By Pernickety Mee
A shared feature of possibly all religious traditions is the belief that people continue to live even after death—that is, after the death of their physical body. This belief reflects the understanding that we are actually something other than the physical body that we inhabit for the period of our earthly sojourn. This ‘something’ is called by various names in different religious traditions and languages, in English being commonly referred to as the ‘soul’. When our stay on Earth is over, religious traditions tell us, we drop our physical body but yet, we—that is, the soul which is the real ‘we’—continue to live, in some or the other place or on some or the other plane.
Religious traditions, however, differ widely as to where the soul goes after the dropping of the body and what happens to it then. According to one set of such traditions, the soul comes into this world just once, where it assumes the garb of a certain physical body. On death, after it drops this physical body, it waits for God to decide what will happen to it and where it will go. According to these traditions, God has fixed a time sometime in the future for this world to come to an end and for a day to arrive when He will judge all of humankind. On this Day of Judgment, all those human beings who have ever lived will assemble before God to receive His decree regarding their eternal future. God will decide, on the basis of the record of their deeds (and, according to hundreds of millions of people who believe in this theory, also on the basis of their religious beliefs), that some people will go to Heaven/Paradise, there to be richly rewarded, and the rest will go to Hell, there to be severely punished. According to one version of this theory (which likely has hundreds of millions of proponents), once people enter Heaven/Paradise or Hell, they stay there forever, God decreeing that they should live there for all time to come. According to another version of this theory, residence in Hell is or may be temporary.
A very different understanding about what happens to the soul on the death of the physical body is offered by another set of religious traditions which believe in the idea that we have not just one life, but, rather, many, many lives. According to this theory, the soul has been coming into this world and/or some other world(s) innumerable times, each time assuming the garb of a different physical body (whether that of a human being or of some other species). Based on its record of deeds left over from innumerable lives, on dropping its physical body, the soul is reborn (on Earth or possibly elsewhere), where it assumes the form of another physical body. This cycle of birth and death continues until the soul is evolved that it transcends the cycle finally, no longer taking birth and dying and being reborn.
Clearly, the two sets of religious traditions that are considered here have very different understandings of what happens to the soul—the real ‘we’—on death, that is, on the dropping of the physical body. Perhaps there was a time when, because of laziness to think things through for myself, plus unthinking conformity to what was held to be the ‘Truth’ in the circles that I then moved about in, I was inclined towards the theory that posits just one life, followed by Divine Judgment and then being rewarded with Paradise/Heaven and Hell, although I do not know if I ever really took all of it very seriously. But now, after giving this theory some thought, I find that it is quite problematic actually.
One reason that I feel that this theory is problematic is that it gives a person what is possibly too short a period—just one lifetime, consisting of a mere few years at the very most—for their eternal fate, their destiny that lasts for all time to come, to be decided. I really do not know if a single lifetime, no matter how lengthy, can be truly sufficient for the full evolution of the soul to happen and in a manner required for its eternal future to be determined in the best way. I'm not sure if just one lifetime on Earth is adequate for the soul to gain experiences sufficient enough in terms of number and variety for it to mature enough for this purpose. Perhaps the soul needs many, many lifetimes in order to gradually evolve and bloom. But this is something that this theory, which posits just one lifetime for us, by definition rules out.
