Not on that premise ... if what you suggest was the case, then I think the general attitude would be 'if nothing counts, then live for today — anything goes', surely?
That would seem to suggest the entire human race, across the world now and always, has always lived in fear of divine retribution after death.
And yet, humanity seems perfectly fine and able to create "moral structures" based around the concerns and interests of their cultures. It appears hard-wired within us as social apes, regardless as to whether the justification for such structures is claimed to be divine or secular.
I mean, if the end is an eternity of bliss, regardless, then morality would go straight out the window. The most inviting solution to life would be to take up the option now — I would think suicide numbers would be pandemic.
Indeed, but it would take a huge amount of belief, and as physical constructs we tend to become rather fond of our physical attachments of being.
And just because there is bliss after death does not mean to say there isn't work and responsibility in life. Otherwise it would be pointless for Divinity to create physical life in the first place!
Because without one there cannot be the other. It is not like, say salt and pepper, where salt could exist without pepper, it is like light and dark. An essential criterion for light is the absence of darkness. An essential criterion for darkness is the absence of light. If one rejects the notion of darkness, how can there be light?
s.
Dualism is a fallacy. There is nowhere in the universe that is completely dark. At the most extreme, there is always light we cannot see. Light is simply a part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and there are other forms, from radio, microwave, IR, UV, X-rays,etc.
The light/darkness duality fallacy occurs because we are a species whose experience of the world is dominated by our visual perceptions of a very narrow range of the EM spectrum. Therefore we define existence according to that experience.
But just because we as naked apes experience a subjective darkness if visible wavelengths are weak does not mean there is an actual objective absence of light. We cannot allow our limitations as a species to claim superiority over the larger universe.
Something I've longed to do is to set up different cameras on the same area, to record different aspects of the electromagnetic spectrum and then create a composite from all of these. It will still require some degree of transformation to visible wavelengths, but that can be done with infra red and ultra violet well enough to show a distinction from normal visible light. That could provide a more objective view of what reality looks like, instead of our blinkered species-specific point of view.
