The belief in immortality

Death is the final doom, says the skeptic, and there is no beyond. Life is but the beginning of death and death is everything. From oblivion we come and to oblivion we return. We play our part and are away forever. All joy and sorrow, success and failure, love and hate, fame and shame, peace and strife, happiness and misery--all, all but lead to stillness and darkness and death. This life is all in all and let us live it fully

and sumptuously. This lovely world with its hundred joys and pleasures is enough for us and there is no need of yearning for another which does not exist. To sacrifice joy on earth in the hope of felicity in heaven is to give up the substance for the shadow.

Such insipid and cold disbelief of the skeptic chills the heart, blights the nobility of human nature, and corrodes the spirit where it becomes the article of faith.

Zarathushtra, my prophet, is the first among mortals to teach mankind unequivocally that all is not lost when life is lost and death is not the end of life. Two different worlds there are, he affirms, this the earthly or the corporeal, other the heavenly or the spiritual. Body and soul form two constituents in the formation of man. The soul exists for the short span of its life on earth in the tenement of the body, and with the crumbling of the material frame into dust, wings its flight heavenward. The bodily death does not mean the death of the soul, for it is immortal. Death then, is not the end of man's life and he lives in heaven in spirit to reap the harvest of its life upon earth. The anomalies of earthly life find their final adjustment in heaven, so says he who is our prophet sublime.

Strengthen my faith in the life hereafter, Ahura Mazda, thou in whom man's faith finds its consummate strength. Fill my mind and heart with the hope of the life of spirit in heaven with thee, for it gives meaning to this life, inculcates in me a robust faith in thy goodness and sustains me now when I live my life of the body.

This page was last updated on Tuesday, August 01, 2000.