The world religions are unanimously pessimistic about human life on earth. Christianity and Islam promise a continued existence after death, either as a reward or a punishment for conduct in this one. The present life is merely a proving ground for your real destiny, to sort the elite from the riffraff into separate post-life gated communities. The future life compensates for the deficiencies of this one and also serves as an imaginary backup, perhaps, given the precariousness and long-term implausibility of human projects.

Hinduism and Buddhism promise rebirth in a new incarnation—another chance, to do better—which serves less vindictively than in the Semitic religions as a reward or punishment. But their ultimate promise, if more democratic, is final release from physical or any other existence. The implicit common denominator of all is that conscious life in the body is a vale of trials and suffering from which one should be glad to be released. Is that not an assessment that pain outweighs pleasure overall in the human story? It says something about the human experience, hard for us to grasp in our privileged time and place.

In some ways science serves as the new secular religion of our materialist culture. Scientific theory is historically the heir of theology (they derive from the same root word). It provides us with a new creation story and with technology as a new means to manipulate nature, superseding prayer, ritual, and magic. Additionally, it implies that our short life in nature, in the physical body, is the only reality, releasing us from the promise or the threat of ongoing existence. It passes no moral judgment on the quality or meaning of this life, simply recognizing (as people have intuitively for centuries) that pain and pleasure are built into biology to the extent that sensation is. Science does not discuss life after death (and has only recently begun to discuss consciousness); but the implication is that when the brain dies, so does the consciousness of the person, after which there is no more experience, either good or bad. This is closer to the Eastern release from the cycle of existence than to theistic notions of resurrection. Fortunately, you don’t even have to earn it by climbing up a moral ladder of improving incarnations. All you have to do is reach the end of your life.