Maybe Christians Do Not Believe in an Afterlife

While less known, there has been a thread of secular theory passed down since the so called "Time of Christ." Much of this writing has made light of the religious concept of an afterlife.

Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE), a Roman General, naturalist, writer and philosopher, was an example. He wrote the afterlife theory adds to the anguish of death by causing one to worry he/she might not measure up. Why not, he wrote, simply recognize that nature prevented you from existing before you were born and will treat all of us in an identical way after we die.

In the 1500's, Frenchman Montaigne, who was a nominal Catholic, wrote of the Christian hypocrisy about an afterlife. He noticed Christians live the lives of secularism by valuing their contemporary lives. Yet they pretend to place a higher value on the afterlife. 

Even Martin Luther upon the death of a daughter said he felt a grief that was not supposed to be there. He was experiencing a kind of secular view of life.

In 1843 LudFeurbach wrote (The Essence of Chistianity) that when humans worship God they are simply worshiping what they themselves value and attributing it to God. A new book plots the parallel paths of the afterlife based in the Bible alongside the secular life in published writing. 

One of the most interesting threads of thinking is about time. Marx wrote some of the best early work about the value of time. It had implications for religion. Since we have but one life, the use of time has extraordinary value. One value is time used for producing food and shelter humans need for survival. Another kind of value is leisure time which most of us consider more valuable than time at work.

I've written here often that practicing religion on the theory there may be an afterlife is not a smart trade off. When one squanders time in his/her only life it is destroying forever a valuable resource. From the new book, "...our own lives, our only lives, are taken away from us when our time is taken from us."

We are in the early stages of theory of secularism that is married to economics. There is good stuff coming in our direction.