Is there a life after death? This has been the most common question of the ages since the first human stood beside the grave of a loved one. We have always longed for immortality because of our obsessive fear of death and our inability to accept the thoug ht of annihilation. Death is the single greatest fear that most mortals everywhere share. Our hope for everlasting life is a result of our egocentric mentality that won’t permit us to accept us to accept the fact that in the scheme of the universe and nature we have no special, pre-ordained purpose and in death we are no more important than th e most insignificant of creatures. With few exceptions, religions in the western world exploit our all consuming desire for life after death by promising us that if we obey the dogmas of their special creed, which is the "Divine Truth" from their omnipotent deity, we shall have eternal lif e in a heaven or paradise. Humanists, those who use intellectually objective reasoning and are no longer brainwashed clones from our ancestral background, hold that all gods, religions and creeds are man-made beliefs based upon ancient folk tales, tribal myths, allegories and primi tive superstitions. If immortality were true, it would be fact of nature and have nothing to do with a leap of faith or a belief in religious creeds. And if we had a soul which was to live forever, it would be a fact of nature absolutely apart from the endless beliefs that w e humans, in desperation, have sought and created. Nature emphatically denies immortality and all creatures that live will die and revert to their elements in the earth. Since the final pages of Biblical writings nearly 2,000 years ago, we cannot find one single, legitimate and documented historical incident when any soul or spirit of a deceased has ever returned to earth and made her/his presence known. Not Jesus, not Mo hammed, not Moses, not Buddha, not Brahma, none of the prophets, none of the popes and none of the so-called saints. Only a few over-zealous, perhaps paranoid religious fanatics have ever claimed visions and spiritual visitations. But where is the evidenc e? Life, death and the existence of a soul was best expressed by Omar Khayyam, the great Persian philosopher-poet, when he said:
Oh threats of hell and hopes of paradise! One thing at last is certain-this life flies; One thing is certain the rest is lies; The flower that once has blown forever dies. I sent my soul through the invisible, Some letter of the after-life to spell: And by and by my soul returned to me, And answered, "I myself am heaven and hell".
People, in their self-serving desire for immortality, invented a soul, a mystic something necessary for the illusion of life everlasting. The soul is the most ridiculous idea ever invented to satisfy a longing for a future state of existence—it is the ver y essence of narcissistic egoism. The idea of a hereafter is but a dream of cowards, who fear to gently into the night. One of the world’s greatest biologist’s, Ernest Haeckel, said the following:
The human soul is only a purely physical
function of the brain cells and ceases at death.
All productions of the human mind and intellect are
fundamentally mere muscular activities.
Therefore,immortality of the soul is a myth without
scientific foundation.
Nothing leaves the body at death except
our last breath.
The knowledge of our condition before life does not fill us with horror, so why should the thought of the same condition after death be so horrifying. We end a sentence with a period which denotes and end. Life for every individual is a sentence and at be st a paragraph in the eternity of time, and nature places a period at the moment of death to denote the end of the existence. Science united with reason declares the soul of theology a myth. When we die, we are dead—period.