On my other podcast "Torah Means Teacher" I received a comment from a listener who respectfully challenged my position on the afterlife. So I figure this would be a great topic as it is an ultimate issue. ***Warning this post and podcast may not be appropriate for young listeners or those who are sensitive empaths***
Do you believe in an afterlife?
Why or why not?
Do you think about it much?
While I do believe in an afterlife, I rarely think about it. By rarely I mean almost never.
The times I think about it are when:
So for instance recently I read Mao: The Untold Story.
As I read about the torturous nightmare he inflicted on China, I wonder what happened to his victims when they finally got to escape the hell they were living in. Keep in mind that while he (via his men) were torturing people they would not let them die so as to inflict terror on the people.
And then when you reach the end of the book, Mao basically just dies a decrepit old man, sad he did not accomplish his world domination dreams. No remorse otherwise.
So Mao dies and then what?
How is his one death as an elderly man in anyway just when you considered the 70,000,000 who died horrific deaths due to his actions? What about the 100,000,000 who were tortured under Maoist China?
It is precisely because of this dilemma that I believe in an afterlife.
Well this and because I believe in God.
And it's not just that I believe in God... I also believe He is just and good.
So let me break that down:
Now I'm sure some of you are think my last statement was a non sequitur.
So allow me to explain:
This world is not just.
This world is not good.
Yes your life (like mine thank God) may be good and just, but for many millions of people who exist with you and prior to you and me that is not the case.
Literally millions (perhaps billions) of people have had a horrific or nightmarish existence in this world. Think about the history of humanity. It is tragic.
Whether it be diseases, disasters, or evil people who cause it... the outcome for many is beyond our imagination in regards to pain and anguish.
Since the dawn of civilization we have been our own great source of tragedy, which is my main argument for an afterlife.
Let's just look at the fairly recent 20th history for examples: (Directly from a well done blog: "25 most evil people in history.")
He was the Grand Vizier of the Sultan in the Ottoman empire from 1917 to 1918. In 1915, Talat declared an order to wipe out the Armenian race. People were whipped, tortured, robbed, raped and killed. All of the Armenians were forced into concentration camps. People were overloaded with supplies and forced to trudge miles with no food and they were killed if they couldn’t continue. People were naked when they marched. The whole male population of Angora was exterminated. Many were forced to rape family members. People were killed by bayonets, clubs, axes, hammers, spades, scythes, and saws. Many had their private parts and sexual organs cut off. Tens of thousands were burned, drowned, poisoned, dismembered, crucified, boiled and beaten to death. Out of the population of 2.5 million Armenians, 1 to 1.5 million people were killed. Talat was assonated in 1921 by a Armenian assassination squad.
He was a physician in the concentration camp Auschwitz and the doctor known as the “Angel of Death.” He was in charge of selecting Jews to be sent to concentration camps or to be killed. He practiced many experiments on people. One of the most common experiments was on twins. He would find the similarities and differences in the genetics of twins, as well as seeing if the humane body could be manipulated. There were about 3,000 twins, only 200 survived. The twins were arrange by sex and age. During the experiment, he would pour chemicals into the eyes of the twins to see if it would change their colors into sewing them together in hope to create conjoined twins. He sometimes tried to change the sex of the twins. He sometimes forced parents to kill their children. He tortured children to see how long they could survive. He often beat prisoners to death personally. He sent over 400,000 people to their deaths in the gas chambers. Mengele escaped with his family to South America and lived there the rest of his life. It is possible that he used 88 twins in his medical experiments there. He died from a stroke in 1985 while swimming in the Brazilian ocean.
