Blackwell Reference Online

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The human drive for meaningfulness is faced with challenges, not the least of which is death. Most religious traditions interpret death as the gateway to destiny and as the fulfillment of life's meaning. To the secular world death remains no less profound a challenge to meaningfulness. This chapter will consider theoretical, then religious, and finally secular approaches to death.While no one possesses evidence of a kind that can persuade skeptics that an afterlife awaits them, few ideas are more important if they are actually true. It was that kind of quandary that led the philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–62) to the idea of a wager to be made with oneself: if one lives a religious life and heaven exists, one wins, and if there is no heaven, one loses nothing; but if one does not live religiously and there is a heaven, one loses. The odds thus come down on living a religious life. Today some might add that if the religious life involves constraints on how one would otherwise prefer to live and, if there is no heaven, then one loses by living a religious life. Pascal's wager points out the close relationship that exists in many cultures among morality, religion, and the afterlife. Plato's concept of a heaven-like ideal world, in which ideas of truth and beauty exist in their fullness, from which the soul comes into the body before birth, and to which it goes after its period of relative ... log in or subscribe to read full text