Jeff, that is an amazing story. I can’t imagine going through that and then having to face the prospect of sleeping or going under anesthesia and wondering if it’ll happen again.
For what it’s worth, the most consistent and believable description of hell I’ve come across is that hell is simply eternal separation from God. If our ultimate happiness is to be with God and contemplate him, then being separated from him–and knowing it–must be a kind of torture.
I tend to think that it takes a profound rejection of God to end up in hell–especially if we think of God as deeply merciful. Those people who are so attached to their wickedness, and totally incapable of asking for mercy–they’re the ones who will never be with God, not because they must be punished, but because that’s the fate they have chosen for themselves. They literally want to dwell in their measly self-centeredness rather than accept the love God offers them. God sends no one to hell; they send themselves.
Definitely check out Bishop Barron. He inspired a number of the formulations I used above, and I think for intellectually curious people, he’s one of the best entry points into understanding a theistic worldview. Your mom is probably right (as moms are).
An afterlife is extremely unlikely (chance approaching nil), and the chance that if it exists it matches anything proposed by any human religion at anytime is so improbable it can simply be ignored for the purposes of any discussion.
I do not believe in an afterlife. I just can’t imagine the logistics.
What happens to a 6 month old child who dies? Or someone who is 102? Will they enter the afterlife as they are? Or what about someone who has mental illness?
How big is the afterlife for every person who ever existed to be able to fit in it? Wait, will it be every person to have existed? That’s a hell of a lot of people.
Is it a physical place? Another dimension? Do we get there the instant we die or will there be some one-time reckoning where those chosen will “awaken”? Or be teleported? Or recreated?
What about prehistoric life? Will Neanderthals be admitted? What about animal life? Will our long gone pets show up?
It’s a lovely thing to believe in, sure.
But why can’t we just accept that we have a limited lifespan, like pretty much everything else? It shouldn’t stop one from living a good, morally sound life or from being kind to others. That “heaven” or blissful afterlife people look forward to could exist right here on Earth (well, without the living forever bit) but not enough try hard enough.
I’ve been unconscious several times and each time there was nothing. I didn’t feel the passage of time, I was awake and then awake again. Not even like sleeping where you are aware of things like the temperature, discomfort (I need a new pillow), noise, movement; and you dream. It’s just NOTHINGNESS. I think that’s what death is like, only you don’t wake up again.
Man, if anyone deserves an afterlife, it is all the good bois!
You try to apply our known physical & scientific rules here. Which makes some sense, given we have no others. But there is no proving that there is nothing (or anything) beyond what we know. It will always be a matter of people who believe that there is, people who believe that there isn’t (yes, atheist only believe there is nothing afterwards, they don’t have a proof, either) and people - IMO those with the largest portion of common sense - who don’t care much one way or the other.
You assume that people who believe in an afterlive exclude anything but humans from it. If I firmly believed in an afterlife, I would certainly believe that any self-aware creature would get one.
Seriously, if I die and if there’s actually more in a way that resembles our current life and consciousness and I don’t get to pet the doggos I grew up with, I will be furious.
Quite possible, I kinda lean towards the same.
But here’s the thing: There is no proof. Unconsciousness isn’t death. Even our medical definition of death (which people have come back from on really rare occasions) might not be the kind of death required to “get there”.
And lack of proof is not equal to proof of non-existence.
How’d you manage to be unconscious several times, though?
I know somebody who went through something similar, losing several years, and in a way it’s lucky there was a recovery at all. Hallucinogenics can be really dangerous.
Atheists don’t need proof. The people claiming extraordinary circumstances need proof.
They have none.
Funniest thing I ever heard when debating a theist was, “look, nobody knows what happens when you die.” Because to an atheist, scientist, realist, we know exactly what happens when you die. Humans have been observing death for their entire existence. Of course we know what happens when you die.
YOU are special, but humans are not. There is no soul. You don’t have a body, you ARE a body.
I hear Christian friends discussing The Bible, and I generally hear the power of the story, even if I strongly suspect the truths are metaphorical rather than literal.
But then I hear the bit about humans, unlike the rest of life, being created in God’s image, and it’s as though someone threw a bucket of cold water in my face. If I am certain of anything, it is that in these matters, what is true about us is true about all of life. We are but a small part of the animal kingdom.
I don’t believe there is one. Eventually I’ll be proven right or wrong, but by then it will be too late and it won’t matter one iota so there’s literally no point in worrying about it. I just hope that if there’s an afterlife such an existence isn’t limited to the hellish dimension the starship, Event Horizon, ran off to for a few years.
@jpinard I don’t want to push my philosophical opinions on faith, death and such, but I think you are a wonderful human being and if nothing else, your father lives on in you.
When you talk about evidence and proof, you’re speaking in the language of science, not faith. If you’re speaking in the language of science, then it is certainly true that, of the following two propositions:
I believe there is an afterlife
I don’t believe there is an afterlife
It is the former, not the latter, which is a positive claim and for which therefore one is expected to offer evidence. The latter statement is a statement of the absence of a view, for which no evidence is even possible.
