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mavendark
Experienced Poster
Joined: 06 Jul 2007
Posts: 44
Location: underground
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 Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2007 4:59 pm Post subject: The Afterlife |
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How many of you here believe in an afterlife? As in some place to go (where you are conscious) after you are dead?
Many people sees afterlife as some kind of bright light...where if they are almost or close to dead they travel through a tunnel where they see light and some of their deceased relatives on the other side. Others believe in reincarnation, that perhaps before you lived this life, you lived as another person somewhere else a long time ago. Some people even believe that depending on what you are in your past life, it could influence what you are in this life. Sometimes people may even be reincarnated as animals. Many people believe that there is just this limbo place where everyone in general goes to whereas others believe that there is a defined heaven and hell.
Personally what I believe in is a mixture of all of the above. I definitely believe in reincarnation, and that the past life influences everything in this life. But then, I really don't believe the fact that people reincarnate right after they die (as in they are born in another body right after they leave this physical body.) I think that they do go somewhere after they die for a while, and then a more superior being designates them (and depending on whether or not they are ready), they can be reincarnated into a new body with erased memories of the past lives.
The afterlife is very related with religion. Some people think that the people who are atheists don't really go anywhere after they die. They believe that wherever a person goes after they die depends on what they believe in. Say if they believe in christianity, then they go to heaven/hell whereas if they believe in buddhism, they are reincarnated. What do you think about this? Do people's religions affect their afterlife? Or do people have a general place to go to in the afterlife whether or not they believe in a religion?
My thoughts on that is more leaning toward the former, that whatever they will experience in their afterlife depends on what they believed in in this life and their religion (or...maybe not so much as their religion but more as to what they believe in.) |
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Duck
Pinko Liberal Communist
Joined: 21 Dec 2004
Posts: 1558
Location: Canada
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| Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 12:07 am Post subject: |
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We know the world as a product of our senses. To us, the universe is what we can see, hear, touch, smell and taste; our senses are our interface with reality. That interface is physically located in the organs that relate to each sense, and when our bodies die, so do those organs, meaning that the interface with which we have known reality for the entirety of our existence is no longer available. Your brain is dead, too, and your brain is where the physical manifestations that facilitate thought are located. If you die, both thought and our interface with reality are gone. All that is left is oblivion.
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SE13
Proud Londoner
Joined: 18 Apr 2005
Posts: 1667
Location: Wherever I Lay My Hat, That's My Home
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| Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 11:03 am Post subject: |
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Interesting thought.
However, if everyone passed over to this "afterlife", and everyone has a life expectancy of the seventy seven years those in The United Kingdom have, there would already be an astonishing 156,000,000,000,000,000,000 people there, and waiting for the next batch of 6,000,000,000,000 from the current inhabitants of The Planet. This of course does not include anything not human, and only counts from the year 0. Must be some vast size, this afterlife place for sure!
Astronouts have gone as far as they can within this solar system, and thus far found no signs of life, let alone after-life, so for me, the chances of it happening are somewhat slim to say the least.
I guess the only time we will know for absolute certain is when we pop our clogs ourselves.
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Artakserksis
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Joined: 14 Dec 2005
Posts: 74
Location: Komotini
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| Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 5:24 pm Post subject: |
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| Well, when I die I am pretty sure I'm going to be in an empty place, where I will feel, see and hear nothing. You can also tell it just nothing. |
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ThreeCubes+Duck
Novice Poster
Joined: 08 Jun 2007
Posts: 33
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| Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 7:13 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | Well, when I die I am pretty sure I'm going to be in an empty place, where I will feel, see and hear nothing. You can also tell it just nothing. |
If you see, feel and hear nothing, are you actually being? Can you think? If it's permanent, you'd have to go insane after a while. Do you exist if you're unperceptible and can't think?
SE13: I don't think physical analysis can really apply to a place that is not confirmed, or even commonly considered, physical? There's no reason to even consider that any place in the afterlife will follow any of the laws we hold real. I wouldn't expect it reasonable to think that we should be able to find it in our solar system, or even our universe, either. Our solar system is pretty small...
Duck: (Hah, I've got three cubes in addition.) That's a rather bleak view. So life is a merely physical phenomena? How does thought arise from thoughtless matter? Or isn't it thoughtless? Surely there's something extra somewhere in us, that can exist beyond our physical selves, and adapt to new senses in some other manifestation, sometime after death? Otherwise there is no hope... and no point. (Yes, I'm the centre of my... everything. I hardly think that's surprising.)
| Quote: | | whereas if they believe in buddhism, they are reincarnated. |
That's not quite right...
See:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism |
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Duck
Pinko Liberal Communist
Joined: 21 Dec 2004
Posts: 1558
Location: Canada
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| Posted: Tue Jul 24, 2007 3:47 pm Post subject: |
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| ThreeCubes+Duck wrote: | | Duck: (Hah, I've got three cubes in addition.) That's a rather bleak view. So life is a merely physical phenomena? How does thought arise from thoughtless matter? Or isn't it thoughtless? Surely there's something extra somewhere in us, that can exist beyond our physical selves, and adapt to new senses in some other manifestation, sometime after death? Otherwise there is no hope... and no point. (Yes, I'm the centre of my... everything. I hardly think that's surprising.) |
Yes, life is merely physical phenomena. Thought isn't anything special in that it doesn't exist outside of physics. Everything we experience, everything we think, everything we feel is the result of chemical shifts in the brain. So no, there's no hope of escaping it, and no, there's no point in us being formed, but we do have the time we're here, and we do have the capacity to enjoy it, so why the hell not? Just because death is the end doesn't mean that we should spend our whole lives worrying about it; it means the opposite.
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Xtreme
Lifeless Person
Joined: 14 Aug 2004
Posts: 1325
Location: New Orleans, LA, USA
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| Posted: Tue Jul 24, 2007 10:12 pm Post subject: |
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The more logical approaches to a life-philosophy / theology are (1) believing that everything is an absurdly coincidental physical phenomenon and that the idea of "meaning" is, in essence, meaningless or (2) following faith and reason to knowing a personal, loving, transcendent God.
Other beliefs aren't necessarily totally valueless, but they aren't backed by good reason or logic. |
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Myst
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Joined: 03 Jan 2005
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| Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2007 3:56 am Post subject: |
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| Duck wrote: | | Yes, life is merely physical phenomena. Thought isn't anything special in that it doesn't exist outside of physics. Everything we experience, everything we think, everything we feel is the result of chemical shifts in the brain. So no, there's no hope of escaping it, and no, there's no point in us being formed, but we do have the time we're here, and we do have the capacity to enjoy it, so why the hell not? Just because death is the end doesn't mean that we should spend our whole lives worrying about it; it means the opposite. |
Ok, I'm just going to jump in on this point. If you believe that, then do you believe that you never make a choice? As everything is mechanical, then there's a 'perfect' (but incomprehensibly complex) formula by which every decision, every thought, anyone ever makes can be predicted. Your enjoyment therefore would also be pre-determined. Which means that you cannot choose to enjoy anything.
Therefore, doesn't that make our existence completely pointless, given that everything we do, and have done, depends on everything else?
I do believe that there's something else. I believe that there's more to humans than just atoms and chemical reactions, and that we have a 'soul' (or whatever you want to call it) which is the core of our experience. |
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Xtreme
Lifeless Person
Joined: 14 Aug 2004
Posts: 1325
Location: New Orleans, LA, USA
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| Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2007 4:03 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Ok, I'm just going to jump in on this point. If you believe that, then do you believe that you never make a choice? As everything is mechanical, then there's a 'perfect' (but incomprehensibly complex) formula by which every decision, every thought, anyone ever makes can be predicted. Your enjoyment therefore would also be pre-determined. Which means that you cannot choose to enjoy anything.
Therefore, doesn't that make our existence completely pointless, given that everything we do, and have done, depends on everything else?
I do believe that there's something else. I believe that there's more to humans than just atoms and chemical reactions, and that we have a 'soul' (or whatever you want to call it) which is the core of our experience |
This is basically why I said that the alternative to a personal God is a universe of pointless, meaningless, purposeless nothing.
Indeed, in such a universe, the senses (sight, touch, etc) of its inhabitants (humans, in this case) could be said to have absolutely no reliability, as they have no intended purpose and no means by which to measure their true accuracy. Therefore, anyone suscribing to this view of the universe must admit that their opinions cannot possibly be said to be correct with any measure of certainty. Such a person must logically accept that his guess is as right as the next persons, so to speak, and should therefore find no reason to even bother defending his own point of view in the first place.
However, most people of this school of thought don't just sit back and accept that they may or may not be wrong. They try to demonstrate that they are right, and, unknowingly, bring to light the fallacy of their belief - they claim to believe in a mechanical nothingness of sorts, and yet they still want to find someway to prove that they are right. These two pursuits are necessarily mutually exclusive.
So then, in short, if you believe that life is without intended purpose and meaning, then you should also [logically] not bother with living, in the first place, and definitely not with arguing that you are right.
As always, no offense meant to anyone, I'm just trying to demonstrate that of the two most logical approaches to a world view (personal God or meaningless nothingness) the nihilistic one is self-defeating and impossible to truly believe while maintaining sanity. |
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linuxdoctor
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Joined: 23 Apr 2005
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| Posted: Fri Jul 27, 2007 5:13 pm Post subject: |
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Very interesting deduction, Xtreme, and quite correct.
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Raymon
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| Posted: Fri Jul 27, 2007 5:49 pm Post subject: |
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Actually, I don´t understand how somebody can live with the concept that after your death you will go to nothing... is depressing... I mean, your entire life, all your person goes to a... hmmm... nothing !!!!!
I still don´t know exactly where we go, can be heaven or hell but not the catolic one, if it´s the catolic one I have a ticket for hell...
