nowhere and I am a brief-insignificant nothing within this vastness of time and space".
This is the official conviction of our civilization - taught from the highest to lowest levels, by those with greatest status and conferred authority.
And it forms the functional basis of all public and "objective" explanations and justifications from the major social institutions (politics, law, military, police, mass media, economics, science, medicine, arts, education etc, and also the churches).
When human life is regarded as as thus futile; its continuation forever seems to most people like a prospect that would be more of a torment than a thing to be desired.
In such a context, the core promise of Christianity has lost its appeal to the extent that most people think that - even if resurrected individual life beyond death could somehow be proved to be a real and genuine possibility - they wouldn't want it!
And would prefer the (supposed) assurance of a swift and painless death (i.e. euthanasia) followed by utter annihilation of consciousness.
Such is the depth of our modern sickness of soul.
Too deep to be touched by evangelism or apologetics - too deep to be touched even by the devout practice of any strict church Christianity.
Because the modern belief in purposelessness, and meaninglessness, and ultimate personal insignificance - is larger and more profound than our professed religions.
Until we - as individuals - are able to build our religion on a foundation of ultimate reality having a direction, personal meaning, individual significance that we can choose from ourselves; then we shall not escape the vortex of modernity.
Most people could enjoy eternally doing the creative activities that are possible on this beautiful green earth, because they have infinite potential, and they appeal to our natures.
ReplyDeleteIf anyone claims otherwise, I am suspicious that he may be a very grumpy, and rather dishonest man. Not saying people can't exist who wouldn't enjoy it, but they are surely rare
@Hagel - Yes but people as they actually are in this mortal life on earth cannot (and never do) do creative activities for very long, or very intensely (because of entropy/ death and evil).
ReplyDeleteSo for Heaven to be Heaven, we personally must be transformed, and so must the world (including other beings) that we inhabit.
So to want eternal life requires more than just not dying - there must also be a belief in (and desire for) this qualitatively different world of Heaven.
The human world that we have built for ourselves is indeed largely miserable, and it is therefore reasonable to wonder if mankind is even worth it, because the depths of human depravity have no bottom.
DeleteTo reject eternal life can therefore be to despair at man's vice, to not believe that the evident virtue that some men are apparently capable of could be dominant, such that throwing it all out would be preferable.
But even without the promise of total purification, wouldn't there be value for the best of us to live on? Tolkien wasn't perfect, but he was pretty good, even without total purification.
Many people seem to think that preventing suffering is the most important, and such people would indeed reject even ressurected life - just let every creature live its short time untill saved by oblivion.
Although I will say that I am sympathetic to the preference to replace mankind with some better species and having that live forever instead, but is that really how these life rejecters think? From what I have seen, a hyperfixation on suffering is a more common cause.
I am trying to understand them. It is a strange pit to fall in to, to reject beauty, but some I have spoken to seem to do just that, and they are miserable. I have a better understanding now of why people may reject life, thanks to reading what you wrote and responding to it.
Valuable insight. If the offer is this life, continually, or worse a never-ending Church service, then no wonder why people reject that. That is often as deep as it goes for some.
ReplyDeleteMore of the same, forever, can be an existentially terrifying thought, if not viewed in the light of eternal creativity, freedom and love - without Sin - which can be hard to imagine here and now
@David - One of my older insights that seems to have stood the test of time, is that for things to get better - especially in ways that seem obvious, there must always be at least Two things that need to be changed, simultaneously - or else the one unchanged will prevent any benefit from the other change.
ReplyDelete@H - I don't understand what point you are making.
ReplyDeleteThey may believe that beauty is Illusion (Maya) like the Hindus.
ReplyDelete