I am interested in hearing people’s assorted thoughts on afterlife. Or lack thereof. Just a detailed statement of beliefs.
Primary Stance: There isn’t one.
Secondary Stance: If there is an afterlife, I really don’t care.
Detailed Statement: I don’t have details on the matter.
I suppose if you believe we are void of afterlife there can be no details to accompany it. Well stated!
Agreed. You’re a curious fellow, Jayson. I assume your interest in religion has something to do with its sociology.
Hope in the resurrection of the dead. Trust in God’s promise.
Otherwise what Jayson said.
I’ve read a lot of interesting theories on what happens to us when we die. Some of them I like, few of them I hope for, and most of them I cannot help but deny. That being said, I can’t help but get the feeling that the concept of the afterlife, whichever one that you are a believer in, is just a comfort blanket used to deal with the fact that every living thing of the face of this planet is going to die. I can’t help feeling like any mention of eternal salvation is just a coping mechanism used by a terrified species that does not want to cease to exist, which is perfectally natural and totally understandable. But until I can sort those feelings out into something a bit more tangible, the afterlife is the ultimate bedtime story.
You know, No-Body, there’s another way of looking at it than preservation.
Look at it from a causal perspective rather than a hopeful perspective as a possible origin.
Why would someone ever think that a human being could possibly still be “living” even after death?
One possibility is that when someone dies, they don’t seem dead to us immediately.
They still feel present in our psyche.
After a while, they slowly drift into feeling more dead.
Conveniently, most afterlife traditions started out with the ideas of a dead person having to travel away from the physical world and make it to the afterlife world; progressively leaving this one along the way.
Should problems arise along the path, then they could risk being stuck “here”.
This fits the idea of someone feeling like the deceased are still here, and then fading over time to feeling like they are indeed no longer here.
So perhaps the concept was more about explaining what humans observed early on in their senses rather than what they hoped to accomplish in surpassing death.
Without Music, I responded to you in a separate thread:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=176284
The same can be said, however, of just about everything we come into contact with. Did the earliest mystics suspect trees or lions of a life after death?
But is this not another way of phrasing the concept as a “comfort-blanket”? Perhaps not emotionally, but psychologically.
Appreciated.
Some of us are already in one having had past lives.
I agree ,if reincarnation happens which I believe it does it would only make sense that in fact we had already died before.
A few did; that we know.
The idea of transitive life force (in all the conceptual modes that is expressed) is among many early, but not possibly the earliest, spiritualities.
Not really.
A comfort blanket is a term for a security blanket.
The concept there is protection, and feeling safe and secure because of that protection.
The idea of why I feel this way or that when this or that happens is not directly a solution that offers a preservative security.
Take a look at Mayan religion, for instance, in this regard.
Think of it this way.
Religion is Neurology 101.
It was our first crash course in reacting and building conceptual models that would explain why we would feel things the way we do existentially in regards to our ontological relationship with things and people related to ourselves.
Where I think such may have an edge over Neurology, at this point, is that Religion offers a lever in a conceptual model that allows manipulation of your ontological sensations.
Neurology only explains the quantification, but not the manipulative means, for the daily life of a human.
I want to travel the stars so badly, I can only hope that this is what waits for me in the afterlife.
I see where you are going, but I see that as two different topics. Believing that your loved ones are still around in one form or another, here or in another place, is different (to me) than thinking that your essence will never cease to exist.
Well, one follows the other.
After we became aware of this sensation and formulated the models of identity of our ontological selves as being a continued existence, then comes the stage where we have descriptions of afterlife’s becoming formulated.
We see humans in anthropology dabbling with this transitive sensation without having any remark on an afterlife in detail or description.
But we don’t have humans in anthropology dabbling in describing the details of the afterlife without an understood model of our ontological transitive state.
Heh, “understood” is being used a little loosely here but it’s an interesting statement none the less. I guess I’m an oddball because I don’t really believe in any kind of afterlife but ghosts and spirits and things of that nature I have no issue with. But if someone dies and their spirit remains on earth I don’t consider that an afterlife. I consider that being lost more or less. A failure to exit.
Eh, I don’t think that’s all that weird for this era.
If you were early man…that would be impressive and I would really like to study your people as much as possible.
However, being from this age, that’s actually more common that you might think.
For instance, there’s a good chunk of people that believe in angels, but not in gods, heaven, or hell.
Whatever the case, and no matter the details, I think it’s clear that we emerged from the simple stuff of the universe in a state of experiencing ourselves and that in death we will recede to a different state of being.
Perhaps afterlife is just what you make it.
I also like the perspective below
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu4EZ8eEc0c[/youtube]
I’ve mostly felt that afterlife, should there be one, should be a lot like a magazine subscription. Tons to choose from, you can subscribe to any of them at anytime. If you don’t like how it is going, just let it expire and move on to something different. And if you don’t like reading magazines then you don’t even have to bother to begin with.