Cisco, the first post you made to this thread was one of your best posts. Like you, I choose to keep an open mind. There’s just so much that we don’t know yet about everything.
Well, you know, tosh. As in pish posh, bollocks, hokum, rot, bunk, malarkey, naff, baloney or taradiddle 
All I’m saying is, for those who don’t trust the priests or the scientists(and certainly not a combination of both), there is a tendency to think “FTW, I’ll operate by my own rules!”. Are you saying that this isn’t happening at all?
eta - FTW = Fuck The World
Are you saying the “Me and mine, fuck everyone else” philosophy is absent from those who do trust priests and/or scientists ? :dubious:
No, but those without faith or trust are probably far more likely to go off the rails. No?
I dunno. Religious people going apeshit aren’t unheard of ;). I really don’t think either group is ahead in that department.
You’ve got your religious assholes, your agnostic bastards and your atheist jerkwads. Some use their religion as a vector or excuse for their antisocial tendencies, others who use the absence of a God to do the same. Are there, proportionally speaking, more religious assholes than atheist jerkwads, or vice-versa ? I have absolutely no idea. But my WAG is, the percentages are about the same. After all, Sturgeon’s Law tells us 90% of everything is crap. Surely, that includes people
Thank you!
Koresh had believers, but he was preaching a varient of Christianity.
Just like most of the odious parts of what you perceive to be Islam are varients of it, usually Wahabi or extreme Sunni.
For you to say that they are ALL terrorists is as ignorant as saying that since an abortion nut killed a doctor, ALL anti-abortionists are murderers. See how that works?
For those not paying attention, for what it’s worth, Nation is part of our recent influx of those who ping my “White Nationalist” radar. Keep that in mind, in the off chance you come across him in other threads.
It’s the part of you that goes on forever after you die. 
Seriously, folks, getting into a “debate” about what happens to you after you die is stupid. There’s no way to know, really. It’s like debating what existed before the universe came into being.
Some people believe that there is an eternal something that goes on after death. Some people believe that nothing happens after death; when you are dead, that’s it. Some people believe in reincarnation. Unlike moon-landing-hoax believers, this isn’t something you can prove. 
I’ve heard that every cell of our body is replaced every seven years. I don’t know if that’s true, but our body is certainly taking in new matter and excreting old matter every day. If you look at a photograph of yourself as a young child, is that child really the same “you” of today?
It’s interesting to think about. What we think of as permanent “self” is really in a constant state of flux. When I pass away, some of the cells that currently make up me will surely find their way into other living organisms.
Right on and, in a side note, Ben Franklin had this to say a month before his death in a letter to an old friend. See this
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While Nation’s hostility is out of line, this statement is a direct violation of the rules of this forum.
[ /Moderating ]
You seem to have the wrong impression of this forum. The correct response to a post that corrects your ignorance is “Thank you.”
You have the same right to post hateful drivel as anyone else, but making it a direct personal attack is not appropriate.
Knock it off.
[ /Moderating ]
Banjo has a more sensible attitude on the matter. 
“Islamist” = “Muslim theocrat extremist” as opposed to “Muslims” generically.
FIRST and FOREMOST: Define “you”. (Or “we”, or “I”, or whatever is the subject of the conjecture here)
If it remains a static definition between What happens to YOU when YOU die, the question is silly. You die is what happens to you when you die. What next, you wanna know how high is up?
But that’s a silly answer to a not-really-so-silly question. The question is really “Is there some useful & valid sense in which there is a YOU that persists after YOU, the individual / flesh&blood / mortal first-person-singular self that you think of as YOU, dies?”
Let’s explore that, with a minimum of waves of the hand in the direction of Sky Gods, Spaghetti Gods, Unicorns, ectoplasm, past lives, great wheels of life, Transylvanian guys with nocturnal habits, et. al…
How dead is Walter Cronkite? Is the world just as if he had never been here? No? Then in some sense of the word (albeit perhaps metaphorical) would you accept that some aspect of him, his legacy, some essential “sense of what he stood for”, still exists and can still affect us, inspire us, or whatever?
Exact same questions, Jesus of Nazareth, without assuming any supernatural characteristics or divine identity-factors, but (at least for the sake of argument) attributing to him all of the best associations in terms of what folks believe he stood for. Or if J of N is just too loaded a topic or too impossible to separate from all that Son of God shit, how about oh I dunno Abraham Lincoln?
The more the person we contempiate is associated, in our own mind, with some huge ideological agenda or a strong identification with some abstract ideals, I think the easier it is to see and say that that person’s endeavors and energies, what they put themselves into during life, what they identified with, what they were about, persists beyond the death of them as an individual.
