What happens when you die? 
the africans believed that your body was a shell and when a soldier died in battle they celebrate his entrance into the beautiful afterlife. The western europeans believed that when you died you died and they would mourn and weep.
so what happens when you die ?
fight that ignorance. hahahahahahahahahahha!
Your perspective: Time stops.
Everyone else’s perspective: You stop.
Or check out the google ads below. They look informative.
Welcome to SDMB googlybear. We love fighting ingnorance here but there is unlikely to be an umambiguous answer since no one has come back to tell us what death is actually like. You’ll get a lot of answers correctly stating that when all brain actvity stops then all perceptions stop but beyond that the debate is about theological beliefs which are a bit harder to provide cites for. NDEs or near death experiences are sometimes used as examples but not everyone agrees since it may be the malfunctioning of a brain lacking oxygen. Close only counts in horse shoes, hand grenaded and thermonuclear warfare. NDE ain’t death. Search NDE as the topic has come up here before.
uglybeech, what are you basing part one of your answer on? Have you experienced death? I’m not saying you’re wrong just asking the basis for a GQ answer.
Let’s let the folks in Great Debates continue this fight.
Moved. samclem GQ moderator
No, that doesn’t make any sense at all.
Well, when you die, the world keeps moving without you.
When I die, the world might end. I’m going to try to avoid that, for all your sakes.
Only (a) guests can’t search and (b) NDE has only 3 letters so I can’t search for it either. A search for the name of a certain poster’s name would work (and though it’s already been mentioned in this thread, it might be bad luck to invoke it again).
There is no empirical evidence that human consciousness is anything but a physiological, biochemical product of the brain. The brain produces consciousness the way a lightbulb produces light. Asking where the consciousness goes after death is like asking where the light goes when a lightbulb is broken. The evidence that either goes anywhere is exactly the same…non-existent and completely unnecessary to postulate.
As I see it, there’s no downside to believing that there’s an afterlife: if you’re wrong, you’ll never find out.
(Though there may indeed be a downside—or an upside—to believing certain things about the connection between how you live your life and what happens to you after you die.)
A near-death or out-of-body experience, particularly one in which someone “sees” something verifiable that they couldn’t have seen if they were confined to their physical body, might well constitute such evidence. But I don’t know of any examples of such “evidence” that couldn’t also be explained some other way.
It often produces a lack of compassion; if people live after death, why not kill them if you feel like it ? “Kill them all, and let God sort them out !” .
Reply based on philosophical and spiritual rather than physiological inquiry:
The question is of the same sort as when your kid, to whom you’ve been reading a good book, asks “So what happens next?” after you’ve read the last page.
The real answer is that the entities to whom this stuff has been happening — the audience consisting of the reader (and in this case the child who is also participating in the reading) puts down the book and goes off to do other things, at some point picking out a different book and reading that one.
One answer to the question “Who are you” is “I am God”; or “I am that which is”, if you prefer. One of the purposes of spirituality as a process is realizing that, seeing beyond a sense of self that is limited to the individual, or even to the kingroup. Ultimately, it’s you as the larger sense of self, as God, that is reading your individual life like a book, and upon completing it puts the book back on the shelf and selects another.
That’s a metaphor, a babytalk oversimplification of sorts, but it’s a good one. What happens to you the individual is that you’re over. What happens to you, God, is that in your experience of this one single lifetime you’ve come to the end.
NDE’s can be explained far more prosaically than as literal “out of body” experiences, and, as you said, there are no verifiable instances of people being able to acquire information that could have only acquired in an ex corpore state.
My opinion: you’re meat.
Other opinions: too many to count.
Evidence: lacking.
Decide what you want, but keep it out of my face/laws/life.
Oh, and atheistic materialism is soooo compassionate- :rolleyes:
Without an afterlife, a Deity, a sense of spiritual worth, other humans can be easily discarded if they get in the way and those doing the discarding need dread no consequences as long as they manage to die happily.
Now as to the OP- short term, I lean to believing the Bible teaches a conscious spiritual afterlife of rewards & punishements as to how each person has related to God (specifically Yahweh/Jesus) and to others- there may or may not be such things as soul-sleep, reincarnation, probationary-purgatorial experiences.
Ultimately, I believe in bodily resurrection, complete opportunity to entrust oneself to Yahweh/Jesus, and the final embrace of all within Yahweh through Jesus.
However, some souls may hate that embrace with all their being, in which case, Yahweh/Jesus may allow them to fizzle out of existence. Or He may not.
BUT there is tons of anecdotal evidence. And the teachings of a lot of people more enlightened than you or I, including those not of my faith.
I know what side I’m bettin’ on
If you accept that belief, as opposed to professing a belief, is actually a choice.
There’s no downside to believing a lot of things that aren’t so. But what does that matter? We’re not weighing the advantages of having certain beliefs, we’re arguing about what really happens.
If you say so.
I see, so what you will tell Ahura Mazda when you die?
I felt my answer was appropriate to the spirit in which the question was asked, and was also in anticipation of its immediate removal from GQ.
In any event, I don’t think either of my statements require my death as evidentiary support. Both follow directly from common knowledge and observations (people stop when they die, and it requires consciousness to experience the passage of time). On the other hand, anyone who posits a supernatural continuation of consciousness after death does require a cite IMHO.
True, but it has more to do with an ideology that denied dissent. One has to take into account that there are unbelievers that are capitalistic and democratic too. Totalitarian ideologies dismiss individuals, and unfortunately religion also does not prevent the fall to hell on earth either.
Besides the classic “kill them all, god will sort them all” example, in El Salvador there was the case of the military dictator Hernández Martínez that ordered the killing of thousands of Indians and peasants. He had the belief that since animals had no souls, it was a bigger sin to kill one than to kill a person! There was no problem organizing the Matanza, he believed that those “traitors” had an afterlife to look for. Not a peep from the Church against that massacre then.
Yes, there is evidence of information acquired in an ex corpore state.
Lots of evidence, in the research done on NDEs. Do you really think the idea of near death experiences, including books, research, etc. would have lasted over 30 years since the publication of Raymond Moody’s first book without some evidence.
Now I could provide a hundred links that show evidence of life after death, but I will post only one. This is the NDE of Pam Reynolds, it is a benchmark case of life after death. Completely and fully documented by the scientists who performed the surgery. Pam’s NDE has been written up in books, magazines, shown on TV, and discussed in many countries. No scientist has ever questioned the documentation of the case or showed in any way it is flawed. Many have disbelieved it, of course, but that is understandable given the skeptical nature of science.
http://www.near-death.com/experiences/evidence01.html
This link is only the tip of the iceberg.