Beyond Death | A Pastor, A Rabbi and an Imam | The Story of God

[Music] Okay, so stop me if you've heard this one: a rabbi, a pastor, and an Imam walk into a bar.

Okay, so it wasn't a bar; it was a diner to discuss my show, the story of God, about Resurrection.

So the pastor says, "So as a Christian, the idea of Resurrection is huge for us. You know, we believe that Jesus was resurrected. Even just hearing the word Resurrection for me, as an American Jew, it resonates so strongly as a Christian word. So I've always been curious: does Resurrection have a place in Jewish faith?"

"There is concepts of resurrection of the Soul. We do believe in a God that gives life to the dead. Now, on a metaphoric level, we can understand that to be a person who's maybe not able to function, that God gives life to that person. And on a literal level, it could mean that at the end of days, there is a resurrection and a return, a resurrection of the people and a return to the land of Israel."

"I see. What about in Islam?"

"We believe that every human being, after their death, will be resurrected in their physical sense and stand before God in judgment. You have probably more sects within Christianity, more sects, let's clarify, sects, more, right, within Christianity and all the other major religions combined. So there's a lot of different perspectives. Eternal life begins the moment that you marry your spirit with God through faith in His son, Jesus. Our bodies now are mortal; they are susceptible to destruction, to death. If we're going to live forever, we need new bodies. So Resurrection is pretty much more of a shedding off of that which is not eternal. It might be possible for us to, at some point, transfer the consciousness to some kind of computer simulation, given the advances of Science and Technology and human engineering with regards to genetics. Can we intervene and derail God's plan by prolonging our lives?"

"I think there's a lot of danger and complication when we head down that route, because everything else on our Earth is on a cycle of everything that lives, then dies. God has blessed us with technologies and medicines, so I don't think that God gets mad at you for trying to do everything in your power to live longer, as long as you do it with a healthy understanding that your days are ultimately in God's hand. One peaceful image that's always resonated with me is that when we die, our souls join with God, and God is like the river or the waterfall, and we're each like an individual strand of that waterfall, all flowing together with God and still part of the whole."

"In Hinduism, there's this notion of you live through this life, and if you do a good enough job, you'll be reincarnated in a better form, and then you can keep moving up the ranks until eventually you don't need to be reincarnated anymore. In the Islamic tradition, you only get one chance, and if you don't make it here, you're kind of resurrected in the Hereafter, in either Heaven or Hell, or you might be resurrected many more times and eventually purged and make your way up. So it's a very similar concept, but instead of the Resurrection happening here, it happens in the Hereafter."

"Are there any particular near-death experiences that have corroborated your belief or disbelief?"

"The story of the person who had drowned for between 15 and 18 minutes and then came back to life and his view of light seems to be a common theme amongst people. Those who came back saw the light; they felt comfortable, they felt warm; they weren't afraid. What it does corroborate is this notion that the soul lives on beyond the physical body, and it's striking that all of these people had such similar experiences and stories to come back with. It's really fascinating to me the process of death in the body and how it takes time for the cells to break down and for the death process to be. The process of the body seems to be separate from the experience of the Soul."

"There's a belief to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. In a lot of Christian traditions, you're not sad for them; you believe that they have gone on to something incredible."