The Afterlife: What You Want Versus What You Believe

What I believe:

As a Christian, I believe that there is a Heaven and a Hell. Who goes where, however, is not a matter of formal allegiance to one religion or to one another, nor of mere intellectual belief: whether one says "I am Christian" or "I do not believe in Jesus" is pretty much irrelevant as far as the afterlife is concerned.

Rather, what matters is belief in what Jesus and Christianity stand for. Being formally a Christian is useful, because it gives you a better understanding of what is at stake and what you should do in order to get the good ending; but it's not a guaranteed win, no more than being non-Christian is a guaranteed loss.

And then there's a Purgatory. This is a process through which people who did not reject Good to such a level to leave Hell as the only alternative but who did not accept it entirely either get purified "before" (but thinking of it as a temporal sequence is a bit misleading: time as we know it is simply not applicable to spiritual matters) going to Heaven. Chances are that most of humankind goes there, at least for a "while".

Finally — and this is important to me, I don't think I would bother with Christianity if this weren't the case — there will eventually be a Resurrection from the Dead. The whole universe will be transformed in some way that I cannot begin to understand, and it will become a physical Heaven — or, if you prefer, a new territory annexed to Heaven. People will be resurrected, and will inhabit it, enjoying all that Heaven is but in the physical, material world we humans were made for. It will be the same, and it will be different beyond all comprehension.

What I would want: I kind of like this whole arrangement, really. There is one idea, however, that has been suggested by Cardinal von Balthasar and other theologians, and that I'd like very much to be true (I dunno if this is the case): basically, at the moment of death people are miraculously granted supernatural insight about the nature of the afterlife and about their own moral state, and are allowed a last chance to repent.

edited 11th Dec '11 12:47:49 AM by Carciofus

Cessation of Existence. I don't believe there's an afterlife for anybody. With all due respect to everyone who does believes in one, it seems too "magical" a concept for me to grasp and take seriously, especially strictly defined ones specific to any given religion.

What I'd want? I dunno, really. The opportunity to explore and properly know the universe without those pesky laws of physics or the inadequacies of human comprehension getting in the way would be rather grand.

edited 11th Dec '11 2:25:09 AM by pagad

I definitely believe in cessation. I was not around in 1879, why would I be around in 2879? Of course I'll still cling to my life till the last breath, and in fact I'm pretty certain that I won't believe I'm dying until I'm actually dead. I'll probably annoy the living shit out of my nurses with dirty jokes and one hell of a bad breath, while wasting away.

But I honestly don't think that there is any kind of afterlife even worth thinking about. It all just sounds sweet on the surface. What we (every last one of us, I guess) really want is for this life to continue indefinitely without the problems associated with old age - and that just won't happen. So, cessation is probably the best option out there.

Except for, maybe, reincarnation - but that amounts to cessation anyway, as long as you don't manage to actually remember your past lives. So, again... cessation it is.

What I belive: Cessation of Existence

What I want: either reincarnation or the personal world thingey. Either one would do.

Edit, Yeah, continued existence would be sweet. Not likely to happen, but one can always hope.

edited 11th Dec '11 3:27:59 AM by Qeise

When I die, my consciousness will cease for a bit and then I will wake up again inside a functioning body (either my own or one freshly built) or running on some sort of computer after no subjective time has passed.

Want: Some kind of afterlife, reasonably similar to this life, whether through reincarnation or some kind of controllable ghostly existence where I could still communicate with the living.

Believe: No afterlife exists yet, any plausible afterlife would come through technology and even that seems quite a ways away.

Personally, I just hope human cryonics has its issues worked out within my life so that I can freeze myself until they come up with a full-fledged artificial afterlife.

Define "have its issues worked out"? Most people mean being able to thaw out a frozen person.

That, and the tissue damage associated with freezing someone in the first place. I hope to see future medical science find some way to prevent (or at least minimize) such damage.

edited 11th Dec '11 10:07:43 AM by HiddenFacedMatt

What I like to say I believe: Life is just by-product of all of our organs and whatnot working together in harmony- your existence is unique to you: you've got no "soul", but you're the unique product of all of the molecules that make up your body working together. When you die, you stop existing until a certain amount of those molecules come back together inside a woman again.

And thanks to the law of conservation of matter, there's always the possibility of you coming back.

What I actually believe: Nothing. 'Wait and see', really.

What I want to believe: There's an afterlife, and everyone gets what they want, regardless of what they did when they were alive.

edited 11th Dec '11 10:28:50 AM by DisasterGrind

What I believe: Cessation of Existence

What I want: "Groundhog Day" Loop, triggered at will to whatever point in the past I am for; in essense, an infinite undo button.

