Questions of dating aside, “a form of imaginary sense-making that is not bound to immediate surroundings” is entering the spiritual realm from my perspective. Do you disagree or do you wish to quibble over numbers?
I don’t disagree.
Worshipping a resurrected dead demi-god who promises eternal life is also “entering the spiritual realm”. And I’m sure you don’t want to quibble with that. That does not justify me claiming that spiritual concepts arose in humans about 2,000 years ago when we first discovered Jebus.
I just want, for the third time, evidence for your claims that spirituality never existed before this particular “form of imaginary sense-making”.
i agree. i assume you knew but just didn’t bother to mention, burying them with prized possessions. wouldn’t that ax or wool coat actually be more valuable passed on to another person instead of buried? belief in a afterlife is a plausible explanation.
Which makes no sense at all. Once you are dead, you won’t care about anything at all. Once you are dead, nothing will be yours. Once you are dead, you are dead.
Saying that you don’t believe in an afterlife, but you care what happens to some insensate protein that once housed your consciousness is logically inconsistent. It makes as much sense as saying that you don’t believe in an afterlife, but you still care what happens to a lamb casserole.
While that explains why you won’t interfere with *other’s *burial rituals, it doesn’t explain why you would choose bury the dead yourself.
That’s a total non-sequitur. Other animal species do literally piss on their mothers’ corpses, or cannibalise them, or ignore them. We know that Chimps don’t bury their dead. There’s no evidence that Homo erectus or H. habilis buried their dead. Saying that it’s “for the benefit of the living” doesn’t explain *why *it benefits the living. Saying that you have a biological incentive not to piss on a corpse doesn’t explain what the incentive is. Our close relatives apparently don’t have any such incentive.
What exactly do you see as being the biological incentive that humans have?
If message board answers leave you wanting more, you might consider checking out this book: Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not. To get a gist of the content, you can hear the author talk about it on this Point of Inquiry podcast episode.
I don’t believe in an afterlife and I feel the impulse to honor a dead person, or leave some token as a symbol of my feelings for them.
I can see wanting to give some dignity to the corpse of someone you loved, even if you didn’t believe they had any continuing existence.
I didn’t see this post before I posted the my last one.
People are emotional. Seeing the body of my dead friend hurts because I know I’ll never be with them again. Not wanting it to be scattered by wolves is a natural impulse.
See above.
We understand symbolism, and the corpse symbolizes the the love that we feel for the dead person. It seems reasonable enough.
Can you explain why? Because at the moment the vagueness of these statements seems like evidence that we are hardwired for belief in an afterlife.
Why would you have an “impulse” to honour a dead person? They are dead. If there is no afterlife then they do not exist. How can you you honour something that does not exist?
And if you mean that you want to honour their memory, then why do you need to do things to their corpse in order for that to occur? The memory exists in you head, not in their corpse. Why could you not honour the person’s memory and still just throw the corpse over a cliff? How are they in any way related?
The fact that people who profess no belief in the afterlife have such a strong impulse to connect a corpse to the memory of the person that once inhabited it is the best evidence I have ever seen that we have an inherent predisposition for belief in an afterlife.
I disagree. Say my favorite Pickup truck breaks down. Most people will sell it for scrap. Maybe I use it to store my tools in the back of the truck. Crazy example but I just made it up to show people can have emotional attachments to something once its utility or functionality has expired.
The memory of the person exists in the living person making the gesture.
Because the flesh is a direct symbol of that person. For the same reason you don’t burn pictures of your dead loved ones.
I think it’s more likely that you, for whatever reason, have an abnormally low sense of sentimentality. I don’t mean it as a dig, or an insult, maybe you just don’t have a lot of that impulse, so you’re extrapolating from that position?
I have zero belief in an afterlife. I still don’t want to hurl my dead grandmother’s body off a cliff. That’s a fairly typical impulse.
Simple: Faith and afterlife first came when we realized we have the power of [Spongebob] imaaaaaaagination![/Spongebob]
This statement is a total non-sequitur.
How does feeling pain at loss of a friend in any way relate to the treatment of a piece of insensate protein? One does not follow from the other in any way at all.
If you cannibalised your friend, as many species do, you could still miss them. And if you gave your friend an ornate burial, it would still be possible that you didn’t miss him at all.
You haven’t actually explained how treatment of a lump of insensate protein has any connection at all your feelings for a dead friend.
Why is it natural?
Chimpanzees have no such desire. Are you arguing that chimpanzees are unnatural, or are you arguing that chimpanzees do not feel emotion?
Once again, this is a non-sequitur. You haven’t explained why someone with no instinctive belief in an afterlife would care whether a lump of insensate protein is scattered by wolves. All you’ve stated is that you don’t want that to happen, which just seems like evidence for an instinctive tendency to belief in an afterlife.
How is that reasonable? What reasoning leads to the conclusion that the corpse symbolizes the the love that we feel for the dead person? Can you show us this reasoning? If not then it isn’t reasonable.
I don’t doubt that it’s true. It’s true for me too.
