Well educated humanists/secularists often take the idea of life after death as a wishful concept. It gained considerable agreement and strength after Freud. He tended to take preoccupation excess that could not be accounted for in the logics of physical science and attach it to the machinations of the mind. Religion became a neurosis, and was to be treated as such. So it became the belief, made somewhat official, that we are fooled by our minds in wishful thinking about life after death. The point darkens further when hell is the topic. Would we identify hell as wishful thinking? The magnificent (heaven) is balanced off by the unthinkable (hell). How could the imagination, willing for the comforting concept (heaven), come up with the ultimate horror of life outside of the imagination (hell)? Did hell come by wishful thinking creativity as did a conjured heaven? Wishful thinking, for the humanist, is given large creativity for both ecstasy and horror. What proof is there? This is not to deny that the mind can easily form and accomplish wishful concepts. Does the Freudian really want all perceptions beyond nature’s elements to be only made up?
Perhaps the study of neurosis as related to religion (or the after-life) ought to begin with a search for the origin of the concept of hell. One wonders what the secularist might do with that assignment? Where does it appear in other religions than Christianity? If it appears what is the meaning? If it does not appear, do those followers escape the neurosis that creates a hell? It is important to remember that one thrust of these Pages is complexity, which is to say that many factors include the both/and perception rather than the exclusive only perception. For example: Alcoholism is both a sickness and a sin – so to be managed with separate or combined contexts as analysis proceeds in the course of treatment. Even if heaven and/or hell are realities, they may be, for some persons, matters of neurosis. One need not assume falsehood or truth as cause for a neurosis. Some persons have neuroses about money. Some rich persons see themselves as poor, or as superior to those who have less than they. Some disregard their wealth and live in reduced conditions. Neighbors are surprised, to discover a deceased friend was wealthy. The end of the earth as we know it is commonly believed by both secular and religious persons. Those neurotic persons about the ending are probably found among both the secular and the spiritual orientations. The Apostle John guides the spiritually minded about the issue in Revelation 22:11. The Apostle would leave it to history, past and future, not to imagination. Get on with life, and leave the matter with God for resolution. Be true to self.
We may forget that God works within the culture of any people, guiding the people (principally his identifiable children) step-by-step into a Christian context for life. If this is true, as I believe it is, we are presently closer to ties between the natural (earth) understanding and the spiritual (heaven). The growing belief that there are various island universes beyond our own is gaining adherents. That is sometimes identified as the String Theory, and may be refined as new data become available. This theory suggests there may be other laws than those guiding the universe we know and live in, especially in that part of it known to us as the solar system. This opens possibilities that were unknown when I was in high school. Had current theories been advanced as I was trying to figure out Einstein’s relativity in high school, and if those conjectures had been supported by the institutional church, it would have faced scorn as was Galileo in his work. The church had to face the problem of error about the center of the creation in the earth, to the realization that the earth, not the sun, was on the move. To capitulate too soon to the discovery of Galileo would likely have cost the church more in its era than did the slower transitional change. The perception rests, with proper humility, on the idea that the new, and true, is responsible to the former for something more than derision. The old followed what it had been taught at the time. Truth emerges from search and shifting for man, not only by the known, but by the projection of the unknown. Our information is limited. Christians are guided by the maps/scripts of both Scripture and nature. Christians can feel protected from Freud’s under extended observation by a belief in Revelation that offers authority for some beliefs that are beyond nature, beyond what may be found even if mankind’s search is extended beyond the experience of human beings in the creation. Faith experience provides us with a future scenario. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020