Contemplating the afterlife is maddening.

[immoderate]

(This is my post way down in another thread. I wanted to get some reaction.)

Consider that much of what we do is maintenance and affirmation of life. Protecting and providing for friends and loved ones, not to mention ourselves, shapes how we live. So what's there to do once you're dead?

You don't need to buy insurance, or look both ways before you cross the street, or provide food for the table. There's not much reason to have sex, or children, or indulge in the pleasures of the flesh, because you have no flesh. If there're iPods, there's no place to hang them. Not much need for exercise or martial arts. Ballroom dancing, anyone? Golf? Go down to earth and rattle some chains in an old hotel, and scare the shit out of people? Study for every certification exam?

I know you can sit around and worship the Lord, and bask in His/Her radiance, but that could get old quick, assuming there's a sense of time, in which case you've got eternity (eternity!!!) to figure out how to stave off the boredom. Maybe you could go to sleep, or better yet, go into a coma where you dream that you have a life on say, earth. Maybe that's what I'm doing now.

--IMM

[Speck Tater]

1. Well...

Why do you think people come back to earth for another round of fun and adventure?

When I was just a little tyke I remembered some of my own previous lives quite clearly and was utterly shocked to discover that my Catholic parents didn't know about past lives. I've taken reincarnation for granted for as long as I can remember. My past lives have always been an integral part of my present life, and it stumps me why so many people apparently don't experience this continuity in their existence.

[immoderate]

6. Begging the question. Life is not afterlife.

What do you do when humanity becomes extinct? And anticipating the rejoinder, so is everything else.

--IMM

[Vidar]

42. I think I've seen your postings at another forum. Pleased to see you here.

[azurnoir]

2. Reminds me of a parable

I was told years ago.- A guy dies,wakes up in a beautiful world of puffy clouds, golden sunshine, blue skies. He finds he is dressed in flowing white robes and lo and behold has wings and a golden harp. Everything in this is perfect tranquility and bliss, no troubles or passions or desires, he sits on his cloud strumming his harp for a couple weeks, until it occurs to him that this is really boring. He looks around; everyone around him is strumming harps in perfect tranquility, so he asks "hey what do you do around here for excitement?". He is told sitting strumming the harp is what they do for excitement. So he goes back to his harp for a couple more weeks, by this time he is starting to go bat guano crazy from boredom, so he asks to speak with who ever is in charge.
He is lead to the "headman", and he asks "hey if this is heaven why is it so boring? I am about to lose my mind, this place really sucks"
The "head guy" turns to him and "Just what make you think this is heaven?"

[immoderate]

4. Good story.

To be fair, Mark Twain wrote a story about heaven being a place where you stand around on clouds and sing hymns. In some ways, it inspired my thinking. A big objection was the people he would have to spend eternity with.

--IMM

[roguevalley]

3. try reading the "Afterlife Experiments" by Gary Schwartz Ph.D,

"Don't Kiss Them Goodbye" and "We Are Their Heaven" by Allison DuBois, "Talking To Heaven" by James Van Praagh, "Love Beyond Life" by Joel Martin and Patricia Romanowski and "Hello From Heaven" by Bill and Judy Guggenheim. They have saved me from despair these past two and a half months since my father died by posing alternatives to the usual palaver.

[immoderate]

7. Of these, I've seen Van Praagh in action.

He is your everyday cold reader. He pretends to talk to dead people, which does not get respect from me.

Schwartz, the one from U of A, makes some different "scientific" claims but doesn't allow his data to be examined, or his studies to be replicated.

I'm glad that you have found some solace in these writings, and have found ways of dealing with your grief. I wish you peace and all the best.:hug: My father appears in my dreams. I'm always glad to see him.

It bothers me that these people don't agree on what's out there, and present it as truth.

--IMM

[neebob]

5. Crazy maddening or annoying maddening?

Forgive my nitpicking - I spent my (18-hour) work day writing a proposal and explaining and negotiating with various individuals, at least one of whom I suspect is from another planet, while also trying to deal with an incredibly stupid thing that happened on this other pain-in-the-ass project.

I used to think it would be cool if the afterlife was like a big video library, and you could fly around and watch everything that ever happened and see how it really was. I still do, actually.

