What happens when we die?

[flamesfever]

I believe that our spirit lives on through those whose lives we have touched.

As for specifics of what happens after we die, I side with those who say it is a great mystery, and is something that we should not fear with the knowledge that we have tried to live a good life.

As for the concept of heaven or hell, I agree with my Mom, who always said that we are capable of making our lives a living heaven or hell, depending on what path we choose to take in life.

[T@T]

Originally Posted by flamesfever

I believe that our spirit lives on through those whose lives we have touched.

I agree we live on in memory's but unless your famous those die soon enough as well.

[flamesfever]

Originally Posted by T@T

I agree we live on in memory's but unless your famous those die soon enough as well.

Not only memories, but actions base on memories. I think it's impossible to predict how much, or how long, our influence will extend.

[stampsx2]

Originally Posted by Enoch Root

That's your argument for eternally coming back to life but not remembering past experiences?

I'll leave you to think that one through for a while.

Help me out.

[Sliver]

Originally Posted by GirlySports

it's just as made up as having a man in the sky watching your every move.

Exactly. They're both ridiculous.

[stampsx2]

Originally Posted by Sliver

Exactly. They're both ridiculous.

Depends how you look at it. 200 years ago if someone said we'd be flying above the clouds in metal containers they would say you're being ridiculous. A fairy tale. Based on what we knew at the time, it probably was.

[stampsx2]

Do you believe in life after birth


In a mother’s womb were two babies.One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?”The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”
“Nonsense” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”

The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”

The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”

The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”

The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover if there is life, then why has no one has ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”

The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”

The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her this world would not and could not exist.”

Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.”

To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and you really listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.”

[PepsiFree]

Moral of the story:
If you don't believe in science and fact, you come off like a dumb baby.

[Enoch Root]

A fable to illustrate a fable. Faith is a powerful thing.

[Dion]

Three dead guys are in line waiting to get into heaven. Before they go in, St. Peter asks them how did they died.

So he asks the first man and the first man says, "Well I've suspected for a while that my wife had been cheating on me with another man so I came home early from work on purpose. When I got back to the apartment she was lying naked in bed like she had just been having sex. So I checked under the bed and there was no one there. I checked in the closet and there was no one there, so I looked on the balcony and there was some guy hanging from the railing. I got so angry I beat his hands until he fell, then I ran back in the apartement, grabbed the refridgerator, brought it back out, and dropped over the railing right on top of him. Then I was so mad I had a heart attack and died and came here."

St. Peter said, "It sounds like you've had it rough, so I'll let you in."

The next man walks up and gets asked the same question. So this man says, "I was standing on apartment balcony when I tripped and fell over the railing. I was able to grab onto the railing of the apartment below me but then this crazy idiot starts pounding on my fingers until I can't hold on any longer. Then he goes and dumps this refrigerator on me and I wound up here."

St. Peter lets this guy in too because he has also had it rough.

Then the third guy comes up and is also asked the question. This guy replies, "Okay, so I'm having an affair with this married women when the husband comes home early and she tells me to run and hide. So I go and hide in the refridgerator..."

[peter12]

If one was honestly interested in searching out decent books about religion, and faith, I would recommend the following:

- The Atheist's Delusion - David Bentley Hart
- The Rage against God - Peter Hitchens
- The Divine Inferno (particularly Purgatorio) - Dante
- Lost in the Cosmos - Walker Percy
- The Book of Common Prayer

[T@T]

Originally Posted by peter12

If one was honestly interested in searching out decent books about religion, and faith, I would recommend the following:

- The Atheist's Delusion - David Bentley Hart
- The Rage against God - Peter Hitchens
- The Divine Inferno (particularly Purgatorio) - Dante
- Lost in the Cosmos - Walker Percy
- The Book of Common Prayer

And when your finished with those and need to come back to earth I recommend these great reads.

- God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything - Christopher Hitchens
- The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason - Sam Harris
- The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
- Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon - Daniel C. Dennett
- The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design - Richard Dawkins

[peter12]

Thanks. I appreciate that list.

The real killer atheist texts that really knocked me down were "Thus Spake Zarathustra" by Nietzsche or "Journey to the End of the Night" by Celine.

[Vulcan]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

I don't know if I'm putting all my eggs in the basket of a 15th century misogynist.

Just because someone is from India and the English translation seems stilted and profound, does not make them so.

Here's a clue for you:

"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark"

Stephen Hawking

I like Kabir because what he says corresponds to my experience, not that it sounds profound. I use Kabir as a reference because he says thing better than I can, I'm not a follower of his.