But that’s the whole point. You instinctively feel that it’s true that a corpse symbolises a person, just as you instinctively feel that certain people are sexually attractive. That doesn’t mean that either reaction is a product of reason. Exactly the opposite. It proves that they are the product of instinctive tendencies. That;s why you can’t explain what your reasons were for either emotional reaction.
No doubt. And?
Why is flesh a direct symbol of the loved one?
And plenty of people have burned pictures of dead loved ones.
Are you saying that if you had millions of duplicate pictures of a dead loved one, no where to store them and they were decaying, you wouldn’t burn them? You would feel obliged to keep them forever? Of course you wouldn’t.
We keep some pictures because we want to. The ones we don’t want, we throw away.
I think the fact that your argument can’t be explained rationally and you now admit that it comes down entirely to sentimentality says it all.
Doubtless it is. That is evidence for an instinctive belief in an afterlife, not against it.
Just as you have an instinctive, purely emotional, utterly unreasonable sexual attraction to certain people. That isn’t evidence against an instinctive sex drive in humans. It.s evidence *for *it.
I am arguing that chimpanzees don’t possess our ability to think abstractly and feel emotions for symbolic things.
No, it means you simply are demanding that any sense of emotional attachment to symbols requires a belief in an afterlilfe. That’s the non sequitur. It doesn’t follow at all.
The corpse is the same flesh that birthed, fucked, hugged, cried upon, yours. Of course it’s a symbol of the person that died. A t-shirt they wore would be a symbol of that person, why wouldn’t the actual meat and bone that housed the person be similarly the symbol?
Do you think that the shirt that Jake Gyllenhaal smelled at the end of Brokeback Mountain is any less of a symbol of the man, than the actual corpse of the man?
I find it weird that you’re even arguing this. I think you’re too attached to your conclusion that sentimentality is evidence for the afterlife.
Again, we attach symbolic significance to things. Apes don’t. Simple enough, and doesn’t require a belief in an afterlife.
And my position explains it, and yours does not.
Because it looks like them. Seriously, are you just fucking with me at this point?
To forget them. And most people don’t do it right after they die.
That’s a profoundly disingenuous argument. How many corpses of dead people are there, per person?
And the ultimate symbol, the actual flesh that held us against the cold, we treat with reverence, and put someplace where we don’t have to watch it rot.
Your argument is the one that isn’t rational. Sentimentality = belief in afterlife. It simply does not follow. Especially since we do things like keep an old truck we loved, or never throw out a pair of shoes that mean a lot to us.
No, it isn’t. You’re not reasoning this out properly. You’re making assertions that two things must be related, while ignoring the more obvious and reasonable idea.
And nothing about treating a corpse reverently requires a belief in an afterlife. Simple as that.
Neanderthals buried their dead with flowers. That’s the clincher to the conclusion that they had some sort of faith and belief system.
Or, that they could understand symbolism, and saw the corpse as a symbol of the person who was.
Just sayin’. 
ok, i agree, but my next statement is: so what? that indicates they had a belief in afterlife but why is it so special if they did? why is it not just a simple function of a more advanced brain having an imagination? maybe you agree with me, maybe you don’t, IDK, i’m just asking a question,
I’m not dead now, am I ? Least I think I amn’t. And I get to think about the future too. So thinking about what happens to my meat after my death is not especially irrational. It’ll still be my meat then. Whose else ? My stuff is still my stuff when I’m not in the room, isn’t it ?
Not really. I’m attached to the protein. We’ve had some good times together. It lets me get smashed once in a while. I owe the protein that much.
OK, so this is just me being a smartass, but still. There’s nothing illogical, or at least nothing *unusual *about being emotionally invested in one’s fleshy bits, mister Spock.
I help you do it for your Mom, you do it for me. Hell, I help you do it for you Mom, you help me do it for mine, too.
Yup. But they don’t have our brains, conscience, memory, maybe not even our emotions. For all we know, they can’t recognize that corpse as their mother’s. E.g. the monkey doesn’t know what death is, and since that corpse is dead and their mother has never been, it can’t be her.
Whereas we do know that, in a healthy human, just seeing a *picture *of one’s mother creates a physiological response. Which can be measured with a galvanometer and everything. Even if they’re not Jewish. And the response will be there for the corpse, too. It might not be “computationally rational” but it’s how people work, regardless of their supernatural beliefs.
Peace of mind, peace of hormones. Lack of guilt ? If you liked a person, you don’t leave them for the vultures. Unless you do it in a ritualized manner (sky burial), which is weird to me but different strokes and all that. Even if they’re dead and if, logically speaking, their body is just slowly decaying meat, you still recognize that meat as them, symbolically speaking.
Think of it like the house you grew up in. Even if you’re left your childhood home, and somebody else bought it, lived in it for 40 years and so on ; it’s a rare individual that can pass by that house and not think of it as “my old home”. That emotional response ? Entirely biological.
We can only guess. Belief in the afterlife is so universal it seems a natural human construct. The mystery of dying leads an intelligent mind to ask questions, especially easy binary ones such as whether or not there’s an afterlife. So the first people who did art, and understood the power of rituals, must have already carried that belief.