But now that you mention it, because it's eternity, you'd eventually run out of interesting things to watch. So it should also have something like a holodeck, where you could participate in the experience.

That would keep me busy for a while.

[immoderate]

8. Huh? Didn't see that one coming.

I don't know. To me, so much of what we are is shaped by physical existence, including the development of consciousness, that I run into all sorts of paradoxes when I try to imagine a non-physical existence. Maybe that's what I want to see. I'll admit that my thinking ties the self or the soul (whatever) to the physical body.

How about amusing maddening? Can I say that?

--IMM

[neebob]

9. I don't care

It's your afterlife. I never really thought about it being non-physical, I guess, because ... well, I'm not sure, but it probably has something to do with my Mormon upbringing. I imagined myself having some kind of substance that resembled my physical body.

Doesn't my idea sound fun, though?

[varkam]

10. IMO, the very notion of an afterlife is inhumane and immoral.

It feeds the masturbatory fantasy that things will not come to an end.

With that, we can take our lives for granted. In fact, we can take the lives of those around us for granted - as surely we will be able to meet those we love and care about again someday (as, of course, they will end up in heaven with us). The belief that there is life after death (which, definitionally speaking, is a contradiction of terms) serves to ease the fear of nothingness, but does little to cope with the reality of the situation. Delusions may comfort us, but do not illuminate much outside of our fractured psyches.

Further, the oasis of life eternal continues to persuade many of us into thinking that our lives, here and now, are only important insofar as being vehicles to a final, time-infinite destination. It allows us to strap bombs to our chests and fly planes into buildings in order to achieve paradise. It allows us to condemn other human beings on the basis of 2000 year old literature and actively prevent life-saving research in order to gain favor with an absentee, metaphysical father figure. Such approval seeking has been the principle cause for the suffering of untold billions of human beings.

People have died choking on the stench of their own flesh being roasted at the hands of the Inquisitor. Of those who died on September 11th, those that were lucky were incinerated instantly. Those that were not faced the agonizing decision of jumping to their death or succumbing to the smoke that contained the remains of their friends and colleagues. Girls have been murdered by their family because they had the audacity to be the victims of violent rape. An exorcism that went wrong resulted in a teenage girl dying a slow, terrifying death from a plastic bag placed over her head by her mother. Parents have elected that their children forgo life-saving medical treatment for their children on the basis of god's will, condemning them to die. The list goes on, and on, and on, and on. I tremble to contemplate the entirety of the tragedies. I have neither the time nor the fortitude to complete such a terrible collection here.

The scars of religion's profanity are apparent enough for anyone who chooses to view them for what they are, and not further delude themselves into thinking that superstition played no part. That fantasies about life everlasting held no sway. That dreams of paradise did not motivate, did not consecrate the countless murders, the endless hours of torture, the vast landscape of suffering.

Religion has murdered humanity. The murder weapon is the afterlife.

[Zhade]

31. "Religion has murdered humanity. The murder weapon is the afterlife."

Why?

WHY?

WHY CAN'T WE RECOMMEND INDIVIDUAL POSTS???

That is an amazing line, and a sobering insight. Wow.

Seriously. That was amazingly well-said.

[beam me up scottie]

32. I concur.

I've been savouring that post all day.

It's exceptionally quote-worthy.


Bravo, varkam.

[varkam]

35. Thanks.

With that, I think I'll change my sig line.

[Random_Australian]

11. Is that all your worries? Persons like me are to spend eternity in a

condition far worse than just boredom, as heaven to me would be severely not good. :(

(The reason for this is that, to me, bieng in paradise while others suffer (in hell) would be torment in it of itself.)

[JerseygirlCT]

15. Which is why I believe in universal salvation

What could be right about others not being there? I think all will become part of the one -- perhaps it will take more time for them to want that? But time is an elastic idea in the afterlife, if it even exists as an idea.

[immoderate]

19. No time and no individuality.

How can that be existence?

--IMM

[JerseygirlCT]

30. I think it's hard for us to comtemplate that

And of course, this can only be my thoughts... I've no better proof than the next person. But I imagine that the willingness to embrace a new existence is part of the transformation. But perhaps that makes eternity seem like the borg.

