What do you think happens after death?
 

Random thought on my mind recently. Views?

Re: What do you think happens after death?
 

Unlike most of Christendom, I believe the Bible when it clearly states that the dead know nothing. It further elaborates by explaining how, upon the 2nd coming of the Messiah, those who have died(living a righteous life) will be resurrected.

Anything resembling 'spirit channeling' is merely demons, further confusing the actual state of the dead. To think that an all-loving God will immediately transport a person's soul to heaven upon their death is rather oxymoronic. Same goes for an eternal anguish in hell for those who don't make the cut. Scripture describes infinite separation from God as hell. So, to state it simply, I believe in the traditional Judaic interpretation of life after death, not some merged concoction of pagan-christian superstitions that the majority of both Protestants and Catholics have been duped into accepting.
sorry for the offensive nature of the above.

Since you started, Bond, what are your thoughts on post mortemism?

Re: What do you think happens after death?
 

Might as well ask if god is real in this thread. lol But I have a thought on Seth's post.

I actually agree with this statement, however.. It depends on how the concept of time works when you're gone. Compared to Eternal life, our time limit on earth would be VERY short. The way I see it, if you're really living forever after death, then the time of your whole life.. let alone the time between when you die and when god returns to earth, would feel like nothing. Especially if you're not even aware of your own death.

Chances are when you die, you'll wake up in your new life in what feels like an instant. Hell, compare to eternal life, we're just living part of what would be an instant one day.

Just some food for thought. :)

Re: What do you think happens after death?
 

I'm a Frisbeetarian. I believe that when you die, your soul floats away and gets stuck on the roof.

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But since the dead know nothing, wouldn't the transition to heaven seem immediate? For the righteous, that is.

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I'd like to say that when you're dead, you're dead, but there are some really weird cases of young kids remembering past lives and actually tracking down their old families and being able to identify everyone never having met.

Then there are ghosts. Now these could actually be spirits or just energy that is stuck without the walls of a building. I liken this to those recordings from old pottery where the vibrations of people talking actually made it onto the surface of the pots. Oh bah, turns out that was a hoax: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/200...es_record.html

Heaven and Hell never made sense to me since there is much more to life than humans, who are a pretty new species given the grand scheme of things. When other animals die they're just dead? Then there are intelligent beings on other planets. What happens to them? If God is the one creator of the entire universe and not just Earth then surely there are other species in Heaven and Hell. Are they then segregated by planet? All seems too complicated to make sense.

Probably other dimensions which could be considered to be a Heaven or Hell. Where else do fairie folk and demons and such come from if they exist?

Who knows? I'll just assume when I die I'll be dead. If I get reincarnated or whisped off to another dimension or left behind as spiritual energy, oh well.

Re: What do you think happens after death?
 

I think your body slowly decomposes and the people that love you will remember you until they slowly decompose as well.

I can't remember before I was born, nor do I remember being born. So I don't expect to remember dying, or have thought after I die.

And hey, if there is a higher being of some sort, cool. I'd embrace that. Unless it is the type of messiah that hates you if you have free will.

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Personally, I don't believe anything happens. I think you're just dead - the spark of whatever makes you human just fades away, like a flame. There's no reason to believe that a fire, once it dies, still exists in some higher dimensional plane...and there's no reason to believe a human does either.

If there is something after death, I doubt it is conceived on a notion of humanly defined "right" and "wrong".

Really? All religions are some merged concoctions of the belief sets that have come before them, which their followers have been duped into accepting.

Re: What do you think happens after death?
 

Interesting. That's pretty much what me and 7 million other witnesses of Jehovah believe.

Except for the hell as being seperated from God. (Don't get me wrong, I don't believe in a burning hell (but the Greeks did)). What is often translated as hell means the common grave of humanity. A symbolical place that we go to when we die.
There's another word (gehenna), that's a state of eternal destruction. A state of not existing. So no burning there either, sorry guys.

And yeah, what Seth said. You die, your life ends. Everything of it. But Jehovah can bring you back to life after his son has started to reign.

Although there is a small group of people who will join Jesus in the heavens, to rule the earth for 1000 years. But Revelation says that group is only 144.000 people big, so most people (incl. Christians, Jews...) have a hope of eternal life on earth.

Re: What do you think happens after death?
 

