QUESTION:
Dear Mr. Armstrong,
I, like most of your followers, read your findings, with great interest! You are, most definitely,
Providing that, which is sorely lacking in the World, ….. Honesty! Many people, can deal with
Life’s ups and downs, provided they feel they are not being lied to!
I know, I most likely should not go there, but what the “H” !
The majority of people, wonder, in the course of their lives, if there is actually an after-life, and indeed, a God?
This is obviously, Not anything dealing with, Markets, Currency’s, Govt’, Politics, Social fabric,… or… lack Thereof, etc. etc.
Since you, are the developer, and owner of Socrates, have you ever asked
Questions, approaching this subject, and have you ever possibly received an Answer you
would care to shed light upon? Since, nothing in this Life, is certain, except Death & Taxes, I,
Like many, I would be highly curious! Thanks for all you do! You will definitely go down in
History, provided your Socrates, does not land in the hands of a crooked Politician! Of course,
We all know, there isn’t such a thing …….. ???? !
RB
ANSWER: This is a touchy subject for some. I suppose it boils down to your fundamental religious belief. Nevertheless, virtually every religion has believed in the here-after and often the last judgment and resurrection, which is by no means limited to Christianity. I have studied ancient cultures seeking to understand how they rise and fall. I have put this together in a report that we will release before Christmas for everyone.
Even the ancient Egyptians believed in the afterlife, last judgment, and resurrection. Mummification was a practice adopted because they believed that the body needed to be preserved in order for the dead to be reborn. The Egyptians realized that the bodies needed to be safeguarded for the soul to return. Christianity was not such a foreign concept. The Greeks believed Hercules was the son of a god. The oldest religion was Zoroastrianism, which believed in good and evil and that there will be the ultimate conquest of evil. It is also believed that the three Wise Men that visited the birth of Jesus were Zoroasters who believed in one god.
Religion has undoubtedly formed a fundamental foundation of culture and history. That said, there is something that exists which indeed connects us all. Some people do not believe in psychics, yet we all have that ability to varying degrees. You think of someone and the phone rings. Or we just get a bad or good feeling when we meet someone. There are people throughout the centuries who have appeared to be able to communicate with the dead.
Einstein himself wrote a letter of condolence to the Besso family upon the death of his friend in 1955. Einstein explained: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Perhaps that is correct and that the past, present, and future are all simultaneous. Those who can communicate with the dead have demonstrated that there is such an existence. When we think of someone and the phone rings, this too is demonstrating that there is some sort of universal connection that is not confined by any limitation imposed by distance.
When Socrates was sentenced to death, his response has always been a guiding light to me in times of adversity.
Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things: – either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king, will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night.
But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this? If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world, and finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making. What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. I, too, shall have a wonderful interest in a place where I can converse with Palamedes, and Ajax the son of Telamon, and other heroes of old, who have suffered death through an unjust judgment; and there will be no small pleasure, as I think, in comparing my own sufferings with theirs.
Above all, I shall be able to continue my search into true and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in that; I shall find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is not. What would not a man give, O judges, to be able to examine the leader of the great Trojan expedition; or Odysseus or Sisyphus, or numberless others, men and women too! What infinite delight would there be in conversing with them and asking them questions! For in that world they do not put a man to death for this; certainly not. For besides being happier in that world than in this, they will be immortal, if what is said is true.
(Apology)
If you turn to Asia, the Buddhists believe in reincarnation. Nirvana is the ultimate spiritual goal in Buddhism that marks the release from having to be reborn here time and time again until you get it right. I suppose that the vast majority of people believe or want to believe in an afterlife. I believe there is significant evidence that we are all connected in a very interesting way. Even the CIA conducted tests on psychic abilities. They discovered that there were abilities that are scientifically unexplainable.
Throughout millennia, there has been a consistent belief in the hereafter. There are even dozens of burials in the southwestern Siberian village of Staryi Tartas where human remains were positioned in pairs facing each other. The rare couple burials are among 600 graves dating to between the 17th and 14th centuries BC from the Bronze Age Andronovo culture. The fact that even in the Stone Age there was respect for the dead. This respect has been a tradition in human communities that appear from the very beginning. But Socrates cannot answer that question. It can show the correlations with religions and demonstrate the similarities of cultures around a central belief system. It cannot confirm or deny the existence of an afterlife.