I don't know for sure. What do you think?

[immoderate]

34. Different boat for me. I'm a materialist.

I think that soul, personality, consciousness, are properties of a living, physical body. I think consciousness and self awareness evolved as a survival method. If you don't have to preserve life, the whole thing is meaningless. That's my view. I know others think differently.

--IMM

[muriel_volestrangler]

12. Maybe souls just sit around discussing things

You know, one would start off a topic with an observation, or a report from "the real world", and then we'd each give our opinions, replying to each other, tkaing the discussion off-topic, and so on. We'd recognise some of the people taking part, but others would be new to us - perhaps they've recently joined. What your real bodies looked like wouldn't be important, but, if there's some kind of perception beoynd words, you could choose an image to represent you. And maybe a tag line to sum up your current concerns or philosophy, so people get a bit of an idea about you. We could pontificate on how "the real world" ought to be. We could have areas where we take things seriously, and others for fun and jokes, and areas for specific subjects, and ...

[immoderate]

20. First you've got to be tombstoned...

--IMM

[neebob]

22. I like you, Muriel

and that's a clever observation, but I gotta say it sounds boring. Maybe if it was another option, along with the video library and the holodeck and sitting around playing the harp and worshipping the Lord, although I can't imagine why anyone would want to do either of those last two things for very long either.

[peanutbrittle]

13. "In my fathers house, there are many mansions"

Here is one particular train of thought on the subject:

http://www.urantia.org/papers/paper48.html

[immoderate]

24. Thanks peanutbrittle.

Forgive me, but if anything is deathless, it is that prose. That's Paper #48? There are 47 more leading up to this?

I fear that I am either too smart or too stupid to work this stuff into my world view. Morontia? :rofl:

It seems to go on endlessly like this:

The morontia spheres are the transition phases of mortal ascension through the progression worlds of the local universe. Only the seven worlds surrounding the finaliters' sphere of the local systems are called mansion worlds, but all fifty-six of the system transition abodes, in common with the higher spheres around the constellations and the universe headquarters, are called morontia worlds. These creations partake of the physical beauty and the morontia grandeur of the local universe headquarters spheres.

All of these worlds are architectural spheres, and they have just double the number of elements of the evolved planets. Such made-to-order worlds not only abound in the heavy metals and crystals, having one hundred physical elements, but likewise have exactly one hundred forms of a unique energy organization called morontia material. The Master Physical Controllers and the Morontia Power Supervisors are able so to modify the revolutions of the primary units of matter and at the same time so to transform these associations of energy as to create this new substance.

Thanks for trying. Sounds like gobbledegook to me, although this part rang with a certain amount of truth.

What magic could death, the natural dissolution of the material body, hold that such a simple step should instantly transform the mortal and material mind into an immortal and perfected spirit? Such beliefs are but ignorant superstitions and pleasing fables.

--IMM

[neebob]

29. Aw, crap - I knew I was gonna hafta look

http://www.urantia.org/about.html#Description

<snip>
A Brief Description of The Urantia Book...

The Urantia Book, first published by the Urantia Foundation in 1955, was authored by celestial beings as a special revelation to our planet, Urantia.

The book's message is that all human beings are one family, the sons and daughters of one God, the Universal Father. It instructs on the genesis, history, and destiny of mankind and on our relationship with God. It also presents a unique and compelling portrayal of the life and teachings of Jesus, opening new vistas of time and eternity, and revealing new concepts of Man's ever-ascending adventure of finding the Universal Father in our friendly and carefully administered universe.

The Urantia Book's view of science, philosophy, and religion is perhaps the clearest and most concise integration of these subjects available to contemporary man. There is little question among the over 400,000 people who have purchased, read, and who study the Book: The Urantia Book has the capacity to make a significant contribution to the religious and philosophical thinking of all peoples; it truly has the potential to shape world destiny.

<snip>

Oh, and there are 196 papers.

http://www.urantia.org/detail.html#Titles

I think morontia is what you get from reading them.

[immoderate]

33. I have to admire anybody who can read that stuff.

You just take all the words from an insurance policy and jumble them up a little.

--IMM

[beam me up scottie]

36. "morontia" !

