<p>I know the right answer and none of you do. I was looking at my cat and he was tryin 2 say sumthin and i no there’s a person stuck in him, so when u die u turn into an angel and get reincarnated into a new person or an animal, whichever dies next. It’s kinda like omegle.</p>
<p>Its like going to sleep forever.</p>
<p>^ No dreaming when you’re dead.</p>
<p>No conciousness. And I"m perfectly satisfied with that . Who would want to live forever?</p>
<p>Maybe hooked up to an euphoria machine sure, but otherwise it’ll be boooring.</p>
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<p>You should have left out the “speaking scientifically” part because that is about as least scientific as you could possibly be. Death is the cessation of biochemical reactions and metabolic activity.</p>
<p>Well if there is no “soul” or non-material entity inside of us, then I’m guessing that we simply cease being conscious. Personally, I find that very scary and if it was confirmed true (somehow) I would probably lose control of reality and go insane xD. I feel that losing consciousness would be the absolute worst thing that could happen to ANY conscious being. This brings me to another question though, where does our consciousness lie? The brain? Or our souls (assuming we have souls)? Where does our true essence reside that makes us who we are? Good luck with that however its one of the things I think about every once in a while. There is also a theory (similar to re-incarnation) that states that when we die, our entire life starts over and we complete life EXACTLY the same way we did before for all eternity. I see this as really depressing, because we cannot change anything and although I think we get to keep our consciousness, we cannot remember anything from our past lives (except for those moments of deja-vu perhaps lol). It would be like being trapped in the movie “Groundhog Day” except you couldn’t change anything the next day and you couldn’t remember anything from the previous day so you weren’t even aware of your fate. :(</p>
<p>I’ll try to work over the subject as best I can, beginning with the secular humanist worldview (atheism), moving on to pantheism (reincarnation), and finally, to theism.</p>
<p>Okay, let’s begin with atheism.
My logic begins with this assumption: that an atheist does not believe in supernatural forces or beings of any kind, including a soul, and or spirit.
We should begin with the atheist position, and follow it to wherever it may lead.
(Note, Ill be dividing this line of reasoning into several parts, and if you wish to disagree with my analysis, please point out which specific part you disagree with.)
Atheism is solely naturalistic. In other words, there is no God, no soul, and no afterlife. Therefore, we can readily draw the conclusion that the human brain consists of no more than the material which makes it up.
Conclusion 1: The human brain is simply a collection of matter</p>
<p>Because the human brain is simply matter, all of its functions are simply reactions predetermined by the laws of physics, both atomic and subatomic.
Conclusion 2: Simple physics reactions determine every decision you make</p>
<p>Therefore, there is no free will
Evidence: Richard Dawkins himself said, As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. Basil Fawlty, British televisions hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldnt start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. Right! I warned you. Youve had this coming to you! He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Why dont we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty?
[D]oesnt a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accuseds physiology, heredity and environment. Dont judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?
Conclusion 3: In atheism there is no free will, as Dawkins himself states</p>
<p>If there is no free will, then there can be no morality, not justice, and no love.</p>
<p>Let me restate that: [In atheism there is no free will; if there is no free will, then there can be no morality, not justice, and no love.]</p>
<p>If that is a road we want to go down, feel free to travel down it. However, based on this fact alone, I believe we can reject atheism and its view of the afterlife as, quite simply, not true to human nature. Don’t you want to believe that there is love, morality, and justice in our world? Where do those thoughts come from? Obviously natural selection doesnt make us more moral, just, or loving. So what is the other option? How do we escape the bondage and lack of free will presented by atheism?</p>
<p>If we wish to believe in free will, we must believe in some sort of a transcendent soul or spirit which exists connected to our physical bodies through the brain. The seat of consciousness, in effect, must be beyond the physical in order for free will to “be allowed.”</p>
<p>This soul or spirit, as immaterial, is eternal. But this doesn’t point us to any single religion, or any one particular worldview.</p>
<p>So let us narrow our options down. If we acknowledge the existence of a soul, we must admit that there is some sort of afterlife. However, our goal now is to figure out what kind of afterlife exists. Do we reincarnate? Do we go to heaven or hell? How do we know what to believe?</p>
<p>The primary differentiating factor between these two views is the nature of God. From a pantheistic view, god exists in all of us as a sort of a Force. We are all part of god. And we continue to come back in reincarnation until we merge with god in a state of Nirvana, or literally, extinguishing.</p>
<p>From a theistic worldview, Hebrews 9:27 says And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment.</p>
<p>So the question is, is God one God, or is he made up of many parts? Is the universe god? Does he exist in all of us?</p>