That would be the coolness of death. In essence, it should almost be like the blink of an eye.
TheGame, yes! Very trippy thinking about the whimsy of time that it takes one to be born, live a full life n die, when compared to the timescape of the universe.
What Angrist said about the 144000. From my interpretive point, the 144k is the remnant at the very end of the world who have been brought through the persecution and literally witness God returning. As for living a millennium, I believe that every righteous soul who has lived throughout Earth's history will be raised and taken to heaven for this thousand year time period. It's basically a question/answer period where the unknown's and mysteries regarding our time on Earth is explained. It's after this thousand years that the Earth is restored and the new city of God is created on the newly reno'd planet.

Teuthida: regarding species on other planets,
From a Biblical perspective, humanity here on Earth is the grand central stage where the dividing question on whether or not we even possess freedom of choice is being played out. Every intelligent, created being in the universe has access to the results of human's choices concerning God's law, and his subsequent redemption plan for those who embrace the love. The Bible regards sin as the one thing that separates us all from the Creator. That's why there are hundreds of prophetic verses in the old testament regarding the arrival of the Messiah. It's difficult(for me) to dismiss fulfilled prophecy as merely religious traditions. We've all heard, "wages of sin is death". That's why we're in need of a 'saviour'. Sin doesn't have the same effect on the rest of the created universe because Luciferian influence is confined to this planet. It was Satan's bargaining chip, in regards to his claimed lack of choice under the 'rule' of a supreme being.
To put it another way, if hell is separation from God. Sin separates us from Him, so any sin in our lives is causing us to live in a 'hell' of sorts.
btw: demons=fallen angels

Typh: last thing you said about free will. Freedom of choice, within the context of Biblical explanations, is a universal law, as real as gravity. It boils down to loving your neighbor as you love yourself, which is pretty weighty. decisions based on selfish motive are what keeps us from being able to exist in the presence of an 'all-encompassing' love, like the kind that God has. So, a Messiah that hates freedom of choice is a big contradiction of his nature. Accepting the redemption of his sacrifice for us is a choice.
The Bible talks about those who have never heard the name of Jesus, that they will be judged based on their propensity to 'do good'.

I really like the one God, Judeo belief of 'the meaning of life'. For me it leaves no room for fear of the unknown because it instills purpose. Purpose beyond, "hey I want that car, relationship, house, richness in next life, that peak, wave, game...." because all this can be removed in an instant. For myself, I want to enjoy the many pleasures of this life, but I don't want to base my existence or purpose on it.

Re: What do you think happens after death?
 

I was more alluding to the fact of "All non believers of *enter religion here* don't go to *enter afterlife here*."

Re: What do you think happens after death?
 

I don't understand why religion is needed to give meaning to life. I don't understand how people can scoff at the idea of Santa Clause in one breath and say they believe in an invisible man in the sky who is all powerful and created all of existence in another.

I believe that life is meaningless. Human's are not the center of the universe, and there is no higher power which is going to grant us immortal life after we have died.

However, I believe that each of us, as individuals, possess the ability and right to give our lives as much meaning as we desire to, through our actions, aspirations, dreams, and achievements. Through our joys and our morals and our passions. Whether you are a writer or an artist or a programmer who revels in creation, or a lover who lives to love the people around them. Each of us, without the assistance of a god, can give life meaning. Without our human judgment, though, life is intrinsically meaningless.

This is the great paradox of our existence: of the short time, the span of years and decades, life is immensely important. Getting to work on time, raising your kids, playing your favorite video game, reading your favorite book. These things are very important to you and have great meaning during your short life. And I say short because, in the context of universal and geological time, our lives are a mere flicker of candlelight. Over the course of geological time, which is so large we cannot appropriately fathom it, these things are meaningless. As humans each one of us must learn to deal with this paradox - that the things we do are both meaningful and meaningless.

We must come to accept that we are mortal - our existence is -not- forever. We are creatures who have evolved into what we are over the course of millions of years, so in that since we are very old, but each individual mind is a candle in the wind. This is the mistake I believe most religions make. They try to take us, as mortals, and force us into the context of immortality, a place which we do not belong.

And there's nothing wrong with that. We don't need to live forever, no other creature does (although technically lobsters and a few other sea critters could). I'm not saying that death is an ok thing that just happens as a product of nature. Nature is not intrinsically perfect. There is a huge amount of randomness in evolution, and no creature evolves toward perfection. Death is an ugly side to Darwinism, but it doesn't mean we need to invent things to help us cope with it.

Speaking of Darwin, I believe that most my concepts of life and it's meaning come from a combination of the things he did, and the things Albert Camus wrote (The Myth of Sisyphus, The Stranger, The Plague, etc).