Reinhard Heydrich was the chief of the Reich Main Security Office, the second most powerful person in the SS and the mastermind of the Final solution. He was one of the highest ranked of all the Nazis and was responsible for many war crimes. His actions caused the deaths of millions of people. He was responsible for the mass murder of Soviet officials and Russian Jews during Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, which killed over a million people. He forced 60,000 Jew to leave Germany and go into Poland, where they were sent to Ghettos. As he chaired the Wannsee Conference, he presented a plan of transportation and deportation of 11 million Jews from every country in Europe to be worked to death or killed. Heydrich thought of the pretext to invade Poland, which killed over 80,000 people and started World War II. There was an assassination attempt on him in 1942. He survived the attempt to kill him, but died 9 days later. In response to his death, Nazis killed nearly everyone in the village of Lidice.
Osama bin Laden was an Islamic terrorist leader that lead the terrorist organization called the Al-Qaeda. He is responsible for the 9-11 attack, which injured more than 6,000 and killed about 3,000. He is also responsible for bombing attacks on the United States Embassies in Dares Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. 212 people were killed and 4,000 were injured. He sponsored the Luxor massacre of 17 November, which killed almost 70 people. Osama has caused other Al-Qaeda bombings throughout the world. The 2004 Madrid train bombings, which killed 191 people and injured 2,050. In October 2002 in Bali, 3 bombs exploded, killing 202 and injuring 209. The 2004 SuperFerry bombing killed 119 people. Thousands of Iraqis have died from Al-Qaeda bombings. In 2007 alone, bombs exploded in Qahtaniya and Jazeera, Iraq, killing 796 and injuring 1,562 people. Osama encouraged other Terrorist groups to attack the United States. He caused the War on Terror, which killed 127,170 to 1.2 million people. Osama was killed on May 2, 2011.
Saddam was dictator of Iraq from 1979 to 2003. During that time, about 2 million people died as a result of his actions. He authorized many attacks on people like the chemical attack on Kurdish village of Halabja, which killed 5,000 people. Saddam’s 1987-1988 campaign of terror against the Kurds killed 50,000 to 100,000. An Amnesty International report said, “victims of torture in Iraq are subjected to a wide range of forms of torture, including the gouging out of eyes, severe beatings, and electric shocks… some victims have died as a result and many have been left with permanent physical and psychological damage.” Saddam also had approximately 40 of his own relatives murdered. He executed over 400,000 Iraqis. Many of them were tortured to death and filmed so he could watch them at his house. In 2006, Saddam was hanged after being found guilty for being convinced of crimes against humanity by the Iraqi Special Tribunal.
Heinrich Himmler was the head of the SS, the second most powerful Nazi and the architect of the Final Solution. He, more than anyone, encouraged and facilitated Adolf Hitler’s decision to implement the Final Solution to the Jewish question, as well as other programs of ethnic cleansing that destroyed millions of lives during World War II. He was responsible for 6 to 7 million deaths of Poles, Russians, communists, and other groups whom the Nazis deemed unworthy to live including people with physical and mental disabilities. Himmler once said “The decision, therefore, lies here in the East; here must the Russian enemy, this people numbering two hundred million Russians, be killed on the battle field and person by person, and made to bleed to death”. His house contained furniture and books made from the bones and skins of his Jewish victims. Himmler committed suicide in 1945 by eating poison.
Adolf Eichmann was the architect of the Holocaust. He was in charge of rounding up Jews into and forcing them into ghettos and concentration camps. He was responsible for day-to day organization of the Final Solution. He organized the registration, cremation and transport of Europe’s Jews. From May until July, 1944 Eichmann organized the deportation and murder of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews. He was responsible for 5 to 6 million Jewish deaths. He would leap into his grave laughing because the feeling that he had 5 million Jews he killed filled his heart with gladness and joy. He once said that he would even kill his father if he was ordered to do so. He escaped and made his way to Argentina and lived under the name Ricardo Klement for 15 years. He was captured in May 1960, Israeli Security captured him and took him to trial. He was tried for 15 charges and hanged.
