Bringing It All Together

In the previous post, I referred to Morecambe. Coincidentally, I then reread Poul Anderson's Mother Of Kings (New York, 2003) to the point where Eirik Blood-ax lands in Morecambe Bay. See here.

The previous posts on Paganism and Christianity were here and here. Two more recent posts on this theme are here and here.

Gunnhild, far-seeing Eirik's last battle in the form of a swallow, is pushed aside by departing souls but does not know where they go. Why should they go anywhere?

"Men believed they knew, many and many a belief."
-Poul Anderson, Mother of Kings (New York, 2003), Book Three, Chapter XX, p. 274.

Some say, "I believe..." Some say, "I know..." Which? Gunnhild says that they believe they know. Claims to communicate with the dead or to experience the postmortem state should be assessed scientifically.

People seemed to leave their bodies in sleep and to visit another realm where they could meet (i.e., dream about) the dead. So it seemed that selves leave their bodies temporarily in sleep and permanently at death but the mere consciousness of not being alive was not a happy prospect. When society divided, so did the hereafter: warriors went to Valhalla, everyone else to Hel. Only later were social divisions overturned (the good rewarded and the poor compensated) in the hereafter.

Greek philosophers who believed that, if there was any immortality, then it was in the soul, not in the body, laughed when St Paul told them that God had raised a man from the dead. Christians, the great synthesizers, came to accept both Biblical resurrection of the body and philosophical immortality of the soul. The Buddha analyzed everything, including the mind, as a temporary coming together of constituents that will inevitably separate again, thus no immortality anywhere.

An Ythrian, told of the belief that "'...the spirit outlives the body...,'" snaps:

"'How could it?...Why should it?'"
-Poul Anderson, "The Problem of Pain" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), pp. 107-134 AT p. 122.

I am with the Buddha and the Ythrian although I am interested in any evidence.