I'm not a fan of one-sided appraisals of complex topics, but since we have the other side represented here - Beliefs in an afterlife - the problems? - this one is being created to balance it. Note that the nature of and belief in the afterlife is quite heterogenous and the below represent generalizations that may or may not apply to a specific framework.
Some of the benefits of belief in an afterlife for the living:
- Alleviating Fear. Death represents a big unknown in our lives - it is something we often fear. Telling narratives about death, including though not limited to what happens after we die, help us as a species to cope with fears and anxieties surrounding death especially for the terminally ill. It helps us live.
- Alleviating Grief. If you've ever lost someone who has meant the world to you, you know how hard that is to deal with. Even if an afterlife isn't real, believing that your beloved continues on in some form is a tremendous boon to the bereaved. Again, it helps us live.
- Honoring our Ancestors. Connecting to the past is important for cultures worldwide, and our fallen ancestors often play a role in making those connections. Tales of afterlives can bring vibrancy to these tales and help us celebrate who we are and our culture. It brings together the living.
- Instilling Responsibility. Some cultural narratives about the afterlife emphasize how our behavior in this world impacts that across the veil. So in addition to being held accountable for our actions by the living, we are also held accountable once dead. This doubly encourages us to be responsible!
- Psychopomps and Mediums. Embracing the idea of an afterlife creates a space for experts who help guide both the living and the dead along the journey. In cultures where they are respected, they serve as advisors and counselors who help us reconcile with death.
- Instilling Purpose. Accepting the idea of an afterlife often allows us to create the notion that our lives are going somewhere or adding up to something. A sense of purpose is a very important motivator while living because it brings our lives focus and meaning.
There are no doubt quite a few more, but are these enough to consider such beliefs as beneficial and helpful?
Alleviating Fear. It's only unknown if one just doesn't accept death as an ending of life. And we fear lots of things - that's what makes us probably rather different from most other species in that we can imagine all sorts of things that might happen, real or not - but we usually find ways of coping with such, if one is a mature adult and not a child. Which is what afterlife beliefs might be said to be for - those who act like little children and need their comforter. I don't know how children are raised in communities without any afterlife beliefs but I would bet that just accepting death, as their parents would (but the sadness will usually be there too), will likely be just as normal as children raised with afterlife belief tales.
Alleviating Grief. Much the same as above. Perhaps we need to honour the dead more than we usually do, which might then alleviate some of the grieving. And of course it does vary. I only grieved for a few days when I lost my mother (she wasn't actually dead but had lost most of her personality due to dementia at the time), and her eventual death a year later was more of a release from the suffering she was enduring, although I am sure many grieve for far longer periods.
Honoring our Ancestors. Again, as above, perhaps we need to remember and celebrate their lives better rather than inventing possible ones they might have in the afterlife.
Instilling Responsibility. I'm not sure this is a good argument. Why not expect people to be fully responsible in this life. It seems to me that there is all too much avoiding of what we should be doing in the here and now - like indviduals and countries looking after themselves, but often at the expense of others. If one asked the question - what would happen if everyone did this (Kant essentially) - and this guided one's behaviour and/or morality (plus a helping of the Golden Rule), perhaps we would come to some consensus on such. Why invent a nebulous carrot when we could create appropriate real carrots to ensure that we all behaved better.
Psychopomps and Mediums. And also opens the door to a bunch of charlatans - like this one, here a psychic but much the same:
Psychic who predicted JFK's death says world will end in 'armageddon' this year (*)
Take away these jobs and they could be retrained to deal with practical issues for those who need it.
Instilling Purpose. So does the fact that one has a finite life - perhaps more so - in which to accomplish all that one would want. And acceptance of this fact (finite life) doesn't necessarily prevent one from having a sense of purpose or not give meaning to one's life. That is, if one accepts that death is the end, and many might not take so many risks in life (often rather silly ones) if we accepted that the one life is all that we are given.
*
However, she certainly hasn't always been right and many of her wild predictions have never come to pass. Jeane believed Russia would beat the US in the space race to become the first nation to send a man to the moon - she was wrong. She also predicted that World War Three would break out in 1958, there would be a cure for cancer in 1967, a second holocaust in the 1980s and that Rome would rise again to be the biggest empire in the world. In 1969, authorities asked for Jeane's help to find a missing six-year-old boy, Dennis Lloyd Martin, who had vanished from Tennessee. She was unable to locate the youngster.