He was dictator of North Korea from 1948 to 1972. Kim Il Sung started the Korean War, which killed 3 million people. After the war, he brainwashed the people of North Korea into idolizing him, even though he made the country a lot worse than it was before. He killed all of his officers and rivals. In addition, he exiled or executed 90% of his generals that fought in the war. More than 200,000 political prisoners were forced into concentration camps. People were forced into concentration camps for something as little as dropping a picture of Kim Sung accidentally on the ground. If someone committed a crime, the person’s children and the children’s children would also be killed or sentenced to life imprisonment. Prisoners were starved, tortured or worked to death. Prisoners were sometimes forced to kneel in a box motionless for months until he or she dies. Hundreds of thousands were killed by firing squads and in concentration camps. Of the population of 22 million Koreans, 900,000 to 3.5 million have died in a famine. Kim Il Sung died in 1994 of a heart attack, which was brought on by a row with his son Kim Jong Il, who has proven that he is worse than his father.
He was the religious leader of Iran from 1979 to 1989. He was also the leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which killed 3,000 to 60,000 people. The Shia Islamic Law had a lot of harsh rules for the normal people. Men and women had strict dress codes, citizens lost equal rights and met with very harsh punishments, were brutalized, tortured and killed. People were imprisoned and tortured for listening to music. People were lashed 100 times for kissing in public. People were tortured and killed if they did not believe in Allah. People were shot, hanged, blinded, gassed, stabbed in the chest, stoned to death and burned alive. People had their hands cut off for stealing. Women had their faces slashed or burnt by acid. People were killed by machine guns, knives, clubs, cutters, and acid. In the 1988 Iranian Massacres, Khomeini ordered that every prisoner that did not repent anti-regime activities should be killed. About 30,000 people were killed in 5 months while thousands of others were killed for other reasons including children that were hanged from cranes. His followers held 52 Americans captive for 444 days, but there were others there for 6 years. They were blindfolded most of the time. They might have suffered a fate worse than death. He spread his ways across the Middle East. Saddam Hussein feared the spread of Khomeini’s militant brand of Shiism so he attacked Iran, which started the Iran-Iraq War, which caused the deaths of 1 to 2 million people. During the war, Khomeini sent young boys to fight and refused to make peace with Iraq even though there was at least one moment when Saddam offered peace for Iran. Because Khomeini refused to settle peace, Iran’s economy was ruined and 500,000 to 1 million Iranians were killed. His hatred of America and Western society inspired and paved the way for terrorist groups including Al-Qaeda. He paved the way for the Islamic Holy War, which has killed more than 2 million people. Khomeini died from cancer in 1989.
He was emperor of Japan from 1926 to 1989. In that time he and his army committing many war crimes and killed countless numbers of Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos and Indochinese. He committed the war crime called The Rape of Nanking which killed 300,000. He ordered every Chinese war prisoner to be killed. About 200,000 women were sexually assaulted. Husbands were sometimes forced to rape their wives and daughters. A total of 10 million Chinese were forced into slavery, many were tortured and some even eaten. Many people were shot, beheaded, stabbed, burned, boiled, roasted, buried alive, and impaled. People were sometimes killed by gas, aid, military dogs and being hanged by their tongues on iron hooks. People were often used for bayonet practice. Between 4 and 10 million people in Java were forced to work by Japanese military, the majority of which died. People sometimes had their bodies sliced in half by a sword. Women were often stabbed by a bayonet or a long stick of bamboo through private parts. The Japanese disemboweled, decapitated, hacked, nailed, crucified and dismembered men. Men and women sometimes had their private parts sliced open. Thousands were frozen to death. 4 million people in Indonesia died from famine and 2 million in Vietnam. Thousands were killed by chemical attacks. About 400,000 were killed by diseases. About 580,000 were killed after being human experiments. The Sook Ching massacre killed 50,000 to 90,000 Chinese. 100,000 civilians in the Philippines died from the Manila massacre. His men said that it was easy to kill because Hirohito told them that their lives were valueless compared to himself. He told his men to kill, burn, and loot all Chinese. Over 20 million Chinese, 10 million Asians in other countries, and millions of people in World War II were killed by the Japanese. He died in 1989 from cancer.
He was king of Belgium from 1865 to 1909. He ruled the Congo Free State, which was a private project, from 1885 to 1908. The Congo Free State was 76 times larger than Belgium. He is considered one of the greatest liars of all time because he fooled the whole world that he was helping the Congo and the world believed him. Instead he turned the Congo into a country ruled by force labor. He was free to rule the Congo Free State as a personal domain. Leopold ruled about 20 million Congolese. Under his administration, the Congo Free State was subject to a terror regime. The Congo Free State also became one of the most infamous international scandals of the turn of the century. His men tortured, maimed, and slaughtered millions of Congolese. Congolese were killed if they did not bring enough rubber. Hundreds of thousands of people had their hands, legs, feet, arms, heads, ears, and noses cut off. Many villages were burned and the Natives forced to flee into the jungle. Leopold’s men raped, flogged and eat the natives. They slaughtered hundreds of thousands of children. More than 500,000 died from various diseases. A few million died of starvation. Leopold killed around 10 million Congolese (or 50% of the Congo’s population). Before Leopold acquired The Congo Free State, most African countries were free countries, but within 30 years after Leopold acquired the Congo Free State, all but 2 African countries were taken by European countries. He did all of this just to get more money. Leopold died in 1909.
Mao Zedong was dictator of China from 1943 to 1976. Mao’s plan was to make China a superpower country. Mao also said he would turn China into a powerful country that could match the United States and the Soviet Union. In the process however, he created the greatest famine and genocide in history. Under Mao’s rule China endured a series of economic disasters and political terrorism. Millions of Chinese died by execution, starvation and committing suicide. Tens of millions were sent to labor camps. 5 Million were executed. Mao turned neighbors against neighbors and sons and daughters against their teachers and parents. Mao used fear to root out every last hint of dissent. A criticism uttered in private could lead to public humiliation, torture or death. The famine killed about 30 to 45 million people. Millions died from disease. Another 700,000 committed suicide out of fear of Mao. Mao lead 2 Great Leap Forwards which was a plan to use China’s vast population to rapidly transform the country from an rural economy into a modern communist society. Both combined killed 40 to 50 million people. Millions of children were also killed. If children stole food, they would have their fingers chopped off. Mao once lead a revolution that everyone in China was supposed to accept, but if you opposed the revolution, you would either be imprisoned for many years, tortured or executed. People were expected to work till they dropped. People were beaten up and tortured if they could not do their work and if they were late going to work. People were also beaten up if they said something that made Mao or his men angry. Mao’s brutal men had methods of torture like whipping, burning people with incense or with flame of a kerosene lamp and nailing a person’s palms to a table and then to insert bamboo splints under fingernails. Mao killed 70 million people. Mao died in 1976 after suffering from a nervous system disease.
Amin was dictator of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. Amin charmed and promised the world that he would bring peace and democracy to the people of his country. Instead he turned Uganda into a poverty-stricken land patrolled by death squads. Amin was possibly the most brutal and merciless dictator of all time. His rule was characterized by human rights abuses, ethnic persecution, political repression, massacres and the expulsion of 80,000 Asians from Uganda. Amin pitted his people and executed hundreds of thousands of his people. Amin was probably the most sadistic dictator in the 20th century. He would show executions of people on television. Amin tortured and killed his country’s soldiers, government officials, teachers, artists, doctors, journalists, engineers, politicians, police officers, photographers, lawyers, business people, ordinary citizens, ministers and children. Amin’s men tortured and killed people with sledge hammers while Amin kept the pictures for fun and amusement. Amin often had his victims buried alive. Amin would often give the heads of his enemies to crocodiles. Hundreds of thousands of dead bodies washed up to the shores of Lake Victoria. Amin killed 4,000 people by throwing them into crocodile infested rivers. About 50,000 people died from disease, most were children. He would cut the flesh of people and force them to eat it until they died. Amin ate human flesh and he said proudly that he was a cannibal. He also drank human blood. Amin mutilated one of his wives and had her limbs sewn upside down. Amin killed and tortured 300,000 to 500,000 Ugandans. Amin was forced in exile in Saudi Arabia for the rest of his life. Amin died almost 25 years later in 2003. In that time Amin lived a very peaceful life.
