THE WORLD has been living with so-called suicide bombers for a few decades now — there have been so many that we almost take them for granted. I use the phrase “so-called suicide bombers” because, as they see it, they are martyrs, and are not really committing suicide. According to their faith, they will go straight to Paradise, with a privileged position in the afterlife. The fact that we in the West call them suicide bombers betrays more than we think.
We of other faiths, and none, have no real answer to the suicide bombers, and surely that raises a fundamental and uncomfortable point about modern belief. The fact that there have been no retaliatory suicide bombs — in Iraq, Palestine or anywhere else — surely raises the question of whether we here in the West truly believe in either an afterlife or Paradise.
Not all religions incorporate belief in an afterlife. Many African ones, for example, have no idea of an afterlife, nor does Judaism. For the Ancient Mesopotamians, the afterlife was a world of darkness and immobility, the apsu, where the diet was dust. In Ancient Egypt the souls of the nobility went to Heaven, in the sky, where the dead kings were, but ordinary people went down to the Field of Reeds, a place not unlike the Nile Valley.
The idea that ethical behaviour could determine one’s fate at death occurred first in northern Iran. Zoroaster, a prophet who lived possibly between 1500 and 1200BC, taught that the soul’s fate was decided at a bridge over an abyss. Someone’s every thought and deed since he or she was 15 determined which afterlife — bliss or the underworld — was appropriate.
At the end of “limited time”, Zoroaster said, there would be bodily resurrection for the righteous. The world would undergo an ordeal when all the metal in the mountains would melt. For the righteous, it would be “like walking on warm milk” but the wicked would perish and, with only the righteous alive, Earth itself would be Paradise.
Meanwhile, the Greeks conceived the idea of Paradise as a specific place. Paradise isn’t mentioned in the early part of Homer’s Odyssey (9th- 7th century BC), in which Athena tells Telemachus that “death is common to all men, and not even the gods can keep it off a man they loved”. Later, however, Proteus tells Menelaus that he will not die; instead, the gods will send him “to the Elysian Plain at the ends of the Earth”.
The Greek word Paradeisos derives from the ancient Persian: pari, around, and daeza, wall. In Babylon pardesu meant orchards of date palms, or vineyards. Only in the 5th century BC were Greeks buried with an obol, a small coin with which to pay Charon, the ferryman who took the dead across the River Styx.
These ideas coalesced further in Israel in the 1st century BC, when the belief emerged that a Messiah would arise and install a new age of bliss, during which the righteous would be resurrected. This too would follow a time of cosmic catastrophe. The debt to Zoroastrianism is clear.
Similar beliefs were adopted by early Christians. The core belief in Christianity is that Jesus “proved” he was the Son of God by being resurrected, confirming that there is life after death. Until the 3rd century AD, Christians also believed that the Second Coming of Jesus would install paradise on Earth in their lifetime. But it never materialised and the concept had to change again. Medieval maps that show the “secret places” of the Earth usually depict Paradise as a garden or island east of India.
Muhammad lived when medieval ideas about Paradise were gaining ground. He claimed he had been there and seen the face of God. The Koran specifies that Paradise is a “fair garden”. In Islam, according to the Koran, one’s deeds on Earth determine the fate of the soul at Judgment, the Day of Doom, “When Heaven shall be split, When the mountains shall be scattered”. The “saved” are given the book of their deeds in their right hand, the damned in their left. They walk the Straight Path spanning this world and Paradise, above the Pit. For the “Companions of the Right”, the passage is easy; for the “Companions of the Left” it is a sword’s width, and they fall. The debt to Zoroastrianism is again clear.
The afterlife, and Paradise, began to decline in importance in Christianity after the Reformation, which removed the clergy from their central role as intercessors between the laity and the Lord. The Roman Church, throughout the Middle Ages, had held that the next world was more important than this one, that the conduct of one’s life on this Earth governed one’s life in the next world. But Protestantism, as it evolved from the 16th century, was more concerned with doing good in this life. It didn’t deny an afterlife, but one’s conscience in this life became more important.Christians still believe in the Resurrection, or say that they do. However, throughout the conflict in Northern Ireland, which involved terrible atrocities on both sides over many years, there was not one deliberate suicide bomb, although there were several occasions when bombers blew themselves up by mistake. Doesn’t this tell us a great deal?
No one in the West today truly believes in the afterlife, or Paradise, in the vivid way that radical Muslims do. We may say we do, but our behaviour shows otherwise.
True, in Christianity and for Roman Catholics above all, suicide is a mortal sin. Despite this, there was a time when Christians had the vivid conviction of present-day Muslims — the age of the Christian martyrs, under the late Roman Empire, when Christians were convinced of the imminence of the Second Coming, and of Paradise. That wave of martyrdom probably helped to bring about the fall of the Empire and marked Christianity’s adoption as the religion of the Roman state, and then of all Europe. But Christians do not have such a conviction any more.
Whatever immediate political changes are wrought in Iraq, isn’t the widespread existence of Muslim “suicide bombers” a long-term threat to the Christian faith, and to the born-again fundamentalists in America in particular (because they claim a literal belief in the Gospels, including the Resurrection)? The Resurrection and the afterlife are the main planks in their belief, so they say. Their lack of action belies their claims.
I am not, of course, advocating that Christians take part in reprisal suicide bombs: that is unthinkable and horrific. My point is that the one-sided nature of this conflict raises uncomfortable theological issues that go well beyond Middle East battles.
Think of one important side-effect that “suicide bombers” are having on the poor and dispossessed around the world. Forget, for a moment, the carnage: if some Muslims are willing to die so readily for their faith, and because of their belief in an afterlife, don’t these “martyrs” offer the dispossessed hope for the future in the way that the early Christian martyrs offered hope to the poor and slaves in the Roman Empire? Whatever else happens in the Middle East, and whatever else is happening in the Bible Belt, is this the beginning of the end for Christianity as a world religion?
DEBATE
Have we lost our faith in an afterlife or Paradise? E-mail debate@thetimes.co.uk
