Relife after Death

[Porter]

Fear of death is a problem.

When you're dead, you're dead. Dunno why people want to live longer, if you think of it, eternal life really doesn't sound too hot, more like a punishment.

[Fitz Tayo]

I think it's more they'd want to be alive longer to spend time having fun or being with their loved ones. Of course that means they wish everybody could live longer. So technically, everybody wants to be an elf, you pansies you.

[Escreon]

Incidentally, atheists can believe in an afterlife if they want. Atheists just don't believe in God, by the technical sense of the word, it just means doesn't belive in god, as opposed to theist, which means someone who does believe in god. I'm not sure what I believe about what happens after death, but I sorta lean towards reincarnation. I also am interested in Buddhism and Paganism, I like the ideas of worshipping nature etc. and altohugh I'm an atheist, I believe in things like astrology and tarot etc.

[Poenaensis]

theists don't nescesarily belive in god, just some deity. polytheists believe in many gods whilst monotheists believe in one god e.g God, but he's made up of three gods.

>Explain God
>well, God
>yes
>he's God
>wow
>and Jesus, he's god too
and the Holy Gost...
>well?
>he's the murjugger flibber of inundo
>WHAT?
> He the spirit of the Lord who impregnates Mary, gets a bit up himself and is reduced to light clerical duties.
>and what of him
>he's God too.

is that a poly-mono or a mono-polytheistic religion or what is it?

[Aegis]

theists don't nescesarily belive in god, just some deity. polytheists believe in many gods whilst monotheists believe in one god e.g God, but he's made up of three gods.

>Explain God
>well, God
>yes
>he's God
>wow
>and Jesus, he's god too
and the Holy Gost...
>well?
>he's the murjugger flibber of inundo
>WHAT?
> He the spirit of the Lord who impregnates Mary, gets a bit up himself and is reduced to light clerical duties.
>and what of him
>he's God too.

is that a poly-mono or a mono-polytheistic religion or what is it?

Well, the idea behind it is that they are all God, yes, and they are seperate beings, yes, but they would never disagree. On ANYTHING. Secondly, I don't even think that the Holy Spirit even exists in the way most Christians think it does.

Fear of death is a problem.

When you're dead, you're dead. Dunno why people want to live longer, if you think of it, eternal life really doesn't sound too hot, more like a punishment.

Well, if it's heaven you could probably erase your own memory of some of the best experiances. That would seriously rock. Secondly, assume you can create basically anything. Since there are probably infinate possibilites for things to create, you'ld never run out of things to create.

[itsdave693]

To throw a monkey wrench into the thoughts that sparked this topic, almost nothing in nature occurs in cycles. Entropy increases, period. The glass breaks, but never, ever spontaneously reforms. Living things reproduce, which gives us an illusion of a cyclical nature, but in reality, the order preserved and multiplied over generations of life comes at the expense of an enormous quantity of energy. It's tempting to invoke the "circle of life" clause and say that this energy comes from nature and returns to it, but this, too, is erroneous: the entire biosphere operates at a loss of free energy and could never work without a continuous, high output power source, the sun, to which said energy never returns.

As for life after death: if you've ever suffered an injury that caused your brain to be short of blood/oxygen momentarily, you know that, for the time it's cut off, you experience nothing. A gap, or splice, in your consciousness. Thus, consciousness is at least wholly dependent upon a working nervous system, even if said workings are not the soul itself defined. Hence, experience ends with the end of the brain's function. Modern science supports this at every level, and if you can give me an example of a single aspect of the soul that cannot be eliminated by a brain lesion or altered by the blockade or augmentation of a neurotransmitter receptor, then I will happily and humbly retract this statement.

What does this say about God? Absolutely nothing, except: if, from the complexity of the brain, a wholly corporeal body, the human soul is manifest, then one must wonder from what other sufficiently complex physical systems might consciousness emerge.

Discuss.

[Blasted_Redoubt]

How deliciously thought provoking...

Human consciousness is a confusing thing. What exactly makes us believe that we're more than bags of blood with an awareness of our surroundings? If you look in nature, very very few animals are aware that 'they' exist, and perform off of instincts. While the human species is subject to instincts and desires, the capacity for concious thought lends itself to trying to make one's existence mean more than just wasting some oxygen for a little while and then dying and disappearing.

It's a point often reached in discussions like this- humans want to believe that they don't cease to exist when they die because they want to trick themselves into believing they are permanent entities in the 'grand scheme' of things.

