The Hereafter

How to believe in the afterlife?

N says that it must exist - that there is <<too much love in the world for this to be everything.>> But I don't feel enough tension between these two forces - love and death - for this to be problematic. Couldn't there be too much love in the world for there to be more than 'this'? Or conversely, couldn't there be too much pain and suffering in the world for there to be an afterlife?

I have a different suggestion: in our world time is sequential (apart from, perhaps, at sub-atomic level or as we approach the speed of light). We live in chronos-time, where an afterlife must follow this life with death acting as the crucial marker in time separating the two. The afterlife is something else, somewhere else, belonging to the next period of time after the one in which our bodies are alive.

Time is subjective of course - it goes slower in a boring class, faster in a film, it stops in car crashes. Perhaps chronos time is one of the filters we use to turn noumena into phenomena. Noumenal time could be very, very different.

Ancient mythology included other kinds of time - particularly kairos, an undetermined period during which particular, peculiar or special events occur. Even as our lives are replaced, sequentially, by death, they could continue to exist in undetectable kinds of time. Perhaps to a time-less being - God - we are always alive, all events happening together, non-sequentially, although the concept expressed by 'together' relies on an idea of chronos time which is meaningless to God.

The afterlife has, occasionally, become an obsession within Christianity, generating theological contortions such as purgatory, limbo and chantries. We hear regularly of the virgins promised, apparently, to posthumous Islamic suicide bombers in the hereafter. If we are going to think about the hereafter at all our starting point should be the 'everlasting life' rather than 'afterlife', what does it mean to live forever? Is it like moving house into a new kind of 'existence' so that death never really takes place? Or is it the 'forever' part we should focus on - what happens to time when something lasts forever?