Whatever the great religions offer it is afterlife their people want: Heaven, Paradise, higher reincarnations, together or apart- for these they will love God, or butter Karma. Afterlife. Wherever it already exists people will crawl into ships' framework or suffocate in truck containers to reach it, they will conjure it down on their beaches and their pooled clay streets, inject it, marry into it. The secular withholds any obeisance that is aimed upward. It must go declaratively down, but 'an accident of consciousness between two eternities of oblivion'- all of us have done one of those eternities already, on our ear. After the second, we require an afterlife greater and stranger than science gives us now, lifelike, then unlike what mortal life has been.
—Les Murray, “The Blueprint,” in New Selected Poems, pp. 249-50.