[edit] Eye Kant Spel[/edit]

edited 11th Dec '11 11:33:32 AM by BlueNinja0

What is worse? Hell, or Cessation of Existence?

Hell, definitely. Eternal suffering is worse than nothing.

I do not understand where the idea of infinite punishment for finite sin comes from.

Hmm... it's tough to say. Hell would be horrible beyond belief, sure, but cessation is fundamentally opposite to living, and I think most people enjoy being alive too much to want to simply wink out of existence. It's impossible to know which is worse, though, since we have nothing to compare existing with.

What I belive: Death is like going to sleep. You might dream, you might not, but it's not real and when you wake up(reincarnate or whatever) you don't remember it. AKA Cessation of Existence.

What I want: Well, what I belive cristians and many others would call "Sinfull life", a world that adjust to all my whims. Desire to have planet wide orgy? It shall happen. After that, I suddenly desire to climb up Mount Everest like the first explores? World adjust itself to provide me the experience I desire. That, is what I beliefe to be "true" heaven. Hell would be eternal peace, basicly life as now but with peace and no conflict.

edited 11th Dec '11 11:54:57 AM by Mandemo

Well, seeing as I'm terrified of just going to sleep, death is not a consolation.

It's amazing how we're hard-wired to fear loss of control. Defense mechanism?

Anyway, I neither hope for no believe in an afterlife. A higher power? That's a different story. I think it's impossible to block out the idea fully, even if you try.

What I believe: Cessation of Existence. There's no evidence for any afterlife. The mind is a phenomena that emerges from the purely physical body, and the two are inseparable. When the body dies, the mind ceases to exist. "Soul" doesn't describe any real entity.

What I want: Immortality of some sort would be nice (either in this universe or in some reasonably pleasant afterlife), but Cessation of Existence doesn't bother me much, either. Anyway, it's a moot point, because reality isn't affected by what I want.

What I believe: Cessation.

What I want: Lotus-Eater Machine

I believe that cessation is most likely though I also believe that reincarnation is another possibility.

What I want is for Buddhism's reincarnation and kamma system to work as is told in the canon so I can get the hell out of dodge but not cease to exist even though I don't exist.

What I believe: cessation of existence.

What I want: cessation of existence.

I've gone into this recently in another thread, so I'll put up a link to my first post (on this subject) there and a collection of bits and pieces from some of my posts (mostly the first, as it turns out,) there to get the idea across.

edited 11th Dec '11 7:45:06 PM by BestOf

While that is a intresting outlook I disagree with Cessation of Existence as a possible outcome of death. I personaly think it's the most depressing and unrealstic of all the "After Death" senarios.

edited 11th Dec '11 8:05:24 PM by LMage

Well, every guess as to what a possible afterlife would look like has exactly the same amount of hard evidence backing it up; none. With that in mind, the more complicated one's conception of an afterlife is, the less likely it is to be the case. Based on the evidence we have, Cessation of Existence is as good a guess as any.

edited 11th Dec '11 8:20:28 PM by tropetown

I've never managed to digest the notion of the consciousness somehow existing outside the body or "steering" it or in any real sense being the experiencer of the experience. It all flows naturally from the body, of which the mind is a kind of a process. In other words, I've always thought that consciousness is an illusion.

In any case, modern medicine knows that if the brain is damaged, faculties are lost. Certain kinds of damage in certain parts of the brain correspond to certain kinds of faculty loss, and the case studies are very interesting.

We know that when the body dies, the brain (as part of it) ceases to function and rapidly spoils. Damage to the brain alone is enough to end the life of the whole body. So why should the brain somehow survive death?

Or when people say they'll survive their own death, if they mean to say that they'll survive the destruction of their brain, what is it that survives, and how does it regain the faculties that were lost when the brain was damaged?

Those were rhetorical questions; I know what people mean, and I can understand the concept, but I can't understand how people overcome the problems inherent in the assumption that their mind is somehow separate from their brain.

To be honest, I don't think letting an unproven afterlife dictate how one lives on Earth is a particularly healthy attitude to have. The fact is, we know far too little about what happens after death to be making decisions based on it. The best thing to do is to live one's own life according to one's own principles, and to worry about death when you're... dead. Not that it's not interesting to think about, but it shouldn't be a very big part of a person's life, since the only way it could affect you is once it's too late to come back.

edited 11th Dec '11 8:28:05 PM by tropetown

The "death into nothingness" concept is such a dreary and pointless one. I prefer not to think about it, even if I do believe in it.