Not enough to prevent an odor.
Nitpick: atheism is not a belief that there is/are no god/s, but rather a lack of belief in one or more gods. Default zero position.
This atheist holds to the sack of fertilizer notion, barring further evidence. This can be mystified into some sort of brahman-atman “I become worms and trees and soil and birds!” approach when needed.
That would be the Riverworld Hypothesis (tho that involved artificial souls called “wathans”, which may be a bit beyond the curve for many here).
There’s also Frank Tipler’s Omega Point, tho it all may be moot if we have neverending expansion (and according to this article string theory also introduces a monkey wrench into the proceedings). An Omega Point of sorts may be possible without a universe-wide singularity-Tipler claims that all his ideas are based strictly on reductionistic principles BTW. YMMV.
If something like that is possible you would be “recreated” in a sort of shotgun approach, involving an infinity of virtually identical and not-so-identical copies of yourself.
I think it can go both ways. YMMV.
athe·ism
Pronunciation: \ˈā-thē-ˌi-zəm\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle French athéisme, from athée atheist, from Greek atheos godless, from a- + theos god
Date: 1546
1archaic : ungodliness, wickedness
2 a: a disbelief in the existence of deity b: the doctrine that there is no deity
or
atheism
(n) : absence of belief in the existence of God or gods; belief in the non-existence of God or gods
Dictionary definitions are good only to the vaguest first approximation. Shades of meaning and usage are never reflected well in dictionaries. Trying to categorize atheist beliefs by using a dictionary definition is worse than useless; it actively confuses the issue.
No one has ever come back to say otherwise, and there’s no scientific reason to believe that the “soul” (that is, an individuals consciousness) can exist independently of the physical body (which would be a prerequisite for an afterlife). I’m sure you could find a few crackpots that claim otherwise though.
Is the term not also divided in actual reality too though? I’m pretty sure I’ve met atheists who said their position was simple absence of belief, and others who expressed a belief that the notion of a deity was utterly false.
Then let’s use this site as further elucidation of the point I made and the dictionaries’ definitions which I find to correspond as well.
It goes on quite a bit with the end result summarized as:
absence of belief in the existence of God or gods; belief in the non-existence of God or gods
Buddhism is essentially atheistic – that is, Gautama assumed the gods of his culture exist, but they’re beside the point. You don’t get enlightenment by praying to them – they’re in the same fix we are, trapped in the world of maya and stuck on the wheel of karma. Buddha never claimed to be a god nor a god’s prophet, just a guy who sat down and thought things out. And most (not all) branches of Buddhism believe in a personal soul or spirit that reincarnates.
In Hinduism, from which Buddhism derives, reincarnation operates mechanistically – your soul will find the incarnation appropriate to your karma like water finding its own level; no god sits in judgment on the process and you cannot get a better deal through prayer. N.B.: In some schools of Hinduism, you can get spiritual benefit from trying to commune with the gods via prayer, chanting, meditation, spiritual exercises – “yoga” means “yoking,” i.e., linking your soul to God’s. Lotsa variety in Hinduism.
Exapno, you are confusing what characteristics atheists often have, with what characteristics atheists have that make them atheist.
An extremely large percentage of US suburban homeowners would also own a car, but that doesn’t mean that the definition of a US suburban homeowner is someone who owns a suburban house and a car.
Someone is an atheist if they don’t have a belief in any god. Atheists often extrapolate out from there to a number of other views, but only as a secondary matter.
The answer to the OP’s second question has been answered. The OP’s first question doesn’t make sense, on its face.
It’s conceivable for someone to believe in an eternal soul, heaven, hell, angels, miracles, etc., etc., without necessarily believing in a God. Simply identifying someone as an “atheist” only refers to what he ***doesn’t ***believe, not what he does believe.
I just got reminded of something I read once – that there’s an idea that the last moment, before your mind shuts down for good, might subjectively seem like/be an eternity (sort of like a ‘personal Omega Point’). This obviously wouldn’t entail a continuation of the existence of the soul in any way, and in fact wouldn’t even necessitate its existence, but it would, in some way, be a form of eternal life, though what the mind would do during that eternity is anyone’s guess (hopefully, not relive the pain of dying all the time, because that’d be a pretty sucky afterlife).
If, for instance, you’d be stuck in some memory for all eternity, you could even work in a nice little heaven/hell-dichotomy: you either get a good or a bad moment, perhaps based on the state of your conscience, or whatever (that’s just an attempt to hypothesize about a possible implementation of such an atheist afterlife, I should point out).
However, it’s not really clear to me how that would work, subjectively experiencing eternity. A loss of the ability to keep track and concept of time, perhaps.
But it’s a possible conception of a not entirely un-afterlife like thing within an atheist (and probably even largely materialist) view.