In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

by Sebastian Junger

researchers point to similarities between so-called near-death experiences and religion as evidence of an afterlife, but it’s equally possible that religions have those traits precisely because that’s how people experience dying.

The price of getting to love somebody is having to lose them, I wrote. The price of getting to live is having to die.

Finding yourself alive after almost dying is not, as it turns out, the kind of party one might expect. You realize that you weren’t returned to life, you were just introduced to death.

The world over, people believe in two realities: one we walk around in and the “other” that we go to from time to time.

On some level, the central tenets of quantum mechanics had to be taken on faith, like a new kind of religion—the crucial difference being that science stands ready to be disproven by facts, whereas religion does not.

But what is true at the subatomic level can also be true for the entire universe. Physicists eventually proposed that the universe existed as a nearly infinite wave function containing all possible outcomes until conscious thought forced it to spring into existence in its current singular form.

The entire universe can be understood mathematically to the subatomic level, but only religion claims to know how it came to exist in the first place. Math and reason fail utterly in this regard.