Evangelicals believe there is life after death. Every person who has ever lived will end up in either Heaven or Hell. Where you end up is determined by faith. Those who put their faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior go to Heaven when they die. Everyone else goes to Hell and will be tortured forever for their rejection of Jesus.
Setting aside the fact that people do not go to Heaven or Hell after they die (no one does until the general resurrection at the end of time), most Evangelicals have extra-Biblical beliefs about the afterlife. For example, how many sermons have you heard where a preacher told you Nana or Grandpa is in Heaven, free from pain, suffering, and heartache? You are told your dead loved ones are having a wonderful time in Heaven, running, singing, and worshipping God. Life is marvelous, better than anything experienced in life before the grave. Most people will never experience this, but, bless God, Evangelicals will. Why? They are members of the right religion. They worship the right God. Their guidebook for life is the Bible, even if they rarely read it. By faith, they believe every word in the Bible is straight from the mind of God. This supernatural book says there’s an afterlife. The men who preach from this supernatural book say there’s an afterlife. Countless authors have written books about Heaven and what awaits the followers of Jesus after they die.
What Evangelicals NEVER provide is evidence for the existence of an afterlife, Heaven, or Hell. Not one shred of evidence is presented for these claims. Either you believe in life after death or you don’t. Either you believe Heaven and Hell are real places or you don’t. Either you believe that your landing spot in the afterlife is determined by believing the right things, or you don’t. All of these claims ultimately appeal to faith for justification. Any Evangelicals who tell you they died, went to Heaven or Hell, and came back to life on Earth are lying. Unless they provide a feature-length video of their time in the afterlife, their claims are not to be believed. Just because someone says something happened to them doesn’t mean their story is true. The same goes for the Bible. The Bible is a book of claims. Just because it says something doesn’t mean it’s true.
People wrongly think I am an anti-theist. I am not. I do, however, expect and demand sufficient evidence for religious claims. If you want me to believe your claims, you will have to do more than quote Bible verses or tell me to just faith-it.
I know that I will someday die, likely sooner than later. I am a sixty-eight-year-old man in poor health. My body tells me that my time on Earth is short. How I die remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure: I will die. Rare is the person, especially in the sunset years of life, who doesn’t think about death from time to time. In the quiet of late nights, I will hear our clock ticking, reminding me of my frail mortality. Eventually, I fitfully fall asleep, hoping I will awake the next day. And I do, but one day the last noise I hear in this life could be the click-click- cl of our clock. And that will be it. Then what?
Since there is no evidence for an afterlife, I have no reason to believe that I will live on after death outside of whatever nutrients my ashes return to the dirt. When I die, that means the end of the only Bruce Gerencser on Earth. Yes, I am that special. 🙂 Do I fear death? No, not as far as it being the end of life. I know death awaits all of us, and since I am not immune to what afflicts us one and all, I’m confident that the way of all men will one day come calling for me. I do, however, at times, fear what may happen to me before I die; the pain, suffering, and loss that may come my way before my demise.
Most Evangelicals believe that after they get to Heaven, they will be given a resurrected body, one perfect in every way, including the brain/mind. Having a new brain/mind, Evangelicals think that they will know countless things they didn’t know on Earth, and they will NOT know many of the things/people they knew before death. You might think, as an atheist, “Who cares?” And I agree, except for this one point: Evangelicals are willing to offload knowing things to the afterlife. Who hasn’t engaged an Evangelical about this or that belief, only to have the believer dismiss your claims out of hand, saying, “One day, I will know everything in Heaven. Praise Jesus!” Sadly, Evangelicals won’t know everything. Knowledge and understanding are gained only in this life. Once dead, all learning stops. Better to have lived life seeking knowledge and passing that knowledge on to others than to make oneself deliberately ignorant, hoping that an invisible deity will one day fill you in on what you missed in this life.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Beautifully lucid thoughts, Bruce. I recommend to you and all of your readers a wonderfully cogent and artful essay by Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe called The Last Messiah. Just Google it and you’ll readily find it online.
Thanks, Rand. ❤️ I will take a look at The Last Messiah.
I read last week that obnoxious founder of the Heritage Foundation, Edwin J Feulner had died. Only he hadn’t, according to the announcement. He’d been ‘called home.’ Hadn’t heard that phrase for a long time….so twee!!!!!
Ah, yes, “called home. “ Anything but, “Bro. Edwin Feulner died today and is now rotting in a 6 foot grave, never to be seen again. His cancerous works remain.”
Sometimes I listen to the quiet clock ticking during the small hours too, and the thought of death wanders uninvited into my mind. Those moments are grim, but serve to remind me how precious and brief our lives are. Thankfully threats of hell and enticements of heaven no longer sway me. Most likely the time after our death will be no different than the time before we were alive. I find no fear in that thought.
Another excellent topic Bruce.
First – Of all the “Fairy Tales” foisted upon the public by the “CULT”, I find this one particularly galling, especially as it relates to Children.
The Evangelicals “promise” a beautiful afterlife or an eternal lake of fire.
