Question For Athiests

Response in Blue

Life is simply a form of energy and energy cannot be destroyed. The Buddhist believe that we should not question what happens after death because there is no way of knowing. Coming up with an answer to something, we as mankind, have no capabilities of figuring out is absolutely preposterous. There is no true answer, and once you come to accept that death doesn’t seem as scary. I am not afraid of death because death is unknown to us. It is hard but to not be afraid of the unknown, it goes against human nature. But once you accept that no one will ever know what happens after death, it can help you become fearless.

The personality is a specific configuration of matter and energy in a physical matrix individual to each person. When death occurs the uniqueness that is YOU, dissipates forever, never to be reconstituted.
When you die you are dead and gone. And it is the act of a sorry person scared of death and their utter end that invents ideas that make them feel they are worthy of eternity.

I agree, eternity if it is possible is obtained only in what you do in life, and what people remember you for afterwards, if you are going to live on, it will only be because you were Achiles or Julius Caesar, or Gandhi, or Martin Luther King or whatever, your only chance at eternal life is to be remembered as an example to those who follow you. You die you rot in the ground, your legacy is all you have, make it a good one, no one wants to be forgotten because they were a massive incorigable forgettable asshole. Well no one worth caring about anyway. :slight_smile:

Although I think that this particular subject is taking the thread off course, I will still react to your statement.

I think that it is sensible to live as if you were going to live on. This is because, when you die, you do so in the manner which you have lived and the baggage you have collected during your lifetime is what influences how you die. I have seen it many times and just presently in my mother-in-law. That is why the attitude is so important, which is the way you will deal with whatever comes your way. Equanimity, compassion and mindfulness help us die peacefully, and so they are the attributes we should seek - or perhaps allow. It may be a wager, but it seems to have benefits in this life as much as in a (possible-impossible) afterlife.

This is of course palpably false. People die in all sorts of ways unconnected to their ways of life.
Evil people live long, the good die young, and vice versa.
Also people who live healthily can die young, and those that abuse the temple of their body can carry on rocking. I just saw Keith Richards jamming away with the Stones; average age 71. Keith is renowned for putting it away, whilst Jaqueline Du Pre, his contemporary lived a virtuous life but died in 1987 of MS.

I’m not saying you can’t improve your chances with healthy eating, but in terms of social and moral responsibility, or “attitude” it makes not a jot of difference to how and when you die. SO much is obvious.

Many compassionate, loving and mindful people die violent and tragic deaths.

You can dream on as much as you like. But there is not indication that there is a judge to determine what may or may not happen when you die. You seemed to have sucked up the biggest myth out there.

Once again, HC, you have completely missed the point - and you are talking out of your … Back on the ignore list … :-"

“Talking out of your …” is not different from saying “talking out of your arse.”
Is that the best you can do to defend your position?
You do yourself no favours. You just look weak.
What is most amusing about your attitude, is that I am RIGHT ON the “point”, and that is why you are running away - running from yourself.

yeah but I think the afterlife is a delusion, so living as if you were going to benefit somehow from something that isn’t going to happen is pointless. I think atheists say it best, you can hope for an afterlife if you like, but if you don’t get one, perhaps you were missing the implaccable grandeur of this life. Paraphrasing Camus there; I’d rather imgine personally and it is my own opinion that I am going to die, and the only thing that will live on is what I did in this world, the mentallity makes me try harder in this life I think. If I am wrong of course, it’s win, and if I am right it’s win in what I try to achieve without expectation. It just seems win all round. :slight_smile:

Taking a thread off course is win too, some threads need some life. :slight_smile:

Thanks, but again, “living as if you were going to benefit somehow from something that isn’t going to happen is pointless” is exactly where you are missing the point. My observations whilst nursing untold numbers of dying people is that, regardless whether there is a life after death, dying in a bed is where I can benefit from the way I have lived. Unless you have done this any amount of times you may miss this point. Even my wife can only see that it is sad and terrible and all the other things people feel about the death process, but she did agree, that her mother is dying in the way she lived, just as I had said in the many other times when she wasn’t emotionally involved.

