Our fear of death is at root of all our other problems

The problem begins, strange as it may seem, with belief in our own immortality. If we can truly be said to believe in something we cannot imagine. What does it mean, to live forever? Our minds do not begin to grasp the infinite. All we perceive is an elusive moment that echoes away; behind as dreams and half-rememberings, before us in glances through unnumbered doors. This evanescent existence is our true experience of life, nothing about it has any permanence at all. How did we ever conceive the idea of living forever?

We never did – we simply failed to imagine its opposite. We do not want to contemplate death. We may not really be capable. To consider what it means not to exist is like asking what it feels like not to feel. So we reject the concept of our own non-existence. And if there must be no death, then the only other possibility is unending life. The idea may make no better sense but it is at least less strange and threatening.

That is what passes for belief with a lot of things – not so much the real conviction that something is true, but the preference for that idea over its unpalatable alternative. And yet even such ill-founded beliefs have enormous power. Not, sadly, to make us all live better lives.

There are billions of people on this earth who profess to have immortal souls, that their actions during these few decades will make all the difference between infinite joy and infinite pain. Yet surely someone convinced of that would lead a life dedicated to boundless generosity and self-sacrifice. I think I can safely say that we do not inhabit a world crowded with those unselfish people. For the vast majority, the immortality of the soul is less an absolute conviction, more a comforting idea.

Where this belief really does have power though is as a tool of rhetoric. It's the trump card of the moral argument pack, the winner every time. Who could disagree that nothing is worth more than one’s immortal soul? This may seem odd when the idea has such a shaky logical basis, but here's the trick: You cannot reject it without rejecting the religion in its entirety.

Anybody who stands up and says "But what if there is no eternal salvation?" is straight off the pitch. It is, for a religious organisation, quite simply unthinkable.

Now for everything to go completely wrong, you only need to ally this with the notion that your religious organisation is the only sure pathway to that salvation. It immediately follows that in order to save those immortal souls, faith in the church must be preserved. So although in private it can admit to itself that it has its failings and imperfections, it sees no alternative but to suppress the truth.

Preserve the glorious image, the luminous example. Cover up. Lapses are, at very worst, spontaneous moments of human failure – never fundamental flaws in the religion itself. Because anything is better than the loss of the immortal soul. Even the protracted, systematic raping of children.

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