:spray:

Kudos for your bravery, I was too scared to go there.

I am overprotective of my IQ since I live in such a brain sucking part of the country.

The propaganda around here makes the messages in Carpenter's flick "They Live" seem nostalgic.

[neebob]

61. Well, if you weren't so busy defending your screen saver

the extraterrestrials could reach you.

Where Did The Urantia Book Come From?

In the early 20th century, a physician practicing in Chicago became the head of a group known as the Contact Commission. This small group was the focal point for the production of, and the primary custodian for, the final text of The Urantia Book. They were sworn not to disclose details about the transactions in order to preclude future generations from venerating the participants. It was considered important that no individual might be exalted through their association with The Urantia Book. Because of its revelatory nature, the book stands on its own merit, nature and content.

As the contents of The Urantia Book were being transcribed, the Urantia Papers were read to, and questions were requested from "The Forum," a group that had been meeting regularly for discussions at the doctor's house. The answers to these questions were then incorporated into the papers. These early readers formed the first core group of believers in the revelation and became committed to the mission of bringing the teachings of The Urantia Book to the world.


http://www.urantia.org/about.html#Where

Chicago. Think about it.

[JerseygirlCT]

14. I think the afterlife takes on a very non-earthy aspect

I don't suppose it will be what anyone expects.

Big thing, I think is that we're no longer necessarily individuals -- just part of it all.

Second is that time ceases to have meaning -- so no sense of "what do I do today?".

I'm trusting that boredom won't be an issue, but as a mere human, I don't understand exactly what to expect.

[Silent3]

16. I started a thread on this idea back in February...

...which can be found here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=214&topic_id=51137">The Afterlife: Forever is a VERY long time

Forgive me for being lazy and taking the liberty of simply copying and pasting what I wrote back then:

Humanly unimaginable chasms of time. Does anyone really want this?

(The idea to post this subject arose from another afterlife thread, but I felt I was going off in sufficiently different enough a direction that starting a new thread seemed like a good idea.)

First off, I should state that I don't actually believe in an afterlife. Many people do believe, however, and the desire to live forever ever (especially in pleasant circumstances, not being sadistically tortured) plays a huge role in the motivation to follow a wide variety of faiths.

It seems to me, however, that many people haven't thought about what it is that they're hoping for beyond escape from the scary thought of simply ceasing to exist (or, worse, transitioning from one kind of existence into another of eternal torment), beyond heavenly reunion with departed loved ones, or beyond some kind of wish fulfillment extension of ordinary human life (streets of gold and walls of jasper, idealized "resurrection bodies", seventy virgins to play with, etc.).

What I think about when I think about an eternal afterlife is this: what would or could anything still recognizably human do all of that time? One could assume that the afterlife is timeless, or that the nature of time in the afterlife is different from what we know, but as soon as one considers such things, one has to immediately realize that one doesn't really understand what it is that we're hoping for. Everything we know and understand, including the very selves we're hoping to have preserved, is defined in and through the flow of time.

If the experience of afterlife time were anything like our living, mortal experience of time, but simply goes on forever, then think about this:

Imagine your first thousand years in heaven. A thousand years worth of conversations, events, activities, sumptuous meals, concert events singing the Praises of the Lord, thousands of sex acts a piece with each of your 70 no-longer-very-virginal virgins. Would it all begin to just blur together? Would God grant you some special resistance to becoming tired of the same old things, or simply provide such a bountiful variety of experiences we can't imagine it? Is basking in The Presence of The Lord just so wonderful that nothing else matters? Pleasant though it might be, would that really be a life, or just some kind of frozen mental state?

Would your heavenly self have a greater memory capacity than your human self, so that a thousand years worth of memories could be held in your mind at once?

A thousand-year lifespan is already hard for the human mind to grasp. Now imagine that your first million years has passed by, and your first thousand years becomes no more than a tiny sliver of your life. Then a billion years passes, and the first million years takes its place in the flow of your life along with 999 other million-year spans that you pass through. Then someday you reach a trillion years old, and, had you decided to keep something like an ordinary scrapbook of ordinary size, spans of billions of years might be forgotten as unimportant or reduced to one or two photographs.

