Easlier today I posted a message at CaringBridge.org to the family of a man who died of pancreatic family last summer. I'll spare you an accounting of my own philosophical and religious peregrinations. Just accept, please, that I did not easily come to believe as I do now. This is what I wrote:
His time on earth was too short, but there's no doubt he left many wonderful memories for those who knew and loved him.
It takes more than living cells, flesh and blood and bones, neurotransmitters and brain synapses, to make a human being, and according to an astrophysicist I met but whose name escapes me, quantum physics is making it increasingly undeniable that our universe is made up of more than atoms. There's something incredibly powerful, he said, that we can't see or explain, that holds it all together.
Although exposed to many religions, I am no theologian, and hopes of an afterlife are not in vogue in my denomination of my religion. My own thinking and reading and contemplating, however, leads me to the belief that a consciousness, a person, a soul, like Jim, does not perish.
That Incredibly Powerful Something (IPS) could easily prove its existence and our own after physical death, to the satisfaction of any skeptic.
We don't get that proof, not because the IPS is just another something that science can't understand yet, but because it's our time on earth that should hold our attention. We should do good because it's good, not because we're hoping for a big bag of candy in the sky or afraid of some caricature with a pitchfork. That's the test.
No one denies that Jim met that test. I believe that somewhere, somehow, Jim the person will eventually embrace again those he embraced on earth.
May his memory be a profound comfort and blessing.
Paul K. Fauteck