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Originally Posted by photon
There's certainly less existential dread believing that you'll exist forever vs facing your own mortality and that the universe will continue without you forever.
It's also a lot easier to just follow a set of right vs wrong rules that someone said you have to follow or suffer eternally vs having to figure it out for yourself and do it because it's right (and not to avoid eternal damnation).
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I think there could be non-religious grounds to believe in the possibility of after life, next-life, or post-life existences. It's something I think about all the time.
There is so much we don't know about consciousness. Is it possible to reproduce consciousness? Like if the physical elements and structure of the brain replicate in another being with enough similarities and in the parts that are responsible for consciousness, will the same consciousness emerge in that being? We know it can happen once, because we are here and conscious, so maybe it could happen again. Or if we figure out how consciousness forms, could we artificially replicate it? Maybe there there is a way for an advanced human civilization to create a simulation that can produce the consciousnesses of every human that has lived or will live.
This is some of the stuff that keeps me up at night. It's a little meta, sure. But I don't think it is necessarily incongruent with science, at least based on the things we know now. It makes some assumptions though, so accepting those assumptions as possible or true probably counts a little bit as faith I suppose.