What comes after death

Both sound equally unappetizing to me.

By popular demand....

I believe in an afterlife. I also believe in a benevolent personal deity, so the afterlife, for most people, should be fairly nice. I believe that my personal identity will be intact. I believe that what you do here has consequences for what happens to you there (so no offing yourself!). I do not believe in eternal hellfire, punishment or other torture for believing the wrong things or making simple mistakes. I do not believe that it's primary purpose is to reward the "good" and punish the "bad" (although the choices you make here may have implications for your quality of existence there). I do not believe that it has been given to us to know exactly what is in store for us after death, and I am not sure that we could comprehend it if we did (i.e., the experience might be fundamentally beyond our comprehension). I doubt that it's an actual paradise. I think that there will be sufficient challenges to ensure that existence continues to be engaging and meaningful. I will learn more about my true relationship to God and the rest of the universe.

My problem with the "you experience nothing, simple as that" is that it's NOT simple. Nothingness is an abstract concept that humans can't easily understand because it doesn't exist.

Well, maybe it's not exactly non-existant. The closest thing we can get to the nothingness that we may or may not experience in death is pre-birth, before a person devlops a real consciousness. And since there isn't a human alive that can actually remember what that was like, the concept of not having a consciousness isn't easy to grasp. Seriously, stop for a minute and try to imagine a compete lack of anything. You'll probably imagine a dark void... for about as long as it takes for ANY thought to enter your head. And even that thought of nothing is a construct of your own mind and may not be what it's really like (the fact that I don't know is part of my point).

Now to my opinion:

I have no idea, but I'll find out one day (according to a "how long will you live" test, in somewhere between 63-71 years). I'd like to believe that there's something beyond this life, but I don't know for sure.

How about... say... sleep.

I assumed "nothing" meant "the lack of any mental activity". Even in sleep our minds are still working, so sleep isn't a good example.

Do you remember before you were born? If not, then to me that simply seems like what happens when you die, you just don't see anything and don't feel anything.

I covered that earlier.

The closest thing we can get to the nothingness that we may or may not experience in death is pre-birth, before a person devlops a real consciousness. And since there isn't a human alive that can actually remember what that was like, the concept of not having a consciousness isn't easy to grasp.

Part of the difficulty in accepting that there may not be anything after this is because we can't remember what it was like before this (or before we were 3, for that matter).

I assumed "nothing" meant "the lack of any mental activity". Even in sleep our minds are still working, so sleep isn't a good example.

We're not conscious, so I think that it's a good enough comparison.

I guess that works. It's not exactly what I was thinking, but it is a lack of consciousness.

Howard Storm claims he knows firsthand... but no one knows if he's telling the truth.

Every logical bone in my body is screaming "Nothing happens, you simply cease to exist. Dumbass," at me.

Except I don't like that, and I cling to the wishful notion that some kind of afterlife does exist. Whether it's reincarnation, or some kind of Heaven/Garden of Eden scenario, or we observe the world we've been living but can't interact with it...I don't know.

But I'm not sure, so until I actually inevitably die, I'm just going to operate under the assumption that this life is all I have, and cherish it with all my might.

Just because one doesn't like it doesn't make "it" suddenly untrue.

I am very aware of that, but if I don't keep a little spark of hope for an alternate possibility alive, I'll just go through my life afraid and horribly depressed.

Why? Its not as if you'll feel anything. I mean I can understand it, I've been frightened by it too, but for the most part its not something we really have to worry about until it happens, and even then it only happens once.

Because a lack of my own existence is something I can't possibly comprehend, and overall, it just seems very scary and terrible, and I would rather have some kind of alternative that's less scary. I know it's not like I'll have to worry about it because I won't be able to feel anything, but I like existing and feeling stuff. It's just that uncertainty and that permanence of the whole thing that makes me extremely uncomfortable.

I dunno, but why is none existence something to be scared of? Oh I can understand being scared now, but being caught inside a rotting body of flesh and blood that is slowly turning against you whilst your brain slows down in your skull strikes me as a good thing to leave behind and a great reason to hope that you don't end up in any afterlife at all, because it'll still be a crap load of work.

edited 9th Dec '10 4:34:41 PM by JosefBugman

False Dichotomy. Being afraid of everything you are completely vanishing forever after is not asking to be trapped in a sack of decaying flesh.

edited 9th Dec '10 4:58:11 PM by KingZeal

^^ Different people have different desires. I know that I would rather go to Hell than not exist, but I despair of ever explaining why in such a manner that other people can understand. (Mind you, this makes me really unsuited to be an atheist, but until someone can actually convince me there's something out there . . .)

If I die right I will join Hái and fight for him and die for him.

Oh, I believe in an afterlife. What it entails I don't wholly know. I do believe in God, but I don't think the afterlife is just sitting on clouds strumming a harp. Nor is it as easy to quantify as "eternal bliss." Whatever it is, it is almost as beyond comprehension as non-existence.

I do vaguely remember hearing something about "expanding the universe," and took that to mean something along the lines of becoming gods ourselves, but this was so long ago I'm no longer sure.

As for why? My simple reason for believing in a higher power: I cannot believe this universe happened by accident.

^ Similar logic here. As I said on the last page, the universe in my experience is too inexplicable for the atheist view to be 100% correct. Sure I don't subscribe to any church notion of creation, but to think that such elements such as an after-death existence don't exist runs contradictory to what I've come to know of how things work in the universe.

I'm a Christian; I believe in an afterlife. But I don't know exactly what it will be like. Keep in mind that the Biblical descriptions of both Heaven and especially Hell are pretty limited—most of the popular conceptions of them are from Dante or other writers, not the Bible.

^^ I don't follow—what suggests that the creator would make an afterlife rather than reuse souls for the cosmic equivalent of spare parts?

In the Bible, the sky is called heaven. Anyway, only (a limited number of) jews are going to heaven. Everyone else is either going to stay on a new earth or burn in hell.

Everyone knows that Mormons are the only ones who go to Heaven.