Why You Want a Physicist to Speak at Your Funeral

My wife sent me this brilliant piece this morning.  The original author is Aaron Freeman.  It first appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered in 2005.  As you’ve probably figured out by now, I tend to identify myself as a somewhat religious person.  The professional language used here is not the one in which I’m trained, but I nevertheless find it beautiful and inspiring.  I would even go so far as to say that the physicist and the minister (this one, anyway) are describing, each in their own way, the same grand mystery of ultimate reality, in which we all live, move, and have our being.

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral.

You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got… (Click to read the full article)

How Important is the Afterlife?

Ok class,

My classes will never be as cool as this guy's.

Time to sit up and pay attention.  I’m asking YOU a question today, so I want to see lots of answers and comments down below!

This is a question that my philosophy students at Utica College are pondering and discussing this week and I thought it would be fun to put it before you.

I was having lunch at a cafe yesterday when someone walked up and handed me a religious pamphlet that asked whether I knew for sure that I was going to heaven when die.  This is an interesting question.

It’s even more interesting that so many in the fundamentalist camp choose to start their evangelistic pitch with this question.  If one’s faith is based on fear for the ego’s survival in an unknown afterlife, then it doesn’t seem to be qualitatively different from the dog-eat-dog drive for survival in this world.

I’m not trying to disparage eternal hope for anyone, but during Holy Week, Christians celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus.  Jesus was willing to sacrifice himself.  His vision and ultimate concern was much larger than his drive for egoic survival.  He embraced death willingly and so became the primary model by which Christians measure their faith.

There is an extent to which I believe we Christians are called to do the same.  Jesus said, “Take up your cross and follow me.”  Christians like to remind each other that Christ died for us, but there is also a very real sense in which we are called to die with Christ.  We are participants, not merely consumers, in the unfolding drama of eternity.

Friedrich Schleiermacher said it like this in On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799):

Religion is the outcome neither of the fear of death, nor of the fear of God. It answers a deep need in man. It is neither a metaphysic, nor a morality, but above all and essentially an intuition and a feeling. … Dogmas are not, properly speaking, part of religion: rather it is that they are derived from it. Religion is the miracle of direct relationship with the infinite; and dogmas are the reflection of this miracle. Similarly belief in God, and in personal immortality, are not necessarily a part of religion; one can conceive of a religion without God, and it would be pure contemplation of the universe; the desire for personal immortality seems rather to show a lack of religion, since religion assumes a desire to lose oneself in the infinite, rather than to preserve one’s own finite self.

The question I am putting before you, superfriends and blogofans, is taken from chapter 9 of William Rowe’s Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction.

How important to religion is the belief in personal survival after death?  Do you think that religion must stand or fall with this belief?  Can you imagine a viable religion which accepts the view that death ends everything?  What would such a religion be like?  Explain.

Post your answer in the comments below!

The Kingdom of God Has Come Near to You

Tonight’s Lectio Divina at St. James Mission came from Luke 10:1-11, 16-20.

As one member of our community pointed out tonight, it’s more than a little unsettling that Jesus tells the seventy to “rejoice that [their] names are written in heaven” rather than celebrate the tangible good that was accomplished during their ministry.  Isn’t that just one more example of Christian indulgence in irrelevant escapism?  It certainly seems so.

It doesn’t help that most popular images of heaven involve pearly gates and golden streets on clouds with angels and harps.  Could anything be more divorced from real life?

Someone suggested another image of the afterlife: you and me in the ground, becoming part of the vibrant ecosystem that exists underground.  What if we could somehow sense the presence of the worms and flowers that transform our broken bodies into sources of nourishment?  We might even be able to reconnect with the creative harmony that was lost when we left Eden.

This image of the afterlife is certainly more engaged and engaging than antiseptic visions of “pie in the sky when you die”.  Not only that, but I think it is more consistent with biblical visions of the prophet Isaiah and John the Elder, where the New Jerusalem is portrayed as an international garden-city.  With gates wide open 24-7 (just like the Waffle House), the nations of the world coexist in a multi-cultural rainbow of celebration.  Instead of an eight-lane highway running through an industrial wasteland, there is a tree-lined river.  This biblical vision of harmonious heaven-on-earth bears more resemblance to the teeming underground ecosystem than it does to clouds and fat babies with wings.

I think we get a foretaste of this biblical vision in today’s gospel text as Jesus commissions the seventy disciples to go and tell people, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.”  Look at what the disciples are doing as they proclaim their message: they are inviting others to participate in an ever-widening community of healing and hospitality.  The Kingdom of God starts here and now as followers of Christ venture out to get dust on our feet and dirt under our nails.

Maybe we can rejoice after all that we are included in this dynamic, organic, and vibrant community?