Then a quadrillion years go by. Then a quintillion, a sextillion, a septillion. No matter how staggering an expanse of time you care to imagine, still greater spans of time always stretch before you, waiting to reduce the incomprehensible magnitude of all you have ever known to a fleeting twinkle.

Could anything that is meaningfully you survive this endless stretch of time? Would your memory keep expanding ad infinitum into God-like proportions so that you could know the fullness of your own life, and if so, would the being that could remember so much be you anymore?

Would your memory be limited, so that, despite the lack of any sharp boundaries, you were simply sliding from one life into another into another, never exactly facing a discrete moment of death, yet still in a way dying over and over again, dying in the sense that self is defined by memory?

When it comes down to it, if I could have anything I wished for when it comes to my own mortality and the possibility of escape from complete death, I can't think of anything particularly satisfying to wish for. I do know that at any given moment, provided that my life had not become unbearably awful and without hope for improvement, that if you were to ask me, "Would you like to die right now?" my answer would be "no". I might choose to live forever, not by accepting the weight of eternity all at once, but simply by always wishing for one more moment, endlessly.

I don't find the Buddhist concept of Nirvana very appealing. Maybe in the Buddhist view of things this is very spiritually immature of me, but I don't particularly want to have my self identity, illusory though it might be, dissolve seamlessly into Everything, like a raindrop falling into the sea.

Endless reincarnation into ordinary human lives, or the lives of animals for that matter, holds no appeal for me at all, especially if life doesn't get particularly any better than life as I know it now. I like living okay, but re-experiencing the highs of my life doesn't seem worth re-experiencing the lows. Being reborn into better and better lives, and actually clearly remembering the continuity between one life and the next -- I'm talking about being a three-year old who can clearly tell his parents about who was at his retirement party in his previous life, not having a new-age hypnotist coax out "memories" of my previous lives as Revolutionary War heroes and Egyptian princesses -- that might be appealing for a time, but I suspect after a few hundred such lives in even that form of immortality would grow old.

What do religious people who've bothered to think deeply about their hoped-for afterlives think? Do some abandon traditional views of the afterlife and accept that any sort of afterlife is probably a humanly incomprehensible form of existence? Some obviously will stick to literalistic dogma no matter what, so is the only thought that can be aroused something like, "Don't worry. God will make it all work out somehow."?

[Evoman]

17. There is no after-life.

I agree with both you and Varkam, but being incorporeal, based on everything we know about physics, biology, and energy studies, is impossible for human beings.

You smash a human being in the head hard enough, their personality changes. The brain changes, the person changes. You take away the brain (either by smashing it or having bacteria eat it) the "person" ceases to exist. Gone. Nothing. We know the entire energy spectrum, and we have never found a "soul" energy.

Our personalities, WHO WE ARE, is a series of chemical and electrical reactions in the physical structure of the brain. The afterlife is magical thinking, plain n simple.

[Odin2005]

18. AFTER-life? Bah, I plan on living forever.

By the time I'm 60 (2044) we'll probably have the abillity to allow people to live for 100's of years.

[cyborg_jim]

21. Right a few questions for those who believe in an afterlife

1) If you believe humans are exclsuively going to go to an afterlife why are we so special? If not, do bacteria have souls or is there some sort of demarkation point for what life forms are going to have an afterlife?

2) What makes a carbon-based life form special consideration for having its structure preserved in somesort of reconstituted energy pattern appearing in an unseen plane of existence? Or is it reasonable to contemplate a silicon heaven? If not why? Where is the demarkation point where carbon machines become significantly complex to be preserved in an alternate dimension?

[neebob]

23. I've always thought the fact that animals

down to the level of, say, a fish or a snake have observable, unique personalities is one of the biggest pieces of evidence - I would go as far as to say proofs - that there are no souls and therefore no afterlife. I'm sure there are people who would say fish and snakes have unique personalities. And who's to say bugs and bacteria don't have them as well.

To your second question - and just so you know, I'm not someone who believes in an afterlife - wouldn't that be a weird surprise, to get to heaven and find out it's full of rocks!

[immoderate]

25. Some rocks have personalities.

They just move very slowly. :smoke:

--IMM

[neebob]

27. Some rocks get mad

and some go mad, contemplating an afterlife. Rock on!