Nothing like a little scare tactic and intimidation, practiced by “caring adults”.
This scared the shit out of me when I was a kid, and I was most decidedly in a non religious household. I can’t imagine what it was like for kids being pumped full of this propaganda nonsense constantly in a “religious” family.
Nothing but a heinous and carefully calculated propaganda and mind control technique to frighten the young (and old) into adherence.
I wonder when the cultists are staring death in the face if they begin to think they were bamboozled and lied to.
Imagine living this already difficult life, into ones elderly years, only to have that epiphany of being “lied to” by what I consider one of the first ever multi national “corporations”.
And of course the “CULTS” fight among themselves about the definitions of this “afterlife” and the specifics leading up to it.
Hell of a prospect, you gotta die first to get to the “truth”. I myself am under no illusion.
The ideas of heaven and hell are an excuse to relieve humans from reforming their social/economic system and our treatment of the natural environment. This way humans do not have to do the hard work ever. I worked in IT (computers) my entire career. I can tell you techies like me have been giving people more tools all the time, but society is not using them to improve the current life of most humans, and society is ruining our environment also,
Death scared the crap out of me as an evangelical. We were told we could KNOW beyond a shadow of a doubt that we were saved if we prayed the Sinner’s Prayer and REALLY REALLY meant it. I must have prayed that prayer thousands of times – at altar calls, at fundamentalist Christian school, before bedtime, before long car trips. I was terrified that I hadn’t done it right or sincerely enough. I would BEG and BEG God to save me. Fear of hell was massive.
Also, I was afraid of the dark far longer than a child should be. I was afraid of demons. We were told that we couldn’t see them but angels and demons were battling all around us, with humans being the prize.
I was terrified of dying and waking up in hell for eternity. I was afraid of dying and going through the Great White Throne Judgment where your whole life was played on the IMAX for all to see.
I’d much rather believe that once I die, that’s it. My consciousness ceases to exist. I’m not looking forward to dying, but I accept that it will happen and that I will cease to exist. Hopefully, memories of me will be a blessing to those I know.
Not believing in an after life makes enjoying this life so much more important.
You called it Bruce! Nice work!
Thanks! ❤️
most people fear death. at this point, after having experienced near-death (a brain injury), i am indifferent about it, but i like this quote, which was originally said by aleister crowley:
I can imagine myself on my death-bed, spent utterly with lust to touch the next world, like a boy asking for his first kiss from a woman.
i have had numerous friends who have died, over the past few years, and a majority of them had significantly less go wrong with their bodies than i have already had go wrong with mine… yet, they have all died, whereas, apparently, i am still alive.
i frequently ask myself, why them? why not me?
I don’t know what’s on the other end, but the way I see it I might as well die in hope of something awesome. If I’m wrong and there’s nothing… well I won’t be around to feel the disappointment.
I support anyone’s afterlife beliefs which give them peace. There isn’t enough time on this Earth for a fraction of “the knowledge” which you write about. I don’t begrudge anyone for not being able to gather enough or making a life in which they have the tools to gather enough in the brief time we have.
I can respect everyone’s right to their beliefs, about the afterlife and many other things, as long as they don’t try to legislate beliefs that damage other people’s wellbeing. Like denying modern scientific understandings of sexual orientation and gender identity, or taking away anyone’s right to what happens to their own body, including but not limited to forcing unwanted pregnancies to proceed. Or for supporting genocide.
You, they, everyone can believe whatever afterlife beliefs give you peace. While Bruce is Biblically correct about resurrection and judgment of the dead after the second coming of Christ, if convincing a small child that their parent who was killed by a drunk driver is in heaven reassures the child and leaves their real need to deal with death to another day, that isn’t necessarily bad.
Raised Catholic, I was taught that every heaven-bound dead person will spend some time in an unpleasant place called Purgatory, where their soul will be cleansed and made whole so that they are fit to come before God. Good Catholics were supposed to pray for the souls of the dead in that place, so that their tenure there might be short. We didn’t do that in my household. Dad was Lutheran, so that set of beliefs was nonsense to him. I suspect my mother feared that no prayers would help her beloved but abusive, alcoholic father, though in her mind, God would forgive those behaviors. Grandpa’s unforgivable sin, in Mama’s eyes, happened when a new parish priest came to visit, oversaw his farm, and told him how much he must tithe. The family were barely holding it together as it was. Grandpa tossed the priest off his property and never attended church again. Grandma was not about to produce that astonishingly large (to them) amount of money. So, in Mama’s mind, Grandpa might be in Hell.
Grandpa died before I was born, of ailments that my mother would never share, so I suspect his liver gave out. But a god who would torture someone for eternity for using alcohol to numb some of the most difficult aspects of a very, very hard life, even if he was a violent drunk, is not a god I would want to worship. A god who would torture someone for eternity for putting the value of feeding his family ahead of stroking the ego of some idiot priest is not a god I would want to worship.
If the Christian narrative (any flavor, including the Catholic one, and yes, they are Christians) is true, then I will go buy Marcus Aurelius the best drink that Satan sells down in Hell when I get there.