Darwin helps to explain the relation between geological time and our life time, and Camus helps to understand how we can give our life times meaning in the face of oblivion.

Re: What do you think happens after death?
 

I'm curious what inspired Bond to make this thread or what he personally thinks.

Re: What do you think happens after death?
 

When you die, your body gets burnt to ashes to prevent the chance of coming back as a zombie, then you get put in a vase for others to admire and be thankful that cant come back as a zombie.

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And the alternative is that they fill your grave with cement. :D

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Yeah when I was lying in bed yesterday, I suddenly wondered if Bond is dying or something.

I really don't think about GT members very often when I'm lying in bed. Seriously. :(

Re: What do you think happens after death?
 

Haha, I was actually just wondering about that.

As for what happens after death...I don't think anything happens. You just die, and that's it.

Re: What do you think happens after death?
 

I am not dying! Sorry if I made anyone think this. I made this thread because "what is after death?" is a question that I have been giving much thought since my birthday (21) a few days ago. Normally I just pass birthdays by quite happily, but for some reason this one in particular gave me a sense of my immortality, and that some day I will die.

And I suppose this hit me now because it is a question I have long ignored, along with "is there a God?" I've realized these are (probably) the two greatest questions in our life, and they deserve a great deal of time and effort in addressing them.

In short, I am not sure what happens after death, which I suppose makes me agnostic, but I hope I am not a lazy agnostic. I have always enjoyed studying organized religion, its selective histories are quite fascinating and entertaining, but I have never much liked organized religion as a personal construct for myself. As much as I tried, I cannot convince myself it is right for me to join a religion.

But, of course, faith is not dependent on organized religion. I view faith as a much more personal than communal journey, but perhaps I am wrong.

I will say I think it is misguided to simply dismiss all of religion, in the view that it makes humans subservient and weak, and that the only way toward human empowerment is through a non-religious mindset. In fact, one could quite easily argue the opposite.

Mormonism - a very strict religion by any stretch of the imagination, is a collection of some of the most industrious and wealthy persons America has ever known. A coincidence? Perhaps, but I think unlikely.

In America, we seem to have a science versus religion mindset, which I think is counterproductive. It seems to me as though they would work much more effectively together than against.

Re: What do you think happens after death?
 

I've been struggling with this for the past year or two. It's a tough thing to think about, and even tougher when you realize that 99% of your peers, friends and family choose to ignore the topic because it is difficult. I was raised Catholic and began to drift away from the church during high school when I began to have personal differences regarding certain topics. I also am incredibly cynical about humans in general and that has pushed me further away from religion. But I've been meaning to start reading the Bible on my own. I want to explore it on my own since I was raised on a religion that focuses on tradition and cherry picks similar passages from the Bible every year.

It's really important to have a sense of humor about life though...and appreciate the little things. Once you realize what a joke everything is, being the Comedian is the only thing that makes sense. :D

Re: What do you think happens after death?
 

This is very true. I suppose you can't fault the Catholics, as their faith has always been based more on tradition than the Bible. I remember in the high school that I attended (a Catholic one) we only had one required religious class that utilized the Bible. The interpretations were sometimes very odd and a bit erratic, but always entertaining.

Re: What do you think happens after death?
 

This stems from the fact that the more we learn in the fields of science, the less and less we need God to explain things.

Science has already proven so many things in the Bible wrong, when they are read literally. The religious response to this was to start reading them metaphorically.

One of my favorite examples is the case of amputees. Whenever you ask most religious people if they think praying for their sick relatives and/or friends recovery actually helps them, they will all say yes. If their friend has cancer, an infection, a heart problem, etc, etc, they all believe that praying will help make them better.

But what about amputees? If you ask them if praying for an amputee will help them recover, their first reaction will be one of discomfort, then they will have to make up something far fetched like, "God has a special plan for those people."

You could argue that by being an amputee who is still alive, God has already helped you. But why, then, does god favor people with internal problems that are invisible to our eyes? Why does he sometimes help those people recover completely, but amputees are left with sometimes 4 missing limbs.

And what about victims of paralysis? These people are alive, but their limbs (or more) are unusable. People pray that they will get back their ability to use their bodies...apparently just being alive isn't good enough for these people. And if these people DO recover the use of their bodies, religious people will say "thank God." So, why doesn't your god help amputees recover the use of their bodies?

