Is There Life Beyond This One? (Part 1) by Rudolf Okonkwo
After taking off on March 2, 2004, over ten years ago, and
travelling 6 billion kilometers, last month a European spacecraft called
Rosetta orbited the nucleus of comet 67P otherwise called Churyumor
Gerasimenko.
It was the first man-made object to essentially catch a
comet, often referred to as the solar system’s most mysterious object. On November
11, 2014, a probe called Philae will self-eject from Rosetta and land on the
comet. Philae will drill into the nucleus of the comet and perform tests,
beaming the results to Rosetta for onward transmission to earth. In December
2015, the Rosetta, flying along with the comet will come close to the sun at a
distance of 111 million miles.
The data this Rosetta exploration will reveal will help us
understand a little bit more about the history of the solar system. Scientists
working on the Rosetta may even prove the theory that it was a comet that
brought water and, consequently, life, on earth. They hope to answer nagging questions
like: Are there other forms of life out there? If there are other forms of life
could that change our beliefs and our perceptions of ourselves in this
universe? If there are other forms of life in this vast and expanding universe,
could that help us understand what form of life we will transform into after
death?
Thanks to Facebook, I recently saw the body of Prophet
Elijah Ireti Ajanaku of Christ Victory Chapel International lying in state. The
church leader had died eleven months ago. Disputes within his family had
delayed his burial until July. Some folks in his flock were denying that he was
really dead. Instead of commuting the body into the ground and letting the dust
return to dust and the ashes to ashes, they held up hope that he would rise again
and return to the pulpit. The body in the coffin looked as dead as a floppy
disc. The light skinned preacher who oversaw a congregation of ardent followers
had turned dark in complexion. Looking at his recoiled mouth, the one that
muttered feigned and unfeigned beliefs, one wondered if it had recoiled in
penitence. His bushy eyelids that once flashed confidence seemed coy and
pleading for absolution of sins. His hands that once clutched the holy book
with gusto and the microphone with a lover’s grip were wilted.
There are essentially five great questions in life: Who am
I? Where am I? Where did I come from? How did I get here? And where do I go
when this is all over?
Man’s attempt to answer these questions resulted in all
the religions we have had, the ones we have, and the new ones we are yet to
get. The first religion that will provide irrefutable answers to these
questions will win the war of the religions.
The trouble that every religion encounters is that the
answers it provides today are challenged by new human awareness that comes into
being tomorrow. Adherents of every religion are in constant struggle to
reinterpret their religion to keep it relevant. A religion dies when it can no
longer be bent to explain today's world within the context of its original
precepts.
In the meantime, since we are already here, we cannot do
much about where we came from and how we came here. We see bits and pieces of
where we are, and our minds have conjured up little ideas of who we think we
are. We can be at peace with those two questions but each day we spend here, we
are one step closer to our exit. So the most urgent of the questions is: what
really happens when we die?
All the shenanigan we display after the death of someone
can be attributed to two things. One is our effort to reaffirm our belief in
what happens after death. The other is our effort to dispel our doubts in our
belief in what happens after death. When our actions are rooted in culture, it
is a culture formulated for the same two reasons.
Sometimes, the dead make their own demands on how they
should be buried. Being that the dead made these demands while they were still
alive, the demands are often based on their limited understanding of life here
and life after death. For some, being that death is the final hurrah, they make
demands they hope will preserve their memory in the hearts of those left
behind.
Irrespective of what religion we subscribe to, the central
piece of each of them is that upon our death we cross over to another realm
where we would be judged based on our performance while we were alive. With few
exceptions, most striving religions do not create a loophole that says our
place after death will be determined by what those we left behind do when we
die.
What happens to us when we die does not depend on the
number of Bishops or Imams that attended our funeral. It does not depend on the
number of people in the crowd that came to wail or the number of cows that our
family slaughtered to feed the multitude. It does not depend our how many
masquerades danced at our funerals or how many prayers were reverently offered.
Most of the things we do for the dead are actually actions aimed at serving and
soothing the living.
The Igbo say that the day we mourn others is really the
day we mourn ourselves. That is simply what we do. We mourn our fear that we
lack an undisputable understanding of what really happens when we die. We mourn
things we didn’t do for the dead, things we wish we had done. We mourn our fate
in the belief we hold which death, more than anything else, forces us to
confront.
If anything changes in the fate of the dead because of the
activities of the living, it amounts to a desecration of the central core of
most religions. It would be like taking the Joint Admission Matriculation and
Board(JAMB) examination, when JAMB was still JAMB, and scoring below the cut
off mark, yet making it into the university. Praying for the dead who failed
the test in life to make it to heaven is like bribing someone at JAMB to get a
candidate who failed to make the cut off mark admission into the university.
Subscribing to that, pursuing it, amounts to a belief that God can be bribed.
Remove all the fluff, religion is man’s attempt to explain
where we came from, where we are and where we will be going after we die. Each
religious book attempts to do this using the worldview of the time they were
conceived. The books use objects within their environment and time to advance
an explanation. Those written in the Middle East use the vegetation of the
region, the animals of the era and the food and the culture to explain life.
When they try to explain the sky above and the world outside their reach, even
in their vagueness, they make errors.
That is why the books, despite the inspirations that are
said to have come from God, even the ones said to have been directly dictated
by God, did not mention the dinosaurs. The reason is simple: at the time when
these books were written, the writers were ignorant of life on earth millions
of years before them. Nobody then had imagined the existence and, later, the
extinction of the dinosaurs. If they knew they would have integrated it in
their explanations. Leaving such a major factor out showed the limitations of
their understanding.
Records showed that in 1676, a 20-foot knee joint of a
dinosaur was discovered in a limestone quarry in England. It was the first
dinosaur bone ever discovered and the people who saw the bone thought it
belonged to giant human beings, the type mentioned in the Bible. At that time,
there was no understanding that there were species long extinct. In 1820, a
British couple in England discovered some fragments of dinosaur bones that were
thought to belong to giant lizards. In 1841, paleontologist Sir Richard Owens
studied these bones and determined that the bones of these creatures were held
beneath the body and as such were from creatures different from lizards. He
then called them dinosaurs.
It will be important to mention that most religious books
mention giant men and giant creatures. The Quran talked about giant creatures
and the Bible in Job 40: 15-24 and 41: 1-34 talked about Behemoth and
Leviathan. Adherents of these religions spilt hairs all in an effort to argue
that those were references to the dinosaur. It should be okay that the books did
not mention the dinosaur especially when it is known that the dinosaur became
extinct some 66 million years ago and modern man appeared only 55,000 years
ago. In the days of the dinosaur man was not in existence. But the idea that
the all-knowing God left that story out has adherents scrambling for an
explanation.
Religions die when their explanations of life around us
become inadequate. There are over 300 dead gods out there, including the likes
of Zeus who once had millions of worshipers. The biography of the dead gods
will read like the evolution of mankind’s belief. Of course, our God is
different. Time kills all gods except ours. Unfortunately, those who worshiped
Zeus believed that too.
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