[cyborg_jim]

26. Of course some people just give everything a 'soul'

Whatever that means for a ant (unless you watch Disney movies as nature documentaries - which I'm guessing a lot of you don't anymore ;) ).

Although I think the mere lack of any evidence for such a nebulous unique pattern for eternal storage for an arbitrary demarcation of a set of chemicals that may possibly have a restriction on its configuration is enough for me.

[neebob]

28. I was taught that the earth itself has a soul

because there's something to that effect, or maybe just something that led my infallible dad to draw that conclusion, in one of Joseph Smith's books of con-man fantasies. That makes it a lot harder to draw a line.

[varkam]

37. Welcome to DU!

The first question you pose is an especially mind-boggling one. In an essay entitled "The Discontinuous Mind", Richard Dawkins poses a similar question. What makes us humans so special? Why do we feel superior to "lower life forms"? He brings up the fact that the intermediates between ourselves (Homo Sapien Sapiens) and our closest living relatives are all extinct. If they were all alive today, where would we draw that line? At what point, in the evolutionary scale, does an "animal" become a human? In other words, the reasons that we see such a sharp distinction between ourselves as a species and other animals is because the "missing links", so to speak, are all dead.

Your second question is mind-boggling as well, but it just contained too many big words for me to even begin to compose a response :D

Welcome to DU, and the R/T forums! :toast:

[cyborg_jim]

38. Thanks for the welcome

Although I have been reading for awhile - it pays to keep an eye on my trans-Atlantic cousins.

I happen to think that species-centric thinking is entirely understandable but it is definately something we should move past - lest we remain merely a mindless construct for propagating our genes.

[cyborg_jim]

39. My second question

Basically asks why life is so special from a fundamental perspective when one considers that the things that make up the living and non-living things are identical. Obstensibly we are complex carbon-based machines so if we have an after-life do non-carbon-based machines have that opportunity? If not why is carbon so damn special?

[immoderate]

43. It's the geometry.

Now, I forgot more than I know about chemistry, so bear with this. Carbon is unique in that it is an atom of such size and configuration, and its charges balance in such a way, that it can easily form and break compounds that are soluble or immiscible with water, the universal solvent. Water, itself, is also unusual, in that its geometry and chemistry lends itself to dissolving a wide variety of compounds, yet it's molecular polarization prevents if from combining with organic (carbon based) molecules. It's also unusual in that its solid form is less dense than its liquid form. In other words ice floats.

Carbon is indeed unique. While there is a parallel structure in the silicon atom, leading science fiction types to hypothesize a similar silicon based life structure, it (silicon) does not really have the same chemical properties which would allow it to form the complex organic molecules of carbon based life. Some analogous structures (silicones) can be manufactured in the lab, but there is not the chemical mobility to sustain a chemistry of life.

Hi, and welcome to DU!:hi:

--IMM

[cyborg_jim]

44. I'm fully aware of the chemistry

... but the question is more directed towards notions of intelligence, since often that might be considered a factor for consideration of an after-life. Now sillicon is currently the basis of our computers and assuming that the operation of our brains is turing complete it is theoretically possible to replicate the workings of a human mind within a standard computing system.

[immoderate]

45. Is there intelligence without a physical brain?

The question goes back to whether information can exist without a medium. I say no.

--IMM

[cyborg_jim]

46. Not an idealist then.

[immoderate]

47. Metaphysically, I'm a materialist.

that is, I don't think that anything happens outside the physical world of matter and energy. However, I do have political ideals such as individual liberty and self determination. Constitutionally, I think of myself as an idealist.

Any argument here is over what words mean. But most arguments are.

--IMM

[cyborg_jim]

48. E = Mc^2

So 'matter and energy' is redundant ;)

[immoderate]

50. All redundancies should be reported to...

The Federal Bureau of Redundancy Bureau

--IMM

[neebob]

49. You guys can talk about chemistry and geometry

all the live long day, but the afterlife mentality is based on the belief that a more or less loving male god made human bodies in his image and then injected them with souls. And then either he or his son, Jesus, injected himself into one of those bodies and died horribly to enable everyone to have their sins forgiven and go to heaven.

