Do we instinctively need or want to live after death?

As a tiny kid, as soon as I can remember, I was told there's heaven and there's hell. It wasn’t debatable, it was a factual fact of life in the way it was presented to me. There was no doubt and no question about it. That was it. It was further reinforced during my entire youth and in my mind it became a fact of life like, say, gravity. 

Sure, one can argue that humans have a hardwired instinct to survive (self-preservation), but why would this translate into a conscious desire for an afterlife? Evolution favors behaviors that avoid death, not beliefs about what comes after. 

If our awareness of mortality creates anxiety, so here we have a fertile ground for afterlife beliefs if those are systematically implanted when the mind is young is the most malleable or when we are faced with desperate choices, hence the importance placed on systematic and intense religious education for all children, as early as possible, or on poorly educated if not uneducated individuals, by most organized religions. 

It’s true that the idea of ceasing to exist is psychologically hard to swallow, so the most creative among us have constructed the narratives of heaven or reincarnation to reduce that existential fear. Also, since we crave permanence and push back the brutal change that death represents, the idea of an afterlife satisfies this need. 

Existential philosophers like Sartre or Camus have long argued that life has no inherent meaning, and the desire for an afterlife is a human-fabricated belief to avoid facing the thought of mortality. 

Societies quickly discovered that belief in the afterlife was a useful tool for imposing social rules, morality, slavery, and even for bringing in money, or paying in that next life cathedral builders, by dangling paradise rewards or hellish punishment. 

So, in conclusion, we may not have a true instinct for the afterlife, but if it is placed in the center of our lives, it will feed our consciousness and somehow reduce our fear of death. This belief in the afterlife works for most people but not for all, as folks like atheists, materialists, or those who accept mortality may not crave it, but readily accept that the end of life is simply for real. 

In the next blog, we’ll try to see the origin of religious afterlife.