Einstein thought that the beginning of the universe, the Big Bang, created all of space and all of time at once in a big whole something.

So every point in the past and every point in the future are just as real as the point of time you feel yourself in right now.

Einstein believed that literally.

One of his best friends died and he wrote a letter to this person's wife, talking about how his friend still exists.

Time is a landscape and if you had the right perspective on the universe, you would see all of it laid out in front of you.

All past, present, and future as a whole thing.

And he said, "Your husband, my friend, is just over the next hill.

He's still there.

We can't see him where we are now, but we are on this landscape with him and he still exists just as much as he ever has."

Einstein believed that you, right now, had been dead for trillions of years, that you haven't been born yet, that everything that's happened to you—if you could get the right perspective on the universe—you could see all at once.

Death is in some ways unacceptable.

I mean, it's just an astonishing fact of our being here that we die.

But I think, worse than that, is that if we live long enough we lose everyone we love in this world.

I mean, the people die and disappear and we're left with this dark mystery.

There's just the sheer not knowing what happened to them.

And into this void, religion comes rushing with a very consoling story, saying nothing happened to them; they're in a better place and you're going to meet up with them after you die.

You're going to get everything you want after you die.

Death is an illusion.

There's no question that, if you could believe it, that would pay emotional dividends.

I mean, there's no other story you can tell somebody who's just lost her daughter to cancer, say, to make her feel good.

It is consoling to believe that the daughter was just taken up with Jesus and everyone's going to be reunited in a few short years.

There's no replacement for that.

There doesn't need to be a replacement for that.

I think we have to be We have to just witness the cost of that.

I mean, there are many obvious costs of that way of thinking.

One is we just don't teach people how to grieve.

Religion is the kind of the antithesis of teaching your children how to grieve.

You tell your child that your grandma's in heaven and there's nothing to be sad about.

That's religion.

It would be better to equip your child for the reality of this life, which is, death is a fact and we don't know what happens after death.

And I'm not pretending to know that you get a dial tone after death.

I don't know what happens after the physical brain dies.

I don't know what the relationship between consciousness and the physical world is.

I don't think anyone does know.

Now, I think there are many reasons to be doubtful of naive conceptions about the soul and about this idea that you could just migrate to a better place after death.

But I simply don't know about what I don't know what I believe about death.

And I don't think it's necessary to know in order to live as sanely and ethically and happily as possible.

There's hardly anything bigger than offering immortality or the afterlife, because, so here's the problem.

We are all aware that death is real because we see it all around us.

100 billion people have lived before us.

They're all gone.

Not one of them has come back, not even Jesus in my opinion, but that's a different video.

And yet you cannot conceive of what it's like to be dead.

Because if I asked you, "Picture yourself dead, what do you see?"

Most people say, "Well, I see myself there at the funeral and the coffin and my loved ones are hopefully grieving and there..."

No, you wouldn't see that, you wouldn't see anything because to see anything you have to be conscious.

To conceive of anything, you have to be a sentient being, you have to be conscious.

And if you're dead, you don't have any of that.

Really, death is just nothing.

And the whole idea of the afterlife is fairly new.

I mean, the ancient Hebrews, their idea of the afterlife was nothing.

You're just nothing.

You're just gone, that's it.

There's no place to go with angels and flowers and whatever.

It's just nothing.

All that was added on centuries later.

And probably for socio-political reasons, you know.

Offer the peasants something nice so that they'll keep building our pyramids or whatever.

So again, we can't conceive of what it's like to be dead and yet we see it all around us, so this creates something of a paradox that we have to resolve in our minds.

Most people resolve it by thinking, "Well, I'm not actually going to die.

I'm just not going to do it.

I'm going to live forever.

Or I'm going to accept Jesus or whatever and I'm going to heaven."

Okay, yeah, but what if you're wrong?

It's not a Pascal's wager where you can say, ""Well I have nothing to lose and everything to gain," because which religion and their version of the afterlife is the right one?

Which one are you going to pick?

And while the Christians, "We're the right ones."

Yeah, well, there's a billion Muslims who disagree with you.

They don't accept Jesus as a savior.

They don't think he was even the Messiah, the Son of God.

Okay, so now what?

And they believe just as strongly as you do.

So what if your God is the wrong one?

Your version is the wrong theory and they have the right one?

You wasted your whole life investing in this idea and you turned out to be wrong.

Why not jettison the whole idea entirely and appreciate the here and now, because that's all we have, whatever is in the hereafter.

If you look at, well, the Bible, which for many people in the Western world was sort of the guiding... in the Old Testament, there isn't really any sort of view of the after life.

The closest you get is a word for pit, a word for 'abyss', which basically means you die and you're not here.

So this idea that the whole thing is about when you die is not really the way that lots of people have thought about it.

And that the phrase "eternal life" was a very first century Jewish way of talking about living in harmony with the divine right now.

So eternal life wasn't a kind of life that happens when you die.

Eternal life was understood to be a certain quality of life that you're experiencing right now, where you're in right relationship with the earth, with the environment, with each other, with yourself.

That was considered eternal life.