Meanwhile, our language is full of tired words, words that meant one thing once but through overuse have lost their original nuanced sense to a more flattened icon-like babytalk representation thereof. SPIRIT can refer to what’s in this bottle of distilled Scotch whiskey or to that ol’ rah-rah team enthusiasm or, more evocatively, to some essence of attitude-and-ideas associated with an endeavor like Spirit of '76 or Spirit of the 60s or Spirit of St. Louis. It’s all about “the distillation of the essence” of something, even though those terms are sufficiently vaguely defined that we can apply spirit to the American Revolution or to American sipping whiskey.
In THAT ahem spirit, then, what’s wrong with saying the spirit of Abraham Lincoln persists beyond his death?
Yeah, yeah, you may be saying, but what’s that got to do with what happens to Abraham Lincoln when Abraham Lincoln dies? Not this freaking ephemeral “distilled essence of” Abe, but him, himself?
Well, I’d say a lot depends on what his own personal answer to “Who ARE you” was by that time. Just as we may identify a person with a complex of abstractions, or groups of people with a bond in common, or most often both, a person may self-identify on a deep level like that, too. We all do it sometimes: answer to “who are you” in the plural instead of in the singular. The tendency to say “We”. First person plural.
If it’s a strong enough sense that a person comes to regard their individual self as merely a small and local component of who they are, and then that persists, I’m inclined to say they’ve transcended death.
And for any conventionally religious whose inclination is to say “You’ve secularized it to death, that’s not it at all!”, rethink a moment. Isn’t this the promise, that if you can look beyond your limited first person singular self and identify with the connection, the neighbor, with ALL neighbors such that there is no Other, and beyond that even with an all-encompassing all-inclusive, you shall not perish?
It was very different for me. I went under general anesthesia for an operation to insert a nail to hold my leg bones together and have a pretty good reference point both for going under and for waking up. For what it’s worth, it isn’t that different to going to sleep (YMMV).
However, the general disconnection from consciousness I’ve experienced both while sleeping and when I’ve been put under, makes the whole death=oblivion rather understandable to me as well.
Heh. When I first read this I thought you’d written from June 5th to June 3rd. Which would have had provided you with a time traveling experience, at least.
Oh well. I’ll try to read for comprehension from now on.
I am not religious myself, though raised in the Baptist faith. I do, however, think we go on after physical death, that consciousness is actually the origin of the physical body, not the other way around.
My brain is an organ…a piece of meat. It is NOT my “mind” or my SELF, but merely a physical organ like the heart or liver (both of which were once considered “the seat of the soul”, much as the brain is currently considered to be the seat of consciousness.)
I do not HAVE a soul…I AM a soul who has manifested a/as a physical form. JMHO.
One reason I hold this view is that I have experienced episodes during my life which “prove” it to me, including verified out of body, precognition, visitations from the “dead”, etc. experiences. I am actually very skeptical overall, and do not accept something as “true” unless I can find no other logical explanation.
But of course, there is no “proof” sufficient for those who choose to believe we die and rot and that’s it. It’s ok…I don’t think it matters what we believe, we go on regardless, so it doesn’t bother me what anyone thinks. And of course, I am simply offering my personal, unprovable opinions, same as anyone else.
I think what happens to “us” when we die can differ widely, depending upon what we expect to happen, our religious ideas, the circumstances surrounding our death, etc…Same as in life, our experiences are very personal.
FTR, there are a few other dogmas from the Christian tradition/sects which consider themselves Christian, besides the Heaven/Hell/Purgatory scenario:
Jehovah’s Witnesses believe we die and are unconscious/dead until Judgment Day, when 44,000, I think it is, will get into “Heaven” to be with God and help govern Earth…the rest who are “saved” will be brought back to an eternal physcial life on a renewed, perfect Earth. And those not saved just stay dead/die again forever.
And the (or at least some) Mormons believe in pre-existence of the soul (and in some cases, reincarnation if I understand correctly)…they believe humans are souls/spirits created at the beginning of creation who live in Heaven as spiritual families both before birth and after death (why their marriages are considered to be forever, not until death do us part).
And BTW, to the OP, your ignorance regarding the Muslim faith is profound.
I do not choose to believe we die and rot, that’s what the evidence, especially complete and total lack of evidence for anything else, leads me to believe. Attempting to pin the ‘believer’ label on those who differ from you when it’s quite obvious they’re not is just projection. You claim to not be religious, but then immediately start espousing rather religious beliefs.
If you feel you have proof then share it. You claim to be skeptical and then immediately talk about the same stuff we’ve all heard a hundred times. How is your precognition different from all the other easily explainable cases, and how did you determine it to be so? Just because you can’t find an explanation, doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
Many near-death accounts describe going down a tunnel towards a bright light.
I’ve always believed that what they saw was nothing more than that white dot that appeared on older TV sets when turned off. They were experiencing the electrical circuits in their body being shut down. You’d probably have to be over 50 to know what I’m talking about.