A second reason why I find this theory problematic is the notion of eternal Hell, an idea that millions of people who believe in this theory derive from their interpretation of certain texts which they consider to be of Divine origin or the Word of God. While I do believe that we get (or, rather, ought to get) what we sow and that we will reap (or, rather, ought to reap) the consequences of our bad deeds, I do not know if any amount of bad deeds committed by a human being in the course of a single lifetime is really bad enough to make them deserving of the punishment of unending torture in eternal Hell, for all time to come, as many proponents of this theory believe. This might not be just and fair, perhaps even in the case of the worst possible sinner. Some people might regard the punishment of enormously painful torture (including maybe things like being hurled into a lake of fire and brimstone, being beaten by maces, being stripped of one’s skin over and over again, and being bitten by snakes and stung by scorpions) that does not stop even for a moment in a limitless Hell as being hugely disproportionate to the crime of limited evil committed by a person during the course of a single, limited lifetime on Earth. Eternal Hell seems a problematic idea to me also because it rules out completely the possibility of the reform of the inhabitants of Hell and their subsequently being sent to a better place, such as Heaven/Paradise, because once one is thrown into Hell, one will, according to this idea, remain there forever. Proponents of eternal Hell seem to think that God utterly despises its denizens, derives sadistic delight in their horrific suffering and just does not want them to change and improve so that they can be eligible to get out of that place finally, once they have been punished enough and purged of their evil tendencies. Eternal Hell makes no room at all for the sinner to mend his ways so that one day, God will deliver him from Hell after he has received adequate punishment there and has become a truly reformed person and thus eligible to be sent elsewhere, including possibly to Paradise/Heaven. The idea behind eternal Hell seems to be of punishment for punishment’s sake, not for the sake of making their inhabitants recognize and repent for their misdeeds and evolve into better beings. I really do not know if this squares well with the idea of a just, loving and compassionate God who truly loves all His children, even the most wayward of them (even though His love goes along with His justice).
A third reason why I find the one-birth-and-after-that-the Day-of-Judgment-and-then-Hell-or-Heaven theory problematic concerns the issue of where the billions of souls presently are that once lived on earth and then died and what is happening with them now. According to a Google search I just did, so far about 117 billion (that is, 117,000,000,000) human beings have ever been born on Earth. If the present human population is around 8 billion, this would mean that till now perhaps a little less than 110 billion humans have lived on Earth and have then died. A question that arises here is: If once we die our eternal fate will be decided by God when He judges us on the Day of Judgment and then He will send us to Paradise/Heaven or Hell, then, given the fact that the Day of Judgment has not arrived as yet, where exactly are these roughly 110 billion souls presently who once lived on earth and subsequently died? If, as hundreds of millions of people believe, we will be sent to Paradise/Heaven or Hell only after God judges us on the Day of Judgment, it is obvious that these tens of billions of souls are not in Heaven/Paradise, nor in Hell, as of now, because the Day of Judgment has not happened as yet. Then, where are these souls? And, what are they doing now wherever they might be? How have they been keeping themselves engaged all this while? What have they been doing ever since they died—which, in the case of the first humans or humanoids that appeared on Earth, possibly happened a couple of billion years ago? Are they amusing themselves, trying to do this and that to while away their time till the Day of Judgment finally arrives? Or, are they waiting in fear and trembling, wondering what God is going to decree for them on that impending Day, eagerly waiting for it to happen so that they can finally be relieved of their agony and boredom? For those who get jittery even on having to stand in a queue at a supermarket or bus-stand for five minutes, waiting for millennia for the Day of Judgment to finally dawn must be excruciatingly painful! Those who love spending every bit of their time creatively and usefully, as well as for incurable workaholics, idling about till the Day of Judgment dawns must be incredibly torturous, a little taste of Hell perhaps. Really, I don’t think God would do anything so mean as to keep billions upon billions of souls stranded in a limbo like this for millennia.
These, then, are some of the reasons why I now find the theory that posits just one life, followed by God’s decree of our eternal fate, in Heaven or Hell, one fine day problematic. Along with this, on all the counts that I now find this theory problematic, I also now find the multiple birth theory to make more sense. Firstly, this theory provides the soul with the possibility of numerous lifetimes, and not just one, to evolve and fully blossom and for its eternal destiny to be worked out. Secondly, because it posits a rebirth and not eternal Hell for an overall ‘bad’ life-record, it is free of all the problematic aspects of the eternal Hell thesis. Thirdly, it provides a convincing answer to where the souls of the deceased may now be (they are present, in some or the other physical body, on Earth or elsewhere, unless they have evolved enough to have been liberated from the cycle of life and birth) and what is happening with them (they are leading their lives, hopefully as best they can).