If, on the other hand, you mean to speak in the language of faith, then words like evidence and proof are just meaningless sounds. One believes out of faith, not because of evidence.
Lacking that sort of faith, I don’t believe in an afterlife. I don’t say there isn’t one — how could I know? But I don’t see any reason to believe in one, other than desire, because of course the same question applies: how could I know?
This is also the only way I can conceive of a creator, with similar resulting thoughts. If there is one, he/she doesn’t intervene and therefore can’t be known or assessed, and ideas like benevolence are meaningless or impossible to discern.
Also, I just want to say that your comments here are beautiful and moving, and I’m very sorry to hear about your father.
The statement “there is no afterlife” is not a statement of the absence of a view. Just like the statement “the USA don’t exist” is not a statement of the absence of a view.
It is a claim as direct as the claim that there is one.
There is a gigantic difference between an absolute statement like that and adding an “I believe that…” to it. If you say that you “believe” in something, that already contains the information that you have no absolute proof, but chose to go with a belief.
Which is fair enough, if you don’t bother other people with it unasked.
If a statement or theory is positive or negative is irrelevant when it comes to providing proof.
“Gravity doesn’t exist” - that is wrong, and it can be proven (by proving its existence).
“The afterlife doesn’t exist” - good luck trying to prove that one right or wrong.
Well, we generally discount the things for which there is no evidence, as a way of a making sense of life. Do you withhold belief that there are unicorns, or do you believe there are no unicorns? I suspect the latter. Or how about the monster under your bed? Aren’t you pretty sure there isn’t one there, or are you just unsure about the question, lacking evidence? I think we would all agree with the positive belief that there is no monster under the bed, even if all we have as a basis for that belief is absence of evidence.
In any event, you’re still talking about matters of faith, for which questions about evidence are pointless. And if you’re asking about evidence, then the burden is on the extraordinary claim, not the ordinary one.
Totally, but even 100% of people agreeing on something doesn’t mean that it must be true. 100% certainty is a pretty damn rare thing for non-omniscient beings. In most cases, we can achieve a “good enough” state of certainty, which is reassuring ;)
We all just know what we can perceive with our fallible senses and measure with our instruments.
Beyond that, we know nothing, including answering the question if there actually is a “beyond that”.
We can only say “not as far as we know”.
If we were in a court of law, maybe.
But we are not. We are talking about convincing people of something.
And right now, about 10-20% of people (tendency strongly shrinking, atheists don’t seem to breed that much) are trying to convince the rest that they got it all wrong with the argument being “you got no proof/the burden of proof is on you/etc.”.
Sitting “between the chairs”, I don’t find that very convincing - not that the other side has better arguments, mind you.
I find it all entertaining, like this discussion, but I have no “faith” that any side will ever come up with something truly convincing.
That wasn’t my point. My point is that the belief that there is no monster under the bed is identical to the belief that there is no afterlife, in that both are based on nothing more than the absence of evidence; and if you can reasonably believe the former based on nothing but absence of evidence, then you can reasonably believe the latter based on nothing but absence of evidence.
@jpinard is asking what people think, and I believe there is no afterlife because there isn’t any evidence of one is a perfectly reasonable answer.
Edit: Also, I’ve said all I’m going to say on this. I don’t think it is what he was after with this thread.
I really like this reply. I think that in the end, those we lose live on through the lessons they’ve taught us, the happy memories that have been ingrained in us and most of all, in the immense love we have for them that we take to our own graves.
Our parents also live on in us. I’ve been told several times how eerie it is that I’m so much like my deceased father. The way I walk; the sound of my voice; certain physical things I do, like the way I cross my legs, or lean when I sit, or how I squint a lot. I remember as a teen and in my early 20s being told my father had musical aspirations as well (I was a musician for some time).
I’ve been told, that like my father, I can be very cautious and serious around people until they got to know me and saw i could be a big jokester and I didn’t take myself that seriously. I’ve also been told I had his stubbornness and general temperament.
Here’s the thing: my father died when I was 10 months old so I never got to know him or of him (my mother didn’t speak of him tobme until I was an adult). He died of some type of heart disease. Not so surprising then when at 39 I needed emergency surgery to repair an aortic aneurysm and was subsequently diagnosed with Marfan Syndrome.
(That’s how I was unconscious one time, since someone asked: 9 hours under anesthesia for open heart surgery. Before then, falling off the side of a nearly 2 story height staircase and landing head first, when I was 9. At 11 I blacked out for some unknown reason in the schoolyard, for a few minutes. At 14, being assaulted by a pack of much older teens and being left unconscious on the street for about an hour until someone spotted me outside their window and called the police and I was brought out of it.)
Russell’s Teapot seems to apply to every argument you offered against me.
Extremist theists? Murdering people by untold millions. Extremist atheists? Getting people butt-hurt on the internet. Totally the same thing.
(Spare us the Stalin/Pol Pot/Hitler was an atheist bullshit.)
It seems @scottagibson successfully walked you back from this madness and your main point of contention was my hard atheism vs. the soft atheism of, “well, we can’t know for sure.” If that’s the case, then, sure, whatever.