Assume that the human soul 'exists', and there is an afterlife. Does the conciousness still appear in this ethereal form? Or is conciousness the product of functions that the body provides? If you connect conciousness to a soul, then MAYBE there is an 'afterlife' in the sense that we are subject to a formless state, able to only observe. If you don't, and conciousness is physically-dependant, then when your brain goes kaput, that's it, you're finished. Worm food! So concepts of life after death are pretty much just faith-filled wishful thinking.

As for cyclical existence, I totally agree. Life is pretty linear- it has a beginning and an end. The cycle of life idea (in Buddhism) is attributed to being forced to relive a life in this world over and over again until you are good enough to 'leave the cycle'; hence, disappear. Regardless of this, you are born and will die someday. Hence- linear.

Again, it seems the only real thing I can draw from all of this business is the simple idea to live a good life. I mean, jeez, what good is it to spend a lifetime always worrying about my future and possible eternal damnation according to my religion? Bah! This is why I enjoy some ideas of Eastern traditions so much.

[itsdave693]

I disagree that consciousness lends little to our ability to survive. Many abilities attributed to consciousness, e.g. voluntary recall, self-concept, etc., are vital to our social structure and our propensity to attribute meaning to symbols within it. The symbolic web of culture is the very thing that propels us above the rest of the animal kingdom by allowing our behavior to adapt over time scales relevant to both individual survival and to the survival of the species - essentially, it's a microcosm of evolution that cuts out the time consuming processes of adaptation via molecular biology.

The most obvious example of this phenomenon is pedagogy. During one's education, one obtains adaptive behaviors (including thoughts) that have accumulated and stood the test of observation over thousands of generations. Our indoctrination into society places us not where the species began, as occurs with all other animals, but where our progenitors left off. As we make new observations, test old theories, and generate new ones to account for an expanding range of phenomena, we record them to the benefit of all future generations. If we were unconscious automata, this process would be difficult if not impossible, and we probably wouldn't be motivated to do it anyway.

[Telephalsion]

I beleive in cyclical nature.

Energy cannot be destroyed or created, take this in consideration you never waste energy you just change it, the heat energy emitted is absorbed by something elsewhere, energy moves from part to part throughout the universe, even if our sun dies the heat we're sending out as a result of our absorbing of the solar energy will move through the infinity of space untill it hits something and this something will either reflect, or absorb the heat. I think that in the future the universe will end, most likely in a future without humans, since I'm doubtful of our species existing when it happens, maybe it will, but not in our current form that's for sure. Either way, the universe will end, in one of two ways: Intinite expansion, the universe thins out so much that one day there wont be enough matter for stars. Collapse, the universe slows down, then starts retracting and falls into an infinitesmall speck, then big bang again. Or maybe the third option, the universe expansion stops and finds a balance, in which case it'll continue, I doubt that... another possible answer is that black holes will suck the universe untill there's nothing else, one wonders what happens to black holes when they can't suck anything into itself... Oh well, point is, the universe most likely moves ina circle, big bang, expansion, slowdown, retraction, collaps and repeat.

Man I'm thinking to far into this, but history has repeated itslef, I'm too lazy to get you a good example.

[Forerunner]

Well if everyone died right now, it would put an end to all doubts or debates about religion.

Somehow I don't think it would be worth it.

[Sling]

What exactly is on the other side of a black hole?
I'm not 100% sure myself but I think that a black
hole is somekind of wormhole (a bit like Stargate)
except that things are ripped to pieces before
they reach the event horizon unless that's part
of the demolecurising transport and remolecularisation
process. That's my theory.

[Telephalsion]

I wonder if it really is a wormhole of just infinite density.

[ReaperGal]

I hope there's nothing after we die. Life is bullshit enough with out more life after you die. What's the point in dying if we're just gonna keep living, even in paradise?

I even hope tibetan buddhism is wrong, even though it's how I was raised. I just wanna get this crap over with, ya know?

Wow. That made me sound suicidal. I'm not. I mean, I'm gonna kill myself, but that's just how I want to die, and it won't be for a long time. If I'm not dead by eighty, I'm punching my own ticket.

[RentACop]

There's nothing on the other side of a black hole, because a black hole isn't a hole.


As for the afterlife, it's not going to effect me as I plan on never dying.

[Violent_Paradan]

I distrust Catholicism because they attempt to block access to heaven by any means other than those that benefit the church’s infrastructure (the directing of confessions through a priest and then making an indulgence) and the fact that they elevate the Saints to a level of reverence that looks oddly like it would go against the often reiterated declarations of not making or worshiping graven images.