Trollheart

Thanks, but I'm certainly hoping my useless scumbag of a father is heading the opposite direction.

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Zhanteimi

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Zhanteimi

LetsTalkMusic

Frownland

Wrong: when you die, death happens.

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

Trollheart

It's party time for all the little worms!

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MicShazam

Whenever I start pondering death too much, I just remind myself of this Mark Twain quote:


“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

About whether I would want there to be anything after this life, then both yes and no.
This lyric from a song by Christian Mistress always stuck in my mind, especially the bolded...:

Don't believe in heaven
Don't believe in hell
There isn't anything
Beyond the physical

Eternity is a long time
Would you want to know yourself that well
Eternity is a fine time
But it's all in your mind

EPOCH6

As a few posters have already described, I've always believed that death will be no different than what it was like before we were born.

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Lisnaholic

I’m also going with a big fat “no” for belief in the afterlife. I prefer to trust in the scientific method which recommends that we always opt for the minimum working hypothesis, the simplest explanation for the available evidence. So I comfortably dismiss a bunch of mysterious phenomena; ghosts, dragons, UFOs, the afterlife, and ( sorry to break it to you so brutally Trollheart) Leprechauns.

In fact I have two problems about the notion of an afterlife – one frivolous and one serious.

For the first, I’ve never been convinced by anyone’s logistics about heaven. As some posters have suggested, being with your loved ones for eternity isn't necessarily Paradise; tbh, a week with them at the beach is usually sufficient. So let’s say instead that my Heaven would be “Marlon Brando, Pocahuntas and me” sitting around listening to Neil Young cds. Does that mean they’d have to sit through eternity with me? What if they don't like NY's songs? But if they get to choose a heaven as well, chances are they'll have different plans that don't include me at all. So all of a sudden, it looks like everybody is gonna need a heaven of their own….

And my serious issue with the afterlife is this: on the basis of scant evidence, more as a question of faith, religious leaders have used the idea of an afterlife to blight millions of lives. More specifically, (and also adding to the implausability) they have encouraged the idea that your conduct in this life affects the quality of your afterlife. The tradgedy of this misconception is that it has led some people to sacrifice happiness today in hopes of an eternal reward later. There are, for instance, monks in Tibet trying to log up karma for the next bardo, Western religious orders intent on denying or chastising the flesh, and suicide bombers prepared to die because of the virgins they’ve been promised in the afterlife: thousands of lives over hundreds of years that could've been lived differently if people took a more rational approach to the afterlife. It's immeasurably sad imo.

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"Am I enjoying this moment? I know of it and perhaps that is enough." - Sybille Bedford, 1953

Trollheart

Yeah, well, you've never been to a Leprechaun party. Those dudes rock!
Yeah I have a (not entirely serious) theory about that. When you die, you go to this huge waiting room. After what seems like (and may be) an eternity, listening to some truly awful elevator music, you're called into the presence of not God, of course, but one of his aides. A busy man, he directs you to a chair without looking up. He pushes a form over the desk towards you, again without raising his eyes. There are three options on the form, and you are to check one and only one. He informs you (looking up for the first time, with blazing red eyes just for one microsecond) that this contract is legally binding throughout eternity and beyond.

Your choices of Afterlife are:

1. You may choose to go back to Earth, reincarnated in another body. You accept the small print which tells you you will have no recollection of your previous life, and that any flashes of "memory" you may get from time to time are nothing more than what humans call Deja Vu, and should be dismissed as such.

2. You may spend eternity in a room off to the right, which will afford you access (sound and vision) to your loved ones still alive. You may then watch over them. When they too pass on, you will be allowed to choose option 1 or 3 again. The contract states very clearly that you will NOT be able to interfere in the lives of anyone living, just observe.

3. You may opt for your own private Heaven. This will be filled with all the things and people you wish, you can be who you want, do what you want and live any life you want, forever.
But sometimes hilarious. Sort of.

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Lisnaholic

^ That's a well-thought out response! I particularly like the paragraph about DMT, and your reminder that so much is about the chemicals in our heads. We get so caught up in the nuances of our thoughts and feelings that it's salutory to be reminded that they're generated by chemicals and sparks or whatever.

