Wednesday 14 September 2011

Death and God

Having watched Richard Dawkins on television last night one could not but help be struck by his insistence that religion was false and science true. By science he meant a reductive materialism and not an examination of the evidence for the existence of life beyond the physical world, or the continuation of consciousness. There was of course nothing scientific in his apparent lack of knowledge of the evidence in these areas. Today I came across the following quote from Albert Camus's Notebooks  which seems to speak to 'the Dawkins' dilemma' - the insistence by some, but certainly not all, scientists (sceptics) on the absolute rightness of their position without the need to produce evidence to support it:

There is but one freedom, to put oneself right with death. After that everything is possible. I cannot force you to believe in God. Believing in God amounts to coming to terms with death. When you have accepted death, the problem of God will be solved - and not the reverse. 


I do not worry about whether people believe in 'God' as the term means so many things to so many people, but I am concerned by the fear of death in our society, in our world, as it distorts the way we live. Fear of death and the freedom to embrace life cannot coincide as fear casts a shadow over life. In understanding the psychology of avoidance or denial I like the following passage from 'Scott' (T.E. Lawrence) channelled through the mediumship of Jane Sherwood (The Country Beyond, 1969: 48-9):

Perhaps psychology can help us to understand this tendency. it is surely a kind of masochism, a stoic resolve to punish the wishful thinking one suspects is behind the belief in immorality. It feels very stern, strong and noble to deny the thing one secretly longs for, and so to prove that one is quite able to do without it. It is easy to find arguments to support this denial and see how superior it makes one feel to say "I, at least, do not need to believe in such things".


'Scott' found, as it seems we all do in our time, that whatever made him who he was had 'escaped' from his body at the moment of death. What he would have denied a short time before became self-evident, that there is change, but no snuffing out of existence. The scientific law of the conservation of energy applies to life itself and not just to inert matter.


More on Jane Sherwood, 'Scott' and the relationship between vital and non-living matter to come in my Exploring the Afterlife blog.