For me there is more going on than what occurs in the brain.

[peter12]

I want to be careful with my following comments. Often, I am accused of troll-baiting, and while it is pretty obvious that I like the occasional inflammatory drive-by comment, normally what I am doing is just briefly summing up my impressions of a thread's tone in one or two sentences.

So, here is my impression. Religious believers seem to be far more clear as to the psychological meaning of being human. That is, they understand, and somewhat embrace their destinies to be utterly amazed, and completely miserable. They seem to grasp the tenuous grip that each of us has on our personal understanding of the cosmos, and our individual place within that swirling nothingness. This is true even in the most puerile of religious expressions. Man has a place, and that he cannot find it is a salient existential fact.

The rationalists, even though they border on scientism, grasp that man is a wonderer, and that he is great insofar as he can discover the rational order, and taxonomy of this wonderful universe. He often goes too far in this understanding, and tends to forget that even though he increasingly gains understanding of the material world, he often forgets about himself, and the life he has been given/forced to live.

I really, truly do not believe that you can have one perspective without the other. You cannot read The Blind Watchmaker, and not be somewhat horrified at Dawkin's insouciant embrace of the empty.

[Regulator75]

Originally Posted by GirlySports

what if you were somewhere before you were born?

Like swimming around in your Dad's scrotum?

[wittynickname]

I never could come to a solid grasp of what might happen to us after death. I grew up as a Jehovah's Witness--you're either one of the chosen (relatively) few who go to heaven to rule with Jesus, or you're one of the other faithful who remain on the earth forever after Armageddon, and if you're not one of those two--you're just dead. No hell, no torment, just no longer existing. Eternal, dreamless sleep.

Which isn't so bad, as religious beliefs for non-believers go, really. No eternal damnation, you just cease to be living.

I've drifted from religion as I've gotten older, leaning more toward being agnostic/atheist. I'm not sure I believe there's NOTHING out there, but I'm not sure I necessarily believe in the idea of a benevolent, omnicient god either. So I've leaned more toward the idea of when you die, you're just gone. Everyone dies, it's over. No heaven or hell, no eternal life, just you cease to exist.

We have a client who comes into our salon however, who claims to be a medium. I'm always hugely skeptical of anything like that, but I've heard some pretty crazy stories from her, and with myself and others I know, she's been oddly spot on. I had a weird event last summer where out of the clear blue sky, 3 $2 bills appeared in my wallet at work one day. At the time that they appeared, my purse was in the locked back room, and I was the only person in the building.

With no other trace of where those bills could've come from, I asked her about it, because it was a very odd occurrence. She told my my grandfather had a message for me, and that was the only way to get my attention. She then described him, the house he lived in, the back yard and the shed outside of the kitchen window, down to the broken window in the shed. It was really, really weird. She's only known me for 3 years, and my grandfather passed 15 years ago, so she has absolutely zero way of knowing any of that information.

She's shared the same kind of oddly personal information with several of my coworkers. Family secrets that she'd have no way of knowing, exact physical descriptions of people she's never met, descriptions of photos she hasn't seen but that people have later found. I remain skeptical because she's said a few things that don't quite make sense, but she's spot-on more often than not.

So I guess at this point I'm kind of open to anything.

[WesternCanadaKing]

"You" go back to nothingness. But you leave a void and nature abhors voids.

Something somewhere in the vast extent of existence will be 'opening its eyes' and will need consciousness. It can fill in the void that you left.

The fact that you exist as something now means that existence as something is possible. "Nothing" is the wrong answer, because it could be literally anything.

[troutman]

PIPPIN: I didn't think it would end this way.

GANDALF: End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.

PIPPIN: What? Gandalf? See what?

GANDALF: White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.

PIPPIN: Well, that isn't so bad.

GANDALF: No. No, it isn't.

[Sliver]

Originally Posted by WesternCanadaKing

"You" go back to nothingness. But you leave a void and nature abhors voids.

Something somewhere in the vast extent of existence will be 'opening its eyes' and will need consciousness. It can fill in the void that you left.

The fact that you exist as something now means that existence as something is possible. "Nothing" is the wrong answer, because it could be literally anything.

Are you being poetic or are you relaying facts as you see them? Was your post to be taken literally? Like, when I die, that means something instantly becomes alive and my consciousness goes into that thing? What is consciousness? Are you making things up, or did you read this in a book somewhere?

This thread is crazy.