I talk a lot about ego. I think that many of the beliefs that still endure in our society initially stemmed from a misunderstanding of the workings of nature and have survived due to the fact that our egos won't let us believe that we don't matter as much as we like to think we do. As human beings, we tend to assume that we are more important than everything else around us. This has been true for many thousands of years and doesn't look like it is going to change any time soon. This is partly arrogance and partly a survival method. Any species in nature places its own existence on a pedestal above everything else.This ensures that that species is able to survive and repopulate.
We, as human beings, seem to think that we are on some sort of elevated plane of existence. We look to higher powers to help us through trivial ordeals. We invent afterlives and guardian angels in order to help us cope with the fact that we won't be on this planet forever. We talk about death as if it is just a doorway to the next plane where await untold riches and untainted happiness. The thought of non-existence is far too heavy for the average ego to handle, so we need to know that there is something afterward. While we can do nothing to comprehend infinity we also accept for ourselves nothing less than eternity. It's almost pompous in its irony.
I would never tell anyone in person not to believe in something that helps him or her through the day, so I won't do it here either. My issue comes when someone asks, point blank, whether someone believes in God, Heaven, or any other power from on high and will not take a simple "no" for an answer. The motivation for asking such a question is usually one of two things; the first is that someone wants to know whether or not to attempt to raise children with you and the other is to set you up for a life-changing enlightenment. Your answer is never the end of a conversation, but the first step in a gauntlet of questions.
The first question is usually about how things began. I like to humor the inquisitor by rattling off the perfunctory, "Big Bang." This is not because I want to have a discussion about the origins of the cosmos, but because it inevitably leads back to the same arrogant question every time. "Oh yeah? Well where did the big bang come from?" Guess what. I don't know. Nobody really does, and that's okay because nobody was fucking there when it happened. We don't know exactly what color a tyrannosaurus might have been either, but you are just fine with letting your kid go on coloring the fucker green in his coloring book.
Some people will also bring up the multitude of stories of people who, on the brink of death, have seen visions of angels and dead relatives. They argue that many of these people see a very similar vision. This must mean that these stories are proof of an afterlife. These people were in the throes of death and saw things that matched closely to one another, how do you explain that? This one is a little trickier than a simple "I don't know." It has been shown that the brain can remain active after the heart stops beating and that in this time our REM functions (the activities in our brain that cause dreams) can activate and even spill over into the waking moments as a person is brought back from perceived death, creating the feeling of being in the real world and the dream at the same time until full wakefulness occurs. There are articles and even books written on this phenomenon and many are quite interesting so I won't go into any kind of detail here. (Really I just don't want to have to site sources of specific quotes.) The fact that many of these people see similar visions is simple. If everyone that reads this closes their eyes and imagines "approaching the light," chances are that we all see things that are fairly comparable.
The need to have an explaination for everything is one of the most rewarding yet taxing qualities of our species. It has caused us to dig deeply into the micro as well as the macro and discover amazing things throughout history, but it has also left room for us to fill in the blanks where we like. Giants that cause volcanic eruptions to punish impure villages and chariots that carry the sun across the sky each day are among some of our ancestors' "explanations" for the natural events around us. Why certain "explanations" have survived while others have fallen into the realm of mythology is lost on me, but someone out there surely has an explanation. It seems that most of our remaining supernatural beliefs are applied to death. Just the word "supernatural" conjures thoughts of ghosts and demons, though its definition is much more broad.
The underlying reason, in my immaterial opinion, is that even with all that we have conquered and all that we have achieved as a species we still have not found a universally accepted way to cope with our own mortality. I think that this comes back full circle to the fact that our egos won't let us believe that we will not somehow carry on to another life or another existence after this one. Our egos and our fears will not let us simply end.
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