ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Resurrection Judgement and the Hereafter Lesson Five: Man's Essential Nature as Evidence for Resurrection If we look at religion from the viewpoint of the history of human society, we will see that at every stage of human thought, in the mists of prehistory as well as throughout the broad expanse of recorded history of this changing world, man has always firmly believed in a life after death.

When we follow archeologists in their excavations, we find material traces of primitive men who all believed in a life after the life of this world. The tools and implements they buried with their dead bear witness to the distinctive conceptions they held of the life that exists behind the gate of death.

They knew that death is not the end of all life, but because of their erroneous concepts they imagined that man would need the tools of life in the next world just as he does in this, and that he would be able to use the implements buried with him. In whatever land and age he has lived, man has always had a hidden perception, a kind of inspiration, that permits him to hope for a tomorrow after today.

Some mono-dimensional sociologists fail to grasp this truth, with their purely rationalistic interpretations, and they discuss the matter purely in the light of social and economic factors. Concentrating on the fantastic and superstitious aspects of certain religions, they overlook the positive dimensions of belief in the hereafter.

These profound and well-rooted beliefs cannot be taken simply as the result of auto-persuasion or habit, for habit and custom cannot resist for ever time and the changes that it brings in human society. Although the peoples of the world differ in their national and social customs because of ethnic and natural variation, so that each people has its own special customs and habits of thought, all men hold in common a certain set of instincts and attributes.

Whatever country or continent they inhabit, all men even semi-barbaric, backward, and prehistoric peoples respect and value precious concepts such as justice, equity and trustworthiness, just as they shun and abhor treachery, cruelty and anarchic behavior.