The Obsession of Religion with Eternal Life, the Ultimate Scam

A tale of two deathbeds

A few years ago, a devout Catholic woman told me she was having a tough time finding a new job. Since I was a career coach at the time, I offered to give her a book on effective job search. I was stunned by her response: “I don’t read books. Even when I was in college, I didn’t read books. I passed the tests because I kept very good notes in class.” And she confessed that was very protective of her faith; she didn’t want it damaged in any way, because she was eager to see her mother again in heaven.
 

 
How in the world does such fantasy, such delusion, get embedded in human brains? A few months ago, an elderly Catholic woman told me that the priests at her church told their young students “never to think about” what they’d learned in catechism. Which included, of course, the stories of all the saints they could pray to. The spiritual realm is real, and swarming with deceased saints who can answer prayers. Including the top saint of them all, The Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven, who has made countless appearances around the globe. All of this is reinforced by the Ritual of the Mass, with music, drama, costumes, and sets. How can it not be real? 
 
Hence the unshakeable, entrenched belief in heaven, eternal life. This was brought home to me dramatically by what yet another devout Catholic woman told me about the day her mother died. She was sitting with her mother, who was sleeping peacefully. This presented quite an opportunity: she had a list of messages that her mother could give to deceased relatives in heaven. After a while, she reported, her mother began to move her feet—in quite an agitated way—which she was pretty sure meant that mom had begun her own walk to heaven. I had another interpretation for the agitated feet: maybe her mother was trying to flee from this babbling idiot sitting beside her. “What! I’m about to die? Get me away from this person!” 
 
I also had to wonder how her god would feel about this obvious breach of protocol. Was this god okay with this surreptitious attempt to get messages to folks in heaven? Then there’s another issue: how does anyone know for sure that their dead relatives are in heaven? Maybe they ended up in hell—those who believe in heaven usually acknowledge the other place as well. There are some very blunt verses in the New Testament about hell as a destination. In Matthew 25, we find Jesus-script about those who fail to show sufficient compassion: “You who are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels…” (v.41) And in Matthew 12:36-37, there is this warning: “I tell you, on the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” 
 
Even the confidence about “meeting mother again in heaven” may be misplaced. Perhaps mother was guilty of sins unknown to adoring children.
 
I also sat with my mother the day she died, the last week of December 1998. The previous month she had turned 93, but she had lived several years too long. Alzheimer’s had destroyed her brain. She didn’t know who she was, where she was, or who I was. Most of her vocabulary was also gone: she didn’t know such words as cookie or toast.  On the day we knew the end was near, I had gone out on a quick errand. When I got back the health care worker had put a boom-box radio on her bed, blasting whoop-and-holler gospel music. Her breathing was alarmingly accelerated—probably in a panic because of the horrible music. My mother’s favorite composer was Mozart! Once the radio had been removed and quiet was restored, my mother’s breathing gradually returned to normal—but continued to dimmish. I sat by the bed, holding her hand, and repeated: “I’m right here, I’m your youngest son, David” (at the time, I was 56). I have no idea if that registered in any way—but I wanted to make the attempt to assure her that she was not alone. After a while her breathing ceased.  
 
Not for a second did I expect, did I wish, that her soul had gone to heaven. What kind of soul would it have been, after all? One so damaged by disease, not reflecting at all her wonderful personality that existed for the many years that I had known her? 

How can we account for the common Christian belief that eternal life is attainable? Even in the New Testament there are conflicting, irreconcilable ideas about how to attain it. But consider this as well: many ancient religions that pre-dated Christianity—by hundreds or thousands of years—also attracted devout followers by promising escape from death. Priests and religious bureaucrats knew that the fear of death was a powerful motivator, so all they had to do was promise a solution. 

Essential homework on this topic is Richard Carrier’s 2018 essay, Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It. Carrier states the case correctly: 

“…the idea of a personal savior god dying and rising from the dead to live again was not original to Christianity. It was, in fact, fashionable. Many cultures all around the borders of, and traveling and trading through Judea, had one. It was all the rage. It was thus not surprising in that context, that some fringe Jews decided to invent one of their own…Jesus is just a late comer to the party. Yet one more dying-and-rising personal savior god.”

There are people who have reacted rationally to death, realizing that all imagined ways of getting out of it are delusional. Mark Twain, for example, said: “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” 

How would eternal life work, anyway? Not too long ago I saw a cartoon, a man wearing an angel outfit, sitting on a cloud in heaven, looking really bored. “I should have brought a magazine,” was his thought. Just what do people imagine they’ll do in heaven, forever and ever? Your earthly personality is geared toward having daily goals. Will you essentially be brain dead in heaven? I’ve seen some depictions of heaven in which folks endlessly praise Jesus. Does that make it worth it to have somehow attained eternal life? And what does it say about a god and his son that they demand—and get off on—unending, ceaseless praise? How does that possibly make sense? 

Then, of course, there’s the issue of evidence. Priests have been promising escape from death for thousands of years, but how do they know? Some religious folks have claimed that Near Death Experiences (NDE) are evidence that heaven is real. People who have survived near death trauma report having seen the glow of heaven when they were unconscious. But this phenomenon has been studied extensively, and the verdict seems to be that there is nothing going on but brain activity induced by trauma. And even without trauma, our brains can be hyper-active. I sometimes have very weird, surrealistic, dystopian dreams. When I wake up, it takes me a few minutes to get back to reality—and I wonder how my brain came up with such bizarre images. It’s hardly a surprise that religious people can have dreams about savoring glimpses of heaven. 
 
Claiming the reality of NDEs is also risky because people of many different religious backgrounds have had these experiences, which negates the idea of exclusive Christian access to heaven. We’re back to the need for evidence: reliable, verifiable, objective data; because, without that…
 
Religions promoting escape from death does indeed qualify as a scam. The appeal to just take it on faith is worthless, because so many conflicting—even absurd—ideas have been accepted by “taking it on faith.” Christianity is a champion in this contest: their god required a human sacrifice, brutally murdered, to enable him/her/it to forgive sins. One New Testament theologian even suggested that eating the flesh, and drinking the blood, of the sacrifice would also do the trick of getting eternal life. 
 
Someone once said, “Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool.” The con man realized that escape from death was a precious commodity that so many people craved. That reflects the full-blown human ego: “I am too important to perish forever: my god wants me to endure eternally” (even if, for some, it would mean burning in eternal fire—how sick it that!). But when we contemplate the Cosmos, we see that death is part of the scene, from top to bottom: stars die, planets die, as do all the animals on the earth and in the sea.  Humans are part of this broad spectrum, so it’s hard to argue we don’t share the same fate. How could it be otherwise?  No amount of superstition, magical thinking or savoring ritual mumbo-jumbo at church can change this reality. 
 
 
 
David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes, the first of which is Guessing About God (2023) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available. 
 
His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.
 
The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.