A correspondent poses this question:
If you believe in an afterlife, one in which things are presumably a lot better than here, why not be eager to "move on"? I can understand the wicked fearing judgment, but why are the righteous not eager to shuffle off?
To put the challenge in a sharper form: "You say you believe you will survive your bodily death, and that death will be a liberation from the woes of this world. And yet you behave like everyone else: you fret over threats large and small and do all in your power to prolong your bodily life. I have to wonder whether you really believe what you profess to believe."
I'll try to give an honest answer.
1. Belief in an afterlife is not like the belief that I am sitting in a chair. The latter belief is either knowledge or very close to it. The will does not come into the formation or maintenance of this belief. With respect to massive perceptual beliefs we are all doxastic involuntarists. But no one this side of the Great Divide knows whether we survive our bodily deaths. The considerations, both empirical and dialectical, in favor of survival are not conclusive, but neither are the considerations against it. (Which is not to deny that the world is filled with dogmatists who think they know what they do not know.) One must therefore decide what one will believe in this matter all the while knowing that one could be 'dead' wrong. In this predicament, it is perfectly understandable why one would not be eager to hurry off into what is presently unknown.
To this I would add that, unless one is in the grip of childish conceptions, of the sort rampant among militant atheists, the encounter with the Lord of the universe can be expected to be terrifying. Fear and trembling, Timor domini initium sapientiae, etc. The exact opposite of a comforting illusion. You might get more than you bargained for. It is easily understandable that the believer, though at one level wanting to enter the divine presence, may prefer to put it off a while, especially if things are going well here below. Do babies want to leave the womb?
2. Another aspect of the above challenge is the veiled accusation that one is professing what one does not really believe. People on opposite sides of ideological divides are wont to taunt one another with You can't really believe that! or You don't really believe what you ar saying! Well, how do we know whether or not a person really believes something? From behavior. Applied to the case before us: does he pursue the afterlife question, think about it, research it, talk about it, write about it? If he does, then it is a Jamesian live option for him. Does he live in any way differently than those who do not hold the belief? Does his belief that he will be judged for his actions and omissions (a belief that Wittgenstein apparently could not shake) hold him back from any morally reprehensible actions? If the answers to these questions are in the affirmative, then the person does really believe what he professes to believe.
3. On many religious conceptions, this world is, in the words of John Keats, a vale of soul-making. That is "the use of the world" as Keats says. As one of my aphorisms has it, we are not here to improve the world, but to be improved by it. It is by our sojourn through it, by our experience of its trials and tribulations, agonies and ecstasies, that we develop an identity, actualize ourselves, become full-fledged persons. Identity is not a given but a task. Nicht gegeben sondern aufgegeben. We are all sparks of the divine intelligence, but only some of us becomes souls because only some of us acquire an identity. The rest fall back into the divine fire. Embodiment, on this scheme, is thus a necessary condition of coming to acquire an identity, an haecceity and ipseity. We come from God and we return to God. But the trick is to return to God as individuals capable of enjoying the Beatific Vision. If we merely return to God by a sort of Hindu reabsorption of the soul into the ocean of Brahman, then we will not be able to enjoy God. As Ramanuja puts it contra the Advaitins, "I Iwant to taste sugar, not become sugar!" If the use of the world is to be a vale of soul-making, then the return to God is not a loss of identity in God but a fellowship with God.
Now if the use of this world is to be a vale of soul-making, then one would have a good reason to not want to "shuffle off" (in the words of my correspondent) too soon. The reason is that there is work to be done in the development of one's personhood, and this work needs to be done in a place and predicament such as the one we are in.
