A recent article in the Niagara Falls Review got me thinking about the idea of life everlasting and the sometimes self-righteous beliefs of the religious that salvation is reserved exclusively for them. 

 

"...the hope of immortality of some kind is mooted at funerals but always in traditional church language and in archaic conceps that make little appeal or good sense to modern men and women," Harpur writes. He cites Raymond Moody's 1975

bestseller Life After Life as inspiration for his view that there is a great need for a

renewed ideology on the subject of life and death.

 

Moody's book investigated over a hundred human subjects who had been

pronounced clinically dead--yet were revived and able to relive and tell of their

experiences on the brink. Most of these subjects were revived with a different attitude

altogether; many reported no longer having any fear of death at all, and went on to live

full lives of love, charity and service having been so changed from their experiences.

However, many religious orders reject the idea of Tom, Dick or Harry's claims of a

glimpse of eternity--a point of contention for Moody and Harpur. Harpur writes, "The

idea that perhaps John Doe or some other "unsaved" member of the general public

could catch a vision of a warm, all-embracing, wholly accepting Light awaiting them

behind death's door, or could enter into a heavenly realm without first having jumped

through all the sacred hoops prescribed by this or that narrow creed seems just too

much for many of the elect to embrace."

 

Yet, ironically, the Bible is all for this all-embracing idea of life after life--it's just that

so many preachers and believers aren't reading it properly. I would like to leave you

to consider the metaphysical writer Emmett Fox's comments on the famous line from

Psalm 23: "Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no

evil, for Thou art with me."

 

In his book Power Through Constructive Thought, Fox writes: "I know that because Thou  are Life, there is no death, and I note that the Bible speaks not of death, but of the shadow of death, which is our false belief. There is no death, but the seeming loss of Thy Presence."