What do you think happens after death?

[KillerGremlin]

Originally Posted by Seth

To think that an all-loving God will immediately transport a person's soul to heaven upon their death is rather oxymoronic.

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

[Typhoid]

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.

[Vampyr]

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".

not some merged concoction of pagan-christian superstitions that the majority of both Protestants and Catholics have been duped into accepting.

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

[Seth]

Originally Posted by KillerGremlin

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

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.

[Typhoid]

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

[Vampyr]

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.

[KillerGremlin]

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

[Angrist]

Originally Posted by KillerGremlin

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

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.

[ZebraRampage]

Originally Posted by Angrist

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

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.

[TheGame]

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.

[Typhoid]

Originally Posted by TheGame

Its just that religion fills in the blanks that science has never, and probably will never be able to fill.

What?

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

[Professor S]

Originally Posted by Typhoid

What?

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

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.

[Vampyr]

Originally Posted by TheGame

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.

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.

[Professor S]

Originally Posted by Vampyr

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.

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.