What do you think happens after death?

[Bond]

Random thought on my mind recently. Views?

[Seth]

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?

[TheGame]

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

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.

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.

[KillerGremlin]

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

[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.

[Teuthida]

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.

[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.

[Angrist]

Originally Posted by Seth

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?

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.

[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.

[Combine 017]

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.

[KillerGremlin]

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