There are just so many unreasonable things about religion. The above example, as well as how obviously cross pollinated they are, yet they are all more right than the others! I think the cross pollination is proof that religions are just made up by humans throughout history, incorporating things they like, and leaving out things they don't like.

Meh...yeah I think this is a coincidence. There are wealthy people of every religion.

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There's a reason science and religion has managed to co-exist this long. The fact that science cannot disprove that there's a creator, even in all of its advancements.. is the reason religion still exists.

People are free to believe what they'd like, but there's no factual evidence that disproves that there's a god.

Don't get me wrong, just because something can't be disproved, doesn't mean it exists. Its just that religion fills in the blanks that science has never, and probably will never be able to fill.

Re: What do you think happens after death?
 

What?

Not to sound like an ass, but please explain what science hasn't been able to answer.

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The burden of proof is not on scientists or the non religious.

The burden of proof is on those who claim that a God does exist. Saying, "You can't prove it ISN'T there" is not a logical argument. It's a fallacy.

So until someone can prove there IS god, there's no reason to believe there is one.

Re: What do you think happens after death?
 

Well for one, the origins of life. Right now science's explanation have been:

1) A mistake or coincidence (a theory even science of probabilities does not support)

2) Aliens (and in that case, who made them?)

Both of those theories are based on pretty lousy "science", to be honest. For me, science seems to create 2 questions with each answer it discovers, and even most of what is treated as proven science is actually just a leading theory. Part of my issue with the scienbtific community is how they tend to treat leading theories as facts, and I find that counterproductive to the scientific process.

Re: What do you think happens after death?
 

I'm afraid I have to disagree with you on that one:

The leading theory on the origins of life remains that God created life. There is no proof that life was created otherwise, and any evidence to the contrary is circumstantial and even silly. There is more hard science to support the God theory (probabilities of life orighinating by accident making it a near impossibility). So if we are going to treat leading and established theories as facts to be disproven, and God has been the leading theory for thousands of years, that puts the burden of proof on those attempting to disprove God's existence.

But more importantly, Vamp, your comments show a big misunderstanding of religion and what it means to be religious. To prove God's existence would destroy him.

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Interesting point. I'm assuming you say this because it would destroy the need for faith, and the awe and mystery that the unknown of God creates?

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I thought that the leading theory was after the Big Bang occurred the "right stuff" (which is the molecular make-up of our universe) allowed life to flourish.

http://www.livescience.com/strangene...ting-life.html:
If you don't discredit Evolution, then who is to say the right reaction could not have created life?

This evidence or theory does not rule out a divine creator setting life into motion, it is just is a very reasonable explanation for where life may have possibly originated.

Just because it is nearly impossible does not make it impossible. I probably won't win the lottery, but it is possible. My understanding is this argument is difficult due to the unknown origins of the universe. So, what "hard science" supports God? Science is not looking for God, it is looking for understanding of the world around us.



I just want to say that science is not theology. Science does not seek out to disprove God, it seeks out to explain the natural phenomenons in our Universe. Science has very little stakes in the Ontological nature of our universe. Theories like Evolution (which is as much of a "Theory" as Gravity is) or the Big Bang do not discredit a divine creator that set things into motion.

Science has taken on this mistaken identity of being Anti-Religious because it has disproved a number of things firmly supported by the religious community; the world is flat, the world is the center of the universe, the sun is the center of the universe, the universe is a constant thing, evolution, etc.

But this ignores and negates the philosophical questions of existence and places the focus on Scripture or certain religious denominations. My beef with brilliant minds like Dawkins is that his wisdom is in science not philosophy, so he has NO business discussing philosophy.


EDIT: There is some new science looking at the Afterlife or Near Death Experiences...but I believe the Catholic's policy is the Afterlife is something that can only be obtained when you have truly passed. Also I believe the Bible describes the Afterlife as intangible to human thought/imagination.

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More importantly, you're comments show a big misunderstanding of what a scientific theory is. You sound like the people who say, "Oh evolution! It's only a theory." Religion is not a theory, and neither is god.

Where are your statistics coming from that make the existence of an all powerful being more probable than all life being created from accident? I find the latter to be more likely - that a group of atoms combined in just the right way to form a single cell organism. At least that is explainable. The existence of a god is not explainable.

If I were to say to you, "There is a purple furred bunny with draconic wings and a lions head somewhere in the world today", then would you be obligated to believe that, just because you don't have evidence to disprove me?

I don't see how my statements lead you to believe I don't know anything about religion or religious people. I wasn't born atheist, but I have become a person of reason and fact. I understand that religion and religious people require a certain amount of spirituality - but since I do not believe in spirituality, I cannot use those terms to express my argument.