<p>The search for answers at last leads us back to morality. Do we each create our own morality (pantheism), or does God Himself provide a universal standard (theism)?</p>
<p>This is a question of basic human nature. Is morality subjective, or objective? Do I provide the standard of what is right and wrong, or is this standard external?</p>
<p>Well, lets take each side again to its logical conclusion.</p>
<p>Subjective morality (reincarnation, Nirvana, god in all of us, pantheism)
If each of us gets to decide on his own what is right, what makes Hitler wrong? From this worldview, Hitler is just as right morally as the rest of us. When each of us sets our own standard, THERE IS NO STANDARD. Morality is bunk. Ethics is a joke. Who is to say that Hitler, or Mao Zedong, or Joseph Stalin was wrong for killing millions of people? THEY EACH GOT TO DECIDE FOR THEMSELVES. And look how it turned out.</p>
<p>Objective morality (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, One God, Heaven and Hell)
To quote Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other mans behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: To hell with your standard
Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are
This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are color-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behavior was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practiced? If they had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the color of their hair.</p>
<p>I think you can see that a universal standard of morality is best. Which narrows down our search to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (not including cults like Mormonism and Jehovas Witnesses, which could also go on this list).</p>
<p>All of these religions have in common one teaching about the afterlife: that there is a heaven and a hell and that some people will go to each for all of eternity. They disagree on how to get to each, but I think we can pretty well conclude that we will be facing a judgment at the end of time which we should be ready for. Thats what happens after you die.</p>
<p>^ This absolutely exudes of your personal biases, a misunderstanding of how the brain works, and your construction of a straw-man argument by saying that atheism implies no morality, justice, or love. It isn’t Dawkins’ position that there is no ability to make choice, no reason to have justice, or no basis for having an objective sense of moral understanding.</p>
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<p>This commits the fallacy of the false dilemma. Evolution by means of natural selection has formed our present unique combinations of mental aptitudes and, unquestionably, altruistic, virtuous, and eusocial behavior has survival capacity and hence a selective benefit. </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1065075512-post715.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1065075512-post715.html</a></p>
<p>^^I’m an atheist and I value justice highly. I do not any religion to decide for me what is moral, just, or loving; it is precisely because I have willpower that I am able to decide for myself what to believe in. The brain is fundamentally governed by the laws of physics, but we have control of directing those laws in the direction we want them to go.</p>
<p>I do not believe in an afterlife. I don’t need a conception of heaven and hell to provide me with an incentive to have a sense of justice in this world.</p>
<p>The world mourns.</p>
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[Oh</a>, I have.](<a href=“http://www.lspace.org/books/dawcn/dawcn-english.html]Oh”>The L-Space Web: Death and What Comes Next)</p>
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<p>Ok, replace “speaking scientifically” with whatever term you use to distinguish between statements about what happens vs why it happens.</p>
<p>When you die, you go to heaven or hell.</p>
<p>It only makes logical sense.</p>
<p>I think we’ve existed for eternity and will always exist. I couldn’t imagine it any other way.</p>
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<p>I would recommend a substitution of “Speaking scientifically” for “Based on my particular theological outlook.”</p>
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<p>It makes “logical sense” because of the particular religious system under which you’ve been nurtured. For some, it’s reincarnation; for others, it’s belief in Earthly Paradise; and in other conceptions, its sprouting wings and eternally flying around fairy-land. </p>
<p>They are all manifestations of the same crude emotional hankerings, derived from a combination of the mind’s inability to withstand contradictions (in this case, the fact that the concept of life necessitates death) and it’s desire to achieve a permanent existence.</p>
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Because then on tombstones it wouldn’t say “RIP,” it would say “BRB” :D</p>
<p>Dying means you become part of nothingness, the same as not being born. Not too bad once you think about it; we cannot even remember what happened during our earliest stages of infancy, let alone before our birth.</p>
<p>Man didn’t just create religion. </p>
<p>There has to be at least some higher power.</p>
<p>Unless you believe that we always existed as spiritual entities, and are just living in bodies, which is pretty logical.</p>
<p>^Agreed. Our minds are too complicated, imo, to have been developed by evolution.</p>
<p>^ Well, about as logical as you can expect when trying to explain an inhernt paradox in reality…</p>
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<p>Ok then. Though that’s not quite it, because my “particular theological outlook” is a lot more specific than that.</p>