The past couple of days I have been thinking about my mom. She passed away in 2003 from pulmonary fibrosis. I had been taking care of her rapidly declining health until that day.
I have found myself wondering…is she somewhere? How is it over there? Can she see us over here? What is she doing?
I mean, what do you really think it’s like over there.
PS. I’m not looking for a pep talk but I want to know your real thoughts.
What I think? Well, I think that when we die, we die. No longer able to think, feel remeber, etc.
…spell…
I agree with Strinka. You die. It’s over. You rot.
Pittsburgh.
… if you’re bad…
You think it’s that simple? You’re born, live for a while then die and that’s it? Everything else in the universe is pretty complex, planetary development, celestial rotation, quantum physics, etc. But we just rot?
Pittsburgh?
Should I go there for vacation to see the worst I’ll have to go through?
Who said rotting was simple? Our bodies slowly decay due to the bacteria that’s been living on us our whole lives having a feast. With no new cells being produced, we get eaten, and our nutrients are put into the bacteria, which in turn are put back into the environment. So when we die, our bodies become the grass, and the antelope eat the grass, so we’re all connected, in the great circle of life.
We’re just matter, after all. Dying is nothing special, it’s just the molecules that make us up taking a different form. All our thoughts and personalities are just unique movements of atoms, which were cooked up in the fiery centers of stars billions of years ago, and death just makes those atoms move somewhere else, perhaps to one day power another star billions of years from now.
Compare that to “Oh yeah, you’re not really dead, you’re just somewhere else. Ah…heaven. Yeah, that’s it.” and tell me which more complex.
Unless your body is stored underground in a steel box inside a bigger concrete box.
Theist here.
Specifically, Christian.
I don’t want to get into a long, involved discussion on the subject (wrong forum for that), but I for one do think that we go **somewhere ** after we are done here.
Whether or not we can “look down” upon this world, or whether we are somewhere “else”, I don’t really have a strong feeling. But my guess is that wherever we go, it is so “other-worldly” that we no longer have much, if any, interest in the goings-on back here.
I think that Carl Sagan said it best in Billions and Billions when he said:
The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look Death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.
So when death comes, that’s it. There is no “over there”. The best analogy I’ve seen about what it will be like after you’ve died is how you were before you were born. You did not exist before your were born, and you will not exist after you have died. And there’s nothing sad about that if you’ve lived a good life.
Welcome to not-being.
No no… I’m pretty sure its Pittsburgh.
I like to think of it as an “eternal, dreamless, sleep.” (Hey, at least it’s better than Hell.)
Aside from that…I’ll probably go into a few coolers, than down to the county airport in seperate cars, then around the country to different transplant teams. Whatever’s left of me will either go to a bookcase or in a closet, in an overpriced urn; or to the local cemetary that’s across the street from the Toys’R’Us and the McDonalds. After that, probably thrown away or mulched after a few decades.
Frankly, I’d count myself as REALLY lucky if I somehow ended up on a shelf in a museum, someday.
I have no clue what happens when we die. Do we have souls? Do they go to heaven or hell or some other place? If we go somewhere when we die, are we noncorporeal? I have no idea. I used to be all but sure we go to heaven or hell when we died, but now I’m not.
On a (somewhat related) tangent, is it possible to believe in God, but not in an afterlife? 
Sure, that’s the beauty of belief—you can believe in anything you want. You could believe that God created the universe and mankind just to watch us squirm, because he’s a sadist, and sending us to oblivion makes him laugh. You could believe that God just “recycles” souls via reincarnation, or that the creator of the universe is the Whale God, and only cetaceans really have “souls” and get into heaven or hell. Or that the lives of mortals are just too unimportant for God to concern himself with, and he barely even notices our existance, if at all. Anything you can think of, you can believe in, if you want.
I’m very sorry about your Mom. You must have gone through such deep emotions and you obviously still care about her.
You did ask us to be frank. There is no evidence at all that anyone has ever gone anywhere after death (‘God’ or not). Therefore your Mom is at peace. You should remember her with love.
Sadly there is considerable evidence that immoral charlatans exploit grief by pretending to speak to the dead for large sums of money. Please don’t get involved with these crooks.
This topic is probably more appropriate for Great Debates, since it tends to be one of those subjects that people don’t always agree on.
For myself, I am firmly convinced that our souls are eternal. We existed before we came here, and we will continue to exist after we leave this earth.
Small derailing here: if you guys want an interesting read that deals with what happens to your body (just body, not necessarily soul/spirit if you believe in that), read Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Great book, and it treats the subject matter very respectfully.
Back on topic: I’m torn. On the one hand I see nothing ignoble or unsatisfying with knowing that when I’m gone, I will be used in the life of something else. On the other, it’s hard to comprehend not existing. It’s difficult to not think, “my body, my mind” instead of just saying “me”; that is, separating what I consider myself from my physical being. It’s kind of nice to think that after I go I can look down on all the people I loved and see the world changing, but sometimes I don’t know if I’d really want that.
If you need to still figure it all out and get with the program, you are reincarnated. And keep getting so until you get it right or reconcile the shit that you’ve been trying to reconcile for a couple hundred bajillion years.
Go ahead, flame me. 
I’m not sure that Great Debates is better for this thread. We aren’t debating, just presenting points of view.
I for one, would like to think that there is something else after death. Wether I am wrong or right does not affect the quality of life & behavior that I have now. In other words, I like to think that I don’t need the ‘reward’ of heaven to entice me to be a good person. On the other hand, if there isn’t anything else, I won’t know…
There are TONS of people out there making money by purporting to talk to the dead. Not to worry, I know they are charlatans and I won’t be spending money on them. I already almost went bankrupt taking care of mom!
But what about Jesus, Krishna, & the other religious figureheads? They couldn’t ALL be wrong, could they?
PS. OK OK OK, that last comment may make this thread more appropriate for GD… :smack: