274. 4. Doubts about divine providence may be raised by observing the widespread ignorance of the fact that we go on living as individuals after death, and also observing that this has not been disclosed before. The reason for this ignorance is that deep inside everyone who does not abstain from evils as sins there is a secret belief that we do not go on living after death and that therefore it does not matter whether you say that we go right on living after death or that we are resurrected on the day of the Last Judgment. If some belief in resurrection does occur, people say to themselves, "I am no worse than anyone else. Whether I go to hell or to heaven, I will have plenty of company."
But everyone who has any religion at all has an instinctive realization that we do live as individuals after death. The belief that we live as souls and not as individuals is not held by any people except those who have been deluded by their own intelligence. The following observations show that everyone who has any religion at all has this instinctive realization that we live as individuals after death.
1. Everyone thinks this when dying.
[2] 2. All who deliver eulogies over the dear departed raise them into heaven and describe them as among the angels, talking with them and sharing their joy; sometimes these speakers even deify the dead.
[3] 3. The common people all believe that if they have lived well, then when they die they will enter a heavenly paradise and be clothed with white robes and enjoy eternal life.
[4] 4. Clergy all say something like this to the dying; and they believe it while they are saying it--unless they happen to be thinking about the Last Judgment.
[5] 5. All believe that their [deceased] children are in heaven and that after their own death they will see the [deceased] spouse whom they love. No one believes that these dear ones are ghosts or, even worse, that they are disembodied minds floating around the universe.
[6] 6. No one raises any objections when something is said about the lot and state of people who have crossed from time to eternal life. I have told any number of people that this was the lot and state of one individual or another and I have never heard anyone reply that their state was nothing at this point and would not be anything until the Last Judgment.
[7] 7. When people see paintings or statues of angels, they believe that this is what they look like. No one then thinks that angels are bodiless spirits or breezes or clouds the way some scholars describe them.
[8] 8. Catholics believe that their saints are real people in heaven and that other people are somewhere else as well. Muslims believe this about their deceased; Africans especially do so; and so do most peoples. How can it be different for Protestants who know this from the Word?
[9] 9. This universal instinctive realization leads some people to strive for deathless fame, so that they translate their instinct into a form that makes them powerful heroes in times of war.
[10] 10. I have asked around in the spiritual world whether everyone has this instinctive realization and have discovered that it is there in the spiritual concepts of everyone's inner thinking, but not in the more material concepts of everyone's outer thinking.
We can tell from this that we need have no doubt about the Lord's divine providence because of the thought that it is only now being disclosed that we live after death. That is only our sensory self talking, the self that wants to see and touch in order to believe. People who cannot think on a higher level than that are in total darkness about the actual state of their lives.
