It has often been noted (mostly by those who believe in an afterlife) that cultures greatly separated in time and space believe in an afterlife. It seems to me that this may be because it is impossible to imagine one’s own non-existence. Try it. Ask yourself questions like, “what’s it like after you die?” or “What happens after you die?” They seem like reasonable questions, but we can only answer them because we are alive, i.e., we exist. If we don’t exist,how can we imagine anything?
It is interesting that we have no problem imagining the time before we were born, but difficult (impossible?) to imagine the future after we are dead.
I think your dilema here is that most cultures that beleive in an afterlife is that you still do exist. Your soul does not disappear it is just elavated so to other plane of existance. Therefore when you die you will be able to find out what it is like.
As for what I beleive, I think that we we make a stop over in heaven for a little while the come back to earth for a new life. We do this until our immortal soul learns all it needs to then we get to sit in heaven and BS with God for the rest on eternity.
I think also that many who believe in an after-life would distinguish between your soul (which they would say continues to exist) and your conscious mind (which may not continue to exist.)
After all, dreamless sleep is like non-existence for your conscious mind, just as is the time before you were born.
I see things rather differently. I think that the afterlife springs from the paradox of self-awareness. Animals have two major missions in life:
Get laid.
Don’t die.
Unfortunately, I am an animal cursed with the ability to anticipate my own death. Somewhere deep inside of me there’s a little alarm going off, saying, “look pal, no matter what you do, you’re gonna kick the bucket, and there is nothing you can do about it.”
“Bullshit,” says another part of my brain. “I’m programmed specifically to avoid dying. I am sure of this.” Therefore, in spite of every indication that I am a maximum of ten decades away from being maggot fodder, I know that I’m not really going to die. Because I’m programmed not to. Therefore some part of me must survive my so-called death.
People with more sophisticated philosophies call this “faith”.
It’s possible, but there’s a trick to it. For example, if I were to tell you, “Try not to think about elephants,” of course immediately elephants pop into your head. Now, try not to think about your own non-existence.
This is pretty interesting, Galen, especially since I was pondering the same damn question this morning (for real!). I think about it every once in a while. I’m not a religious person, and personally, I believe that once we die we return to complete “nothingness”. Exactly like it was before we were born. That’s it. The lights go out and the show’s over. But the difficult part to grasp is that it’s not like true “nothingness”. Think with me here, for something to be “zero” you have to have something to count “zero” of. There’s an envelope of existence around the nothingness that gives it its value of nothing. But if we’re not even around to realize that we’ve been zeroed out, what then? I guess it’ll be sort of like what I was thinking about when Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo — not a damn thing. Total, absolute zero.
P.S. No I’m not on drugs. I did them a few times many years ago, but that’s got nothing to do with this, I’m just a deep thinker sometimes.
Sigmundex, the difference is that you know about Waterloo because it happened in the past, i.e., before you existed. We can contemplate Waterloo because we now exist. We think that we can contemplate our non-existance, but that’s only because we exist, so we are really not doing that. In the future when we won’t exist, we won’t be able to contemplate our non-existance as we would not exist to be able to do so.
I believe this dilemna gave rise to the concept of the soul.
I believe I shall go quite mad over this question!
