Draft February 2022 – please consult published version ‘Those Who Taste It Merit Life’: On the Superfluity of an Everlasting Afterlife Aaron Segal Forthcoming in Norton Introduction to Philosophy of Religion (eds. Lara Buchak and Dean Zimmerman) 1. Introduction 1 Some people believe in an afterlife. Others don’t. Among those who do, many of them believe in an everlasting afterlife, one that goes on forever and ever. But I’d venture to say that most folks on all sides of that debate agree about the following conditional claim: if there’s an afterlife, and especially if there’s an everlasting afterlife as standardly conceived, then that fact has immense practical significance. After all, it’s commonly held that if there is an everlasting afterlife as standardly conceived then it offers enormously great goods, unobtainable in this life--so great that they dwarf, in quality and quantity, the paltry goods we can enjoy in our meager lifespans. And that fact seems to have the consequence that if there is an everlasting afterlife as standardly conceived, then we ought to orient our lives around it, at least to the extent that it’s realistically attainable. Among other things this means that you should choose a way of life that maximizes your chances of living on forever in the hereafter, and that it’s reasonable to think about the afterlife a great deal, even to dwell on it. 2 As I said, these conditional claims are widely held on all sides. But I don’t accept them. I myself subscribe to the traditional Jewish view that at least some people will enjoy an eternal afterlife, and I think my conception of that afterlife, inspired by classical Jewish texts, is pretty standard for theists. And yet I don’t think that the everlasting afterlife offers any good that is unobtainable in this life, nor do I orient my life around it; I certainly don’t dwell on it. (To the extent that I think about it, I do so for philosophical purposes, like writing this essay.) And I don’t think my combination of views is idiosyncratic for a traditional Jew. It’s a prevalent one and well rooted in Jewish texts, as I will soon argue. But it’s admittedly puzzling. Indeed, it’s puzzling in two ways. One puzzle is about the very denial of the conditional itself: I imagine it strikes many readers as pretty unintuitive, perhaps ridiculous, to say that even if there is an everlasting afterlife as standardly conceived, it offers 1 This essay draws on Segal (2017a), Segal (2017b), and Goldschmidt and Segal (2017). 2 As a matter of fact, Pascal famously held that the eternity spent in Heaven, if it exists, is infinitely great, and so one ought to embark on a religious path for its sake, even if there is only a miniscule likelihood that the path leads there.