What comes after death?

To the editor:

After 40 some years of coping with the problems of life, I lost faith in religion and adopted common sense as a guide to live by. During the next year or so, through self-honesty and introspection, I realized that life’s first priority is survival, then comes acquiring knowledge about matters of interest, followed by a pursuit of personal desire. These priorities led me to peace of mind and the assumption that the world is exactly the way it ought to be, and people are exactly where they need to be.

I tried to share my new point of view with friends, but soon realized everybody is different, and they must use their own knowledge and experience to answer their own questions about life. Even so, all of us are socialized by Western culture and we have similar attitudes and expectations about other people. Christian values are reflected in our cultural behavior, and regardless of our religious beliefs, most of us appreciate the “blessings” of cultural institutions that provide law and order, education, the means to earn a living and many social opportunities. Regardless of where our “blessings” come from, they slowly bring about a higher standard of living in the long run.

Concerning the source of our existence, I believe that in the beginning, empty space had an ever-present need for change that developed an intelligent and emotional form of logic. In time, the intelligent aspect of logic established the laws of physics, which caused the Big Bang that formed the universe, where the laws of physics caused environmental changes that enabled the emotional aspect of logic to establish a will to live in certain types of carbon. Since that time, the logical results of evolution and life’s emotional struggle to survive have continued to satisfy the need for change.

In spite of my skepticism, I think the age-old religions contain some amount of truth, which supports the norms and mores of human culture. However, there will never be a universally accepted explanation of our existence because the upward progress of evolution brought reason and passion to the mind of man. Unlike the steadfast nature of logic’s intelligent laws of physics and the emotional will to live, man’s ability to utilize reason and experience passion allows us to make personal choices and pursue personal aspirations. Our reason and passion enable us to enjoy a measure of security and contentment through the acquisition of knowledge and the pursuit of emotional experience.

At our death, our non-physical inner-selves might continue to gain knowledge and emotional understanding in a spiritual realm of being — or maybe there is a process of reincarnation that provides a continuous connection between the simple-consciousness of primates, the self-consciousness of man and the cosmic-consciousness of souls — or maybe we return to empty space, heaven forbid!

Art Carney

Wasilla