Pol Pot was Prime Minister of Cambodia from 1976 to 1979. His plan was to destroy the civilization of Cambodia and turn it into a new age. He turned Cambodia into a killing field. Pol Pot is the only man in history that ordered an official genocide against his whole country and he killed the greatest percentage in the amount of time he was in power. He declared that the Buddhist religion, money, and personal possessions would all be banned. His communist government forced mass evacuations of cities. Millions of Cambodians were displaced, tortured and killed. People were separated from friends and families. People died from effects of slave labor, malnutrition, poor medical care, starvation and execution. Hundreds of thousands were clubbed to death and buried alive. Thousands were killed from disease and torture. Many were hanged. Millions of people including the elderly, pregnant women, and children would stand in water up to their necks in cold and rainy seasons, working on canals, with legs and feet swelling up and bleeding. If you stopped working because of illness, you would not be feed or you would be killed. If a worker made a mistake, he or she would be flogged to death or shot. You would be expected to work until you dropped dead. Many people had no rights to eat. If people were found eating dead humans, they would be buried alive. Pol Pot wanted teenagers to become solders with a love of killing. If Cambodian people married people of Vietnam, the husband and wife would be killed. People that spoke and looked like Vietnamese were also killed. Pol Pot often ordered people to kill and fight Vietnamese. He took pictures of the people he executed and recorded them in detail. Prisoners were forced to drink humane urine. He ordered babies to be torn limb by limb. People were beaten to death by blunt instruments like hammers, spades and axe handles. People were also killed by sharpened bamboo sticks. Some of his men killed people by bleeding them to death. He liked to keep the skulls of dead people. To Pol Pot, his people’s lives were not just cheap, but of no value at all. He killed 1 to 3 million Cambodians, 25 to 33 percent of the country. Pol Pot died in April in 1998 of natural causes.
Hitler was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to his death in 1945, becoming Germany’s Fuhrer. Before he gained power, he wanted to be an artist, but he failed. Then he decided that he wanted to be a member of the German army, he became solder in World War I. When the German army surrendered, Hitler escaped and returned to Germany. He believed that Germany lost because they had surrendered, and it made him bitter. He then turned his attention to the Jews. He believed that the Jews were the cause Germany’s problems and he also believed that the Jews did not count as human beings. His plans were to eliminate every Jew in Europe and to gain world control. He once said “by the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise.” Hitler would kill any Jew, enemy, or anyone that he thought was a problem. He used wounded people that were in hospitals for test experiments for ways of killing, like carbon dioxide gas. These experiments killed over 300,000 people. Every Jew in Germany was sent to concentration camps. Jews in other countries were also sent to concentration camps. All were expected to work until they died or they were killed. Millions of Jews had to watch friends and members of their families die. Jews died from gas chambers, crematories, firing squads, lethal injections, force labor, starvation, poison, exposure, disease, execution, death marches and medical experiments. More than 90 percent of Poland’s Jews were killed. Millions of children died because of him. Hitler betrayed friends and allies in the war. Hitler had a breading program. If the child fell short of Nazi-defined perfection, the child would be killed. Hitler himself was responsible for the deaths of more than 11 million people (5,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 15,000 homosexuals, 100,000 Freemasons, 100,000 of the mentally ill, 500,000 Gypsies, 750,000 Slavs, 3 million non-Jewish Poles, 3 million Russians and 6 million Jews) but his actions caused the deaths of over 50 million people. On 1945, Hitler committed suicide by gunshot and cyanide poisoning.