You're trying to put me into a catch 22 - I can't use reason to argue my point because it is against the nature of religion, but I can't use religion to argue my point because it contradicts my point.

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I'll say that I generally agree with Strangler's stance in this thread. Lately I've not been in the debating mood, so I'm not really going to sit here and go down point by point and argue with Vamp and KG.

But there's one point I want to touch on..

No. Just like you're not obligated to believe that a god created us, nor are you obligated to believe in 'random chance' or evolution. It's a choice.

But the search for evidence, and the further understanding of how energy works.. usually leads back to the same fact. Its much more likely that someone or something created life. Random chance is possible, but its more of a stretch to say random chance created energy from nothing without a hand to push it in the direction it went. To me that's both illogical, and goes against what science has discovered.

I know its cliché, but what came first, the chicken or the egg? Saying god created chickens to give birth through eggs may sound crazy to you, but to me it makes more sense then saying they were created by accidents and random chance from nothing. And science has yet to find a shred of evidence that disproves my belief on the subject..

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Heh, aren't religious people the ones that believe something came from nothing? XD

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Not necessarily, but this goes back to the human construct of time. God could either exist outside of time, or in multiple dimensions of time.

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Thanks, KG. I didn't want to have to break out my old bio textbooks.

The Game, there is no choice except for disregarding science or not.

And the egg came first. Two animals very close to being chickens mated and laid an egg. Their offspring would be the first of what we consider a chicken to be.

Re: What do you think happens after death?
 

Anyone who believes energy came from nowhere and that there was no creator is disregarding science. An Agnostic doesn't disregard science, but an Atheiest does.
just as much.. or more then any religious person.

Where did the two animals that mated come from? Why can't we consider them to be a chicken? If they weren't born from an egg, why did the next baby happen to come out of an Egg instead of how its parents were born? What did the creature that came out of the egg mate with to create more eggs?

I don't think that you have the correct answer. You just made up that answer to rationalize the fact that there's a hole that science can't explain. Just as a religious person would fill the hole with saying god created either/or.

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Life and energy are not interchangeable concepts. The universe was around well before there was life so there was energy to bring about the creation of life. The creation of the universe is a whole other matter I have almost zero knowledge on.

Going to take the easy way out on the chicken debate and quote wikipedia. Explains it much better than I could.

Red junglefowl-grey junglefowl hybrid, it's what's for dinner.

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There are two arguments that will have us running in circles for days:
-God always existed (in counter to the, "who made God/where did he come from?)
-Energy always existed (in counter to, "where does energy come from?)

Believing in the latter does not mean you need to forfeit your belief in God.

From smaller organisms. Many of which live in your body and you depend on for your day-to-day survival.

How did Adam and Eve's children populate the Earth. Oh, they had sex with each other. Siblings banging is nothing new. :p

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How do you know that the universe was around before there was life?

That quote from wiki is based completly off of theories and beliefs, and not off of facts.

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Take Biology. Microorganisms can split or multiply. All it takes is some good primordial tidal soup. And there is a whole cannon of science - Biology - which supports the claim that microorganisms can reproduce. And if you want facts I can dig them up. In labs microbiologists have been able to witness reproduction of single-celled organisms. They have mapped DNA and compared human DNA to other animals (as well as other animals to other animals). There are remnants of single-celled organisms in you and me too. I'm not a Bio Major, this is my GF's territory, but I think if you really seek answers you should take biology. (And again, this STILL doesn't disprove God. It merely provides a logical explanation to some phenomenon in our Universe).

Also, your use of words like "accidents" and "random chance" are misleading. It seems the universe is actually quite receptive for life. Jupiter's moon Europa appears to have enough oxygen to support Earthly life (NASA). Mars may have bacteria on it, and our Moon has water on it! And that's just within our Solar System. There are BILLIONS of galaxies out there with TRILLIONS of stars.

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Eventually I'll have to take classes on that subject, my main two majors have been Philosophy and Economics. (Persueing both, but got my AA in liberal arts, then went to work... :()

But anyway, the only thing I can really say to that, is that experiments are also created.. As are the environments in which organisms are studied. So as you said, it doesn't disprove creationism. At the end of the day, it boils down to if everything became how it is now by design, or by chance.

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For the same reason we don't classify a Chimpanzee as a Bonobo. They're both apes, but different in little ways that make them not the same at all.