Also you neatly answer my point about everyone having a heaven; it's only in your head anyway, so of course everyone has one each. Nice.


^ This is an interestingly detailed scenario, TH, but if I end up in a place where I have to make complex choices that carry irrevocable long-term consequences, then I know I will have arrived at my own private Hell!


^ That's good! In a couple of seconds they've covered the main plot of that entire Bedazzled movie in which Dudley Moore doesn't quite specify the details of his Paradise - although now I think of it, Dudley Moore was selling his soul to Satan for an earthly Paradise, while suicide bombers are laying down their lives for an eternal reward from God. Supposedly complete opposites morally, but also superficially the same kind of deal.

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"Am I enjoying this moment? I know of it and perhaps that is enough." - Sybille Bedford, 1953

Lucem Ferre

I like what Frownland said about us might not really being able to grasp what life is. Because I don't think we do. These concepts are so casually talked about that they seem simple when in reality I don't think the human truly understands consciousness or life, what exactly time is, the concept of infinity. Like, we all know what infinity is but our minds still truly can't grasp infinity. We say we do, we can trick ourselves into thinking we do, but we really can't. It's beyond human comprehension at this time. So to think anybody could truly know or understand death, what death is, what truly happens to our consciousness, that's ludicrous. Also one of the reasons why I hate that religious people are pretensions enough to think they know there is a god and what it is. Like, bitch, we all struggle with basic logic at times. ALL of us do. So NONE of us could ever perceive what a god would be if god was real. I digress, and probably accidentally stirred a pot of some sort again.

On the afterlife, I don't have any firm belief. I have theories. One is that there is none. It's that our consciousness ceases to exist. Which is scary at times and relieving at other times. A lot of people don't like that answer because it shoves the over all meaningless of life in our faces and tells us how trivial any thing that was ever important to us is in the grand scheme of things. The other theory leans towards a yes but not in a sense that religious folk like to hear. Or even people that want to believe in karma. When you die DMT is supposedly released into your brain. Now DMT will **** with your perception of time. It's like dreaming. Dreaming ****s with your perception of time. You can fall asleep for 5 minutes and have a dream that lasts hours, or days, or weeks, I don't know, my dreams have never lasted ultra long periods of time for me. So if this whole chemical gets dumped in your brain when you die you are going on the ultimate trip of your life, errrr, death. How long this sequence lasts and things like that is a mystery. I don't know much about DMT trips, but I think that when you die you are going to be flooded by the emotions and thoughts that reflect upon how you lived. You might feel gratitude and happy and proud that you got to do so much in your life and that might effect your trip and make it very pleasant. Or you might be haunted by your regrets or your guilt or your anxiety and that could send you on into a nightmare. And maybe it all eventually drifts away as your brain dies and you slowly lose grasp of your identity and your feelings and your memories. What happens in a moment in our perception could last thousands upon thousands of years to those that die.

For one point to go towards theism, if this DMT theory is true it does seem like something of intelligent design. Or something that is meant to happen to ease us into death. Like there is something behind it that we don't understand and probably will never understand.

But to perhaps shake that point away from theism, people have chemical imbalances. Some people have brains that have problems providing certain chemicals that cause certain emotions. I'm bipolar, my brain sometimes has problems providing the chemicals that cause happiness and I get depressed for no reason. So if that could happen with serotonin or what ever chemical it is that I lack at times, it has to be possible that some people have brains that can't properly provide DMT. And that's a scary thought if said theory is true. I hands down don't believe in an afterlife heaven and hell dictated by a god. But I am afraid of a self induced hell brought on by my own guilt. And I'm also afraid of being shot in the head and having that drastically destroy what would be the afterlife. Decapitation is fine but anything that immediately damages the brain kind of frightens me.

I obviously think about my own death a lot as people should know by now, and this is just my thoughts on what it could be. But what do I know? I'm just another dumbass high school drop out that listens to terrible cringey music and willingly subjects himself into the slavery of materialism and social separatism to desperately retain some type of identity and ego as rich corporations make money off of my predictable choices fueled by the low self esteem they pounded into my head like the rest of us.

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