The Bible doesn't talk about carbon and water or silica. It talks about people and animals and heaven and hell, and it doesn't say the animals go to heaven or hell. That's why some people think only people have an afterlife.

[immoderate]

51. When you say "all the live long day..."

You have to throw in a "Doo dah!" or two.

--IMM

[neebob]

52. Oh, sorry.

Doo dah!
Doo dah!
And, for good measure: Oh, doo dah day!

[immoderate]

53. You know, I'm looking at this thread as a whole...

And it seems to confirm my original statement.:)

--IMM

[neebob]

54. Yeah

Interesting thread, though. Kinda makes ya wanna kick the ass of whoever thought of an afterlife in the first place, or whoever first thought of it in each culture. It's such a pervasive idea that it must be the product of the feeling of being inside a body, looking out, and fear of death.

It's hard to accept the idea of just ceasing to exist, even though it makes the most sense, if you're first told there's an afterlife.

[immoderate]

55. Another thing: I experience the people I have lost.

I see my dead friends and relatives in dreams. I also feel as though they are here sometimes because their memory and our interaction is so strong. I often forget that my mother, who recently died, is not around when I see something that I really want to tell her. It's like the feeling you get after you take off your hat, but you still feel like its on your head.

Its easy to see that in our fragile minds, that feeling could leave someone to believe that dead people, in some way, still exist. They do, but it's all in our minds.

It's interesting that the Hebrew prayer for mourning the dead, the Kaddish, neither mentions death nor the afterlife.

--IMM

[neebob]

57. Good point

but there isn't much excuse for assuming it's evidence of an afterlife if you also dream about people who are stil alive.

I once dreamed that my grandpa who died in 1972 came to visit me, and wondered why he was wearing purple corduroy pants. The only time I ever dreamed about my other grandpa, who died in 1990, he was hanging out with the mysterious elusive blonde guy who loves me. I dream about him more often than I do dead relatives.

[ozone_man]

56. The goal of all life is death.

Sigmund Freud. Sounds grim doesn't it? I never thought of it that way exactly. No one really wants to die, but we have to eventually. It's the "goal" of all life.

Hiking in Alaska a few years ago, I passed several salmon streams, where the salmon had stopped feeding in the salt water and were living off of their bodies, literally consuming them in the process of running upstream and spawning. They had another goal certainly (spawning), soon to be followed by death. And then supplying food for the coastal grizzlies and bald eagles. Made me contemplate my own mortality. Death is peace, an end, and a beginning for new life. But not an afterlife. Live life the fullest we can, because we don't always have control over the ending. And no encore. :)

[neebob]

58. It's not peace if you're not feeling it

It's just over. I think that's another reason people tend to believe in an afterlife, because it's hard to imagine nonexistence. If you imagine it, it's as if you're observing it, which means you're still there.

[ozone_man]

59. A different kind of peace.

You're right though, peace implies that it can be appreciated. There is nothing.

Someone needs to lighten up this thread. All this death stuff, not ready to go there. ;)

"The thing to remember is that each time of life has its appropriate rewards, whereas when you're dead it's hard to find the light switch. The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there may be no afterlife - a depressing thought, particularly for those who have bothered to shave. Also, there is the fear that there is an afterlife but no one will know where it's being held. On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down."
- Woody Allen

[neebob]

62. Oh, but it's OK for salmon.

:)

[ozone_man]

64. What a way to go.

If human life had such a grand exit. An amazing swim upstream, leaping spectacularly over rapids, to have sex, and then right into the mouth of a grizzly bear. :)

"Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion--several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven....The higher animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste."
- Mark Twain

"One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it. They also believed the world was flat."
- Mark Twain

"Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company."
- Mark Twain

[ozone_man]

40. Afterlife is wishful thinking.

I completely agree with Varkham's (somewhat dark) reply. It's a destructive idea that has been very bad for civilization, since it offers the promise of rewards beyond our natural existence. Rather than seek justice on earth, sustainable life for future generations of plants, animals, and people, we look toward heavenly fulfullment. It's not only a childish and selfish concept, it's perpetuated by the controlling powers, the church and state, to keep the masses under control (opiated), to prevent uprisings, revolutions, dissent, from demanding earthly fulfillment. It's a delusion, but one that has been used for great effect by TPTB.

