Dennis Prager argues that there is an afterlife… and his reasons why are the worst forms of appeal to emotions imaginable.
His very first claim is this: “If there is a god, there is an afterlife.” This claim is patently ridiculous. If there is a god, there may or may not be an afterlife. Gods, after all, are by definition infinitely far beyond us; they would be the ultimate aliens. Perhaps some hypothetical god made mankind in his image… as a project out of boredom, or as a joke, or for any of an infinite number of reasons that have nothing to do with that god having some desire to have the souls of dead humans flitting about cluttering up his crib. Heck, perhaps “god” is Azathoth, who blindly created the universe without the slightest bit of conscious thought or intention, and all life within the universe is merely an emergent property, the result of the natural processes occasionally bringing together conditions right for biogenesis and evolution.
And then he goes on to claim that without an afterlife, there’s no possibility for “ultimate justice” either for victims or victimizers. But so what? Just because you *want* there to be justice – in particular, *your* conception of justice – doesn’t mean there *is* justice. Me, I want to be rich and attractive to the wimmins and important to western civilizations conquest and colonization of the universe. But just because I want those doesn’t mean that they are reality, or ever will be. And of course there’s always the possibility that there is indeed an afterlife, but it’s one you just don’t want. Maybe God really does love us so much that there’s just the one destination; let’s call it Heaven. Everyone gets to go there. Once there, God spends eternity showering us with his love. However, his love comes in the form of hydrofluoric acid mixed with lemon juice and small glass shards because to God, that sort of thing is *awesome.* What, do you think your idea of Heaven would be all that spectacular for, say, fleas or dust mites?
And a related argument: without an afterlife, he’ll never again see dead loved ones, and he thinks that if he believed he’d never again see the dead, he’d go mad. But then, there have been millions of perfectly sane atheists and agnostics who believed they’d never again see their beloved dead. Sadness and grief are bad, but not necessarily so bad that madness is the inevitable result. And the other side of the coin: a day ago I posted a video by a feller who seems pretty convinced that he’ll get to see his dead loved ones again…and he was clearly as crazy as a five gallon bucket of ass crack spackle.
Prager says that the thought of an afterlife keeps him sane because without an afterlife, torturers would get away with their crimes. But that’s just exactly the problem. If you put your faith in supernatural justice, rather than cops, courts and John Moses Browning, then you’re much more prone to let the torturers get away with it, because the afterlife will be sure to get ’em, so why is it any of your bother?
The arguments presented in the video are all exactly wrong. They are utterly worthless appeal to emotion logical fallacies, rather than logical arguments supported by facts and evidence. I’m honestly stumped as to who this video is meant to sway. I can only assume it’s meant to console those who already hold the same position he does.
If you want to convince someone that the afterlife exists… provide some incontrovertible evidence. How hard can it really be? People have been pondering the afterlife for at least 6,000 years of recorded history; surely in all that time if there is an afterlife, there’re some hard facts amenable to rational scientific testing.
Seriously, though. If someone comes to me and says, “I believe in an afterlife,” my first response is “why.” If their response is “because I just do,” hey, I can fully respect that. I got my own unsupportable beliefs that exist on no firmer footing than “because.” If, however, they justify their belief with painfully flawed arguments, arguments so bad as to be not just laughable, but essentially fraudulent, I gotta cringe. If they are making money pretending to be wise experts on the topic and they crank out these dumbass arguments, I really gotta point and laugh.