Maybe you go to a new dimension where you find all the death people waiting for you and you have similar things that in earth... who knows.
The idea of nothing is depressing, that´s all I can say... so I hope to go somewhere even if that mean hell...
See you around,
Raymon
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marinaroz
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Joined: 04 Mar 2004
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Location: Israel
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| Posted: Mon Jul 30, 2007 11:46 am Post subject: |
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I don't believe in the afterlife. I think that when you die, you just cease to exist, and therefore can't feel or react or think or anything of the sort.
I don't believe that there's some great 'purpose' for humankind, and surely not for individual people. You are what you make yourself be, and how you define yourself. Thinking that there is a god out there that has some sort of pre-thought higher purpose for 'you', is strange and very arrogant.
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wellingtonboots
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| Posted: Tue Jul 31, 2007 12:42 pm Post subject: |
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I would like to believe that there is an immortal soul within me as per Christian beliefs but I am not fairly sceptical. Considering that whole point of having an immortal soul was to teach people that even though you will die in this life your sins will continue to stick with you for eternity until you repent.
The whole heaven and hell business is not something I'm comfortable because every religion claims that it's answer to heaven and all non-believers will end up in hell or purgatory, so I can't really subscribe any version of event.
I think that one life is enough for me, I would hate to have to get back up again and live another life full of anguish and problems. Oaky that is a bit defeatist but I don't really mind the concept of eternal peace. Once you die you simply cease to be and its lke going into a dreamless sleep for ever.
Of course I could be completely wrong and when I die I'm going to wake up at the gates of heaven and get St. peter's question wrong and end up in hell instead, or even better I would get cast in there automatically. Anyway I think if there was a hell it would be different for everyone, a kind of tailor made experience by the devil himself designed to bring out your worst fears and torture you for eternity, but then forever is very long and compared to the time we spend on earth it seems hardly fair to condemn some people to an infinite amount of suffering just because they lived a few years of their life badly.,
I hope that when I die I will have an enjoyable time.
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RohitMalhotra
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Duck
Pinko Liberal Communist
Joined: 21 Dec 2004
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Location: Canada
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| Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2007 2:29 pm Post subject: |
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| Myst wrote: | | Ok, I'm just going to jump in on this point. If you believe that, then do you believe that you never make a choice? As everything is mechanical, then there's a 'perfect' (but incomprehensibly complex) formula by which every decision, every thought, anyone ever makes can be predicted. Your enjoyment therefore would also be pre-determined. Which means that you cannot choose to enjoy anything. |
No, I don't believe that. I may believe that our entire experience and thought is based on the complex interaction of an amazingly complicated series of physical phenomena, but that doesn't mean that it is any less 'real' than if we had a "soul" or whatever. Coincidence has conspired to give us consciousness, therefore we can make decisions.
[quote=Xtreme]This is basically why I said that the alternative to a personal God is a universe of pointless, meaningless, purposeless nothing.
Indeed, in such a universe, the senses (sight, touch, etc) of its inhabitants (humans, in this case) could be said to have absolutely no reliability, as they have no intended purpose and no means by which to measure their true accuracy.[/quote]
If you replace this part with statement that God does not offer proof of his existence to Man, the rest of your post can describe a theistic viewpoint. So if I'm understanding you right, what you're saying is that you should just shut up.
[quote=Xtreme]Therefore, anyone suscribing to this view of the universe must admit that their opinions cannot possibly be said to be correct with any measure of certainty. Such a person must logically accept that his guess is as right as the next persons, so to speak, and should therefore find no reason to even bother defending his own point of view in the first place.[/Xtreme]
I'm going to reiterate: your opinion that God does exist cannot possibly be said to be correct with any measure of certainty. You must logically accept that your guess is as right as the next person's, so to speak, and should therefore find no reason to even bother defending your own point of view in the first place.
But you do. Interesting.
[quote=Xtreme]So then, in short, if you believe that life is without intended purpose and meaning, then you should also [logically] not bother with living, in the first place, and definitely not with arguing that you are right.[/quote]
"I don't like your point of view, so you should kill yourself, or at the very least not tell anyone about it."
[quote=Raymon]
The idea of nothing is depressing, that´s all I can say... so I hope to go somewhere even if that mean hell...
[/quote]
Whatever. Life's depressing. For me, the idea that there's some bodiless intelligence constantly not only watching but judging me is less attractive than an opportunity to have just a hell of a time before inevitable oblivion, but that's not even the main reason I don't subscribe to the idea of God; it's because I've been raised in an environment where God and religion just weren't important, and my experience with science and psychology has given me enough knowledge to be reasonably certain that, at the very least, we were not created by any sort of godlike intelligence. That doesn't even necessarily mean that He doesn't exist (although that's what I'm inclined to believe), but the idea that humans and life on earth could have come about without divine intervention is not nearly as outlandish as a lot of people seem to think.
Enough people have refused to subscribe to an idea because they find it depressing to mean that it's just human nature. I can't really criticize you for it.
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