"Talk show host Stephen Colbert, who has long been lauded as a devout Catholic, baffled Christians with a very anti-Christian claim about life after death on the penultimate episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
During an “orgy of self-worship” where a massive string of celebrity guests asked Colbert to answer questions about himself, comedian Jim Gaffigan entered the host’s chair and posed a query that Colbert himself has asked many times:
“What do you think happens when we die?”
Stephen Colbert, a professed Catholic, says he believes that when we die, "there is some continuance of some kind. But it’s like a dispersion of the self into some other greater being. And I don’t have
Gaffigan, also a professed Catholic, quipped back, “What you’re saying is: we become Febreze.”
“Yes. Right,” Colbert replied with a smile. “That’s exactly right.”
The interaction quickly sparked a flurry of conversation on social media, with this author remarking that Colbert’s view of the afterlife “sounds more like the Gnostic concept of the Pleroma than the Catholic doctrine of Heaven.”
The “pleroma” is a Greek word that ancient Gnostics, like the followers of Valentinus, used to communicate the mythology that all physical matter is splintered off from a perfect divine being, and it will eventually return to that Godhead, or “Fullness,” and the corruption known as the physical world will cease to exist.
According to Valentinian teaching, human beings (personified as Sophia) were originally part of the divine collectivity or Fullness (pleroma). The world originates when human beings fall into a state of suffering and deficiency. Physical existence is explicitly identified with this fallen state. Similarly, the dissolution of the world and restoration to Fullness takes place through gnosis.
The Valentinian initiation ritual included prayers for the ascent to the eighth heaven in which the person declared their origin from the “Pre-existent One” and renounced the authority of the Craftsman (Demiurge) and the lower powers.
While some commentators agreed Colbert’s take sounds quite Gnostic, others said this belief sounds like Buddhism or Hinduism. One user remarked, “Stephen Colbert chooses the Childhood’s End Overmind ending to nobody’s surprise,” referring to the Arthur C. Clarke novel where aliens who resemble Medieval depictions of demons trigger the extinction of humankind through transhumanist experimentation.
One reply suggested Colbert may be referring to the “Omega Point” theory espoused by Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, who finds an acolyte in fellow Jesuit (and unwavering subversive) James Martin. He and Colbert have a long relationship, where the latter declared the former the “official chaplain” of his Comedy Central show The Colbert Report."
Breitbart