Just as an aside, have you seen the cartoon of the ecologist meeting, talking about climate change where the caption say’s, “What if this is all a hoax and we improve the quality of the air, of the water and the land for nothing!” The cartoon makes us laugh, because improving the environment is a goal unto itself, just as the life with the qualities I mentioned is.

Despite what I think about the conservative beliefs, I have seen people from these churches die in a remarkable peace, and I believe that this is the measure of piety, not how literally they take the Bible or how well they can quote it. If they fall into oblivion, it isn’t as though they will know anything … at they same time, if they have lived good lives, they have profited and helped others profit from them having lived.

No one is qualified to disagree with you, eh?
Yet you have not died, and are equally unqualified.
When you die - then come back and shout about who can and cannot know what the point is.
For me, I’ve been in that bed. But I suppose for you, I don’t count.

Religion helps us cope with death better, well ok, coping with the inevitable is not high up on my list of priorities though.

Of course atheists will have lead murderous rapacious satieted lives of excess helping only themselves in an orgiastic indulgence of hedonism. Christians are always so patronising about how much better it is to be religious than not, how it means you are just a better person all round and real good egg, and then you get a happy house in the sky with the beardy fellow 'cause you are so great. It’s a pity they are only looking at it from their point of view. The more interesting religious people I have met lost faith, and probably realise how they sounded to others now, the same could be true in reverse too. It reminds me a bit of the episode of Southpark where they started by hybrids and it started causing toxic amounts of smug to build up in the atmosphere. I am sure you don’t mean to come off sounding smug, but you do.

What you have really outlined in this whole post is it makes no difference what you believe as long as it makes you happy, and you are a good person, just as my logic is good, yours for the believer is also reasonable. In essence it’s all good, believe what you want, which is probably not how you see it, but then I suspect you lack perspective of others views.

OK, that is your choice - perhaps you’ll have different priorities when you are older.

That wasn’t the point of what I posted. If you would read carefully:

Having indicated that I have (sceptical) thoughts about conservative beliefs, I mentioned only that I felt that a measure of piety could be seen in the way people die, rather than the conventional way people measure piety. Instead of reading this, you dash off in a list of ideas you have stored up in a drawer somewhere and pour them out on me.

Which means …???

What it says. I think you see religious people as having some sort of betterness and wellness of being over areligious people or atheists or even non Christians because you are one and lack perspective. Mankind has been dealing with death for the two hundred years of his existence, some do it by inventing mysticism and ritual practices around death which eventually leads to organised religion and dogmatic views of the after life, some believe life is what you are trying to escape from, that the goal is to cease to exist and not be reborn, others still think you dwell on as ancestor ghosts, and others yet think you rot in the ground and probably spend more time grounded in the here and now. All of the approaches are fine, none of them outrank any others.

I also genuinely don’t understand how smug most religious people come off, when they wax on about how great it is to be with God and how they pity the poor sods born in a jungle in the middle of the Amazon who are going to hell, and all that other stuff, ok bit of an extreme example but when people start explaining about how wonderful it is to be x it always sounds like proselytising, even when it is not. You probably don’t get why it makes people feel patronised. That’s not something I can explain to someone.

Who is talking about “outranking”? I am talking about my observations of people who have lived and died in my care and my respect and acknowledgement of people I otherwise firmly disagree with.

And what do you mean by two hundred years?

I fail to see complacency in what I have said, and I have certainly not been proselytising – I get the feeling that you are talking about someone else. My position is that religion isn’t all bad, once you get down into understand where it is coming from. However, most believers do not – and neither do the non-believers, even if they are sometimes a little better informed. That is why such a lot of garbage is written for and against religion.

Look I know you didn’t mean what I said, I said that, I am just saying how it comes off generally, something you are probably not aware of as always a Christian. Just saying. You may well not be aware of it, but people tend to do that, on one side think they are just saying x, and on the other side think they are saying y, on either side both sides can come off as patronising. Maybe they shouldn’t but this is the problem. You should just accept this that people generally get mildly offended by people who just speak about how wonderful their own perspective is, it’s why this forum called religion exists. It’s why religious stupidity and irrleligious stupidity can if not cause exacerbate wars. It’s just something I noted.

Before you were born, did you find things to be miserable? Unless there is some form of consciousness after death, then being dead can’t be any worse than it is prior to being born. And were you in any kind of misery prior to being born?