Stalin was dictator of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1953. When he was young he was a bank robber, an agitator, and an assassin. After a long road to get into power, he became a paranoid, ruthless, unforgiving, brutal and vengeful dictator. He created a 30 year reign of violence, terror, destruction and murdering. Anyone who spied on him, displeased him, or voted against him was doomed to die. His first plan was to create the Soviet Union into an industrial superpower country. To do that would cause the deaths of countless numbers of people. People were sent to slave labors and were forced to work to death. Huge industrial schemes became a living hell for hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions. He signed the death warrants for tens of thousands of people. Stalin only liked people who fourfold his orders, but if you were a popular figure, an intelligent, and independent person, Stalin would order you to be tortured, imprisoned for many years or life, or shot you. He would kill family members of people who loved him and family members of people who horned him as a god. Stalin once kissed a small girl in public, she had become famous and thought Stalin cared for her and her family, but he later killed her parents. People were sometimes killed with an ice pick. About 10 million people died in a famine. Stalin once said “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is simply a statistic.” He killed the wives of some of his friends. He exiled his daughter’s boyfriend, Aleksie Kapler. Stalin’s wife was driven into despair by his treatment of her, which caused her to kill herself. His son died in a Nazi concentration camp after Stalin refused to trade for his life. He would even kill people who were defending their country against the Nazis. People were in prison were force to fight in World War II, but if they returned they would be sent back to prison. Hundreds of thousands of people from other countries were tortured, raped, or killed. People were often killed by mustard gas bombs. More than 1.5 million German women were raped from the Soviet Union. Recent evidence shows that Stalin had his own Final Solution in which hundreds of thousands of Jews were exiled or killed. Stalin wanted the Soviet Union to become a country strong enough to rival the U.S., but if they were stronger than the U.S., he would want the 2 countries to fight a war. Stalin killed 20 to 60 million people. He died in 1953 from a stroke.
So here are 16 distinct examples of a single person doing incredible evil to a mass number of people... and that is just within the last hundred years. This kind of behavior goes back thousands and thousands of years.
And I have not even mentioned the random person who murders another person. Or the rapists. Or the child molestors. Or the sadists.
Unfortunately the amount of unjust suffering and violence in this world is mind boggling.
So what happens to these people when they die?
Stalin murdered 20 - 60 million people, and he died his single death from a stroke... Where is the justice in that?
All these examples I just listed are similar. They murdered and tortured millions of individuals and inflicted unimaginable pain on all those who were associated. But they only suffer their one death?
So as my logic would dictate... assuming God is good and just... then there must be an afterlife... an existence beyond this world where the evil will be subject to greater suffering than what they caused their victims in this world.
And on the other hand, their victims must enjoy an existence of tremendous pleasure, as their corporeal existence was a horrifically pain filled nightmare.
I believe that since God is good and just, and this world is not... then the next world (the afterlife) makes up for the suffering that goes on here.
I have only really mentioned suffering caused by evil, but of course we must not dismiss all the suffering that is just terrible luck.
Diseases, disasters, accidents, and other tragic life events that inflict people every day.
We forget or ignore it because it is not our life... but its someone else's life. Someone else who is as good if not better than you and me.
I truly hope there is another, better world waiting for them. One which somehow cosmically justifies the suffering they endured here.
Likewise, I hope that their is cosmic justice for all those who live lives of evil and wickedness.
If there is no afterlife, or no difference for the fate of those who are evil and their victims, then God and I have a problem.
He is either cruel, unjust, or simply uncaring if that is the case. How could I care more about the pain in this world than He who created it? As Dennis Prager says: If pain were water, the world would drown.
Thankfully, the God I learn about from the Torah is caring. He demands justice. He demands goodness. So it seems perfectly reasonable to me that He is too is just and good. I know, God could be a hypocrite... but I choose not to believe that.
Rather I choose empowering beliefs like, 'God is good', and 'this world is not all that there is.' God is non corporeal so it is logical to assume an nonphysical existence beyond this one. And since this one so often tragic and unjust... then the other one should be its counter and be filled with goodness and justice.
Please God... I hope so!