But, religion may also have been a necessary, or inevitable step in civilization. Before we had the answers, or at least the powers of reason and scientific method to think of alternative explanations, it was plausible to believe in supernatural causes for existence, life after death, someone who listens to our prayers. As we mature as a civilization, these things can gradually be left behind, like the teddy bear in our crib.

"Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect."
From The Future of an Illusion, (1927)

"Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. <...> If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity."
(Sigmund Freud / 1856-1939 / Moses and Monotheism / 1939)

Here's an excerpt from an essay by Italian Marxist Enrico Ferri (1894) that addresses the issue of the deferred promises of religion, i.e., to the afterlife.

It is for this reason that science and religion are in inverse ratio one to the other; the one diminishes and becomes feeble in the same measure as the other increases and is strengthened in its struggle with the unknown.

And if this is a consequence of Darwinism, its influence on the development of socialism is perfectly evident.

The disappearance of the faith in something beyond when the poor will become the elect of the Lord, and when the miseries of this “valley of tears” will find an eternal compensation in Paradise, gives more vigour to the desire of a little “terrestrial Paradise” down here for the unhappy and the less fortunate who are the most numerous.

Hartmann and Guyaul<2> have shown that the evolution of religious beliefs can be thus summarised: all religions have within themselves the promise of happiness, but primitive religions admit that the happiness will be realised during the life itself of the individual, and later religions, by an excess of reaction, transport it outside this mortal world after death; in the last phase this realisation of happiness is again replaced in human life, no longer in the short moment of individual existence, but in the continued evolution of the whole of humanity.

On this side again, socialism is joined to religious evolution and tends to substitute itself for religion because it desires precisely that humanity should have in itself its own “terrestrial paradise” without having to wait for it in a “something beyond,” which, to say the least, is very problematical.

Also it has been very justly remarked that the socialist movement has numerous characteristics common, for instance, to primitive Christianity, notably its ardent faith in the ideal which has finally deserted the arid field of bourgeois scepticism, and certain learned men, not socialists, such as Messrs. Wallace, Laveleye and Roberty, etc., admit that socialism, by its humanitarian faith can perfectly replace the faith in the “something beyond” of the old religions.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/ferri/1894/religion.htm

I think IMModerate intended this to be a light hearted thread, but it's one of those subjects that can go either way. :)

[TallahasseeGrannie]

41. Remember the scene in Our Town

where the dead are envious of the living?

I sure hope it isn't like that. What I look forward to is understanding. I hope to God they let us in on all the secrets. We've earned them!

[neebob]

60. That's one thing that's kinda cool about Mormon hell

It's not really hell but just the lowest of three heavens, and it's so beautiful, you'd kill yourself to get there - or so my dad used to say. The hell is in knowing you could have done better.

Of course it's a different story if you murdered someone, had an abortion, or are an unrepentant homosexual or one of Satan's minions. Then you get cast into Outer Darkness, which is like total nothingness.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

63. Well,

total nothingness is better than eternal flame!

Now, if you have done these things is there a get out of jail free card where you confess and then you are cleansed? Or are you doome forever?

[neebob]

65. No, I'm pretty sure you're just doomed

although Gordon B. Wrinckley would probably say, "I don't know that we teach that."

[skyblue]

66. To go Back in Time, Forward in time, to inhabit other beings like animals

and feel what it is like to be an animal, to go to other planets and talk to their alien inhabitants, to see dinosaurs and mammoths, to be able to take unusual substances that make you experience things on different levels, this is what I imagine my dream afterlife to be like, but I need to be with my family to help them out as needed and get love and give love.

[and-justice-for-all]

67. Use your imagination.

[lvx35]

68. That post was just plain brilliant.

And to me, it was somehow satisfying as to questions of the afterlife...

[WoodrowFan]

69. well, BMUS will owe me a beer

I have a bet with BMUS that there is an afterlife and that when we're there, BMUS will owe me a beer! (I'll spring for the pizza though).



Seriously, yeah, I believe in Heaven. No bleeping clue what it'll be like. I'll find out when I find out. In the meantime I kind of like life right here and now.