SO what you are saying is that death is scary? Death is nothing, then nothing is scary. But is you know that something is scary , nothing cannot be scary, thus death is not scary.

The problem is about dying. Death is easy, you will be in that state till time ends. But you already have 13 billion years of that state, before you were born, So what is your problem?

I live for myself, and those around me. I do not live to please an invisible being, in the faint hope that I wlll be one of the living dead at some point in the future.

It really does not matter what you believe: it will not make it true. Would it not be better to live your life to the full whilst you can, and not as some sort of rehearsal for death?

You are of course entitled to your belife that this is simply a version of Pascal’s wager but you have no evidence.

Many Xians of my acquaintance have expressed it precisely in those terms.
But it’s a bit rich of you to chide me on a lack of evidence! :smiley:
The only “evidence” that you have of Jesus is a book that you largely reject.

Why is it so hard for an atheist to belive that there are different ideas of what it means to be a follower of Christ?

I don’t have any trouble believing that: I know it. You are missing the point, or just not expressing yourself well.
I am suggesting that it is ridiculous for there to be so many shades of belief, on the one hand, and a single redemptive god on the other. You can’t all be right - so I don’t feel obliged to accept any of it - and why should I?
The god you claim encompasses all of Christendom must be a bizarrely capricious being to accept such incompatible diversity and contradiction.
The real question is why do you accept such a laissez-faire, cherry picking attitude to religious belief, and still claim to have it right.

You seem to be defending the fundamentalists more even than they themselves do…

I think not. You are all the same to me.
In other words, you are a fundamentalist, who rejects most of the Bible, whereas they are fundamentalists who mine the Book for inspiration, you just ignore what you don’t like. They are “followers of Christ”, and follow what he is claimed to have said; and You are a “follower” who rejects much of what he said.
Neither of you amount to a viable way to live your life; they for adhering to a dead book, and you for making it up as you go along.

Do you really think that up until the 19th century that everyone held to the literalist belife? I think if you look deeper you will see that the earliest forms of Chrsitianity found most biblical definition metaphorical. As was the tradition in those times. I am confused as to your motivation in leading this conversation down this particular path, have I offended you or criticised your beliefs?
[/quote]
Response in Blue
[/quote]
We all believe what feels right to each of us. You decide to judge those around you and attach labels inaccurately and arguing against that is pointless. Obviously it helps you in some way, or at the very least you feel it does.

God bless

R

I have developed my position towards Christianity and Christ through my experience of it – within Christianity and from outside.

For me Christianity has gone through a number of transformations, leading up to the modern complications that have become so disturbing today.

First of all, we have a young man who is immersed in Jewish tradition but also highly influenced by the school of the Cynics, who challenges the religion of the day calling it hypocritical and who shows the crowds a form of faith which is able to be spontaneously compassionate and caring. The duplicity of the Temple leaders lead to his being whisked away as another “terrorist” and crucified.

His followers are concerned that he should be portrayed differently, as the archetype of faith, rather than as a criminal, and after a few generations of spreading his teaching and living in the way the feel he saw fit, various accounts of his life start appearing, which begin idealising and mystifying his presence.

At a later date, the mystification is continued and expanded; so far that he is for many not just metaphorically, but physically “God in disguise”. Many theories of his nature start emerging and each theory is further speculated, so that theology becomes independent of the source and dogmatic.

Various dogmas compete and with the coming to power of Christians, being politically manipulated, Christ becomes more and more like the perfect Emperor and his church like a court of law.

The rest, we all know … or should know.

Therefore, it is quite possible to see Christianity at all of these stages having some valuable message, whereas not ignoring the fact that the idea of a logical continuation is highly unlikely. Especially since in the growth of the West Christianity has been largely influential, it would be difficult to transport moral expression in different terms, and therefore the symbolism of Christianity is widespread – even if the teaching is ignored.

I personally have failed within my lifetime at Christianity, finding it deeply troubling in parts, and highly idealistic, which can also become fanatical. But even idealism, if contradicted by real experience, can be a source of breakdown and depression – something that we are experiencing widespread in Christianity, albeit not admitted by most.

The evangelic syndrome, of seeing devils and angels, is also a result of deep conviction and devotion towards an idealistic religion.