What Happens After Death? Exploring the Possibilities of an Afterlife

[pippo90]

...and i don't mean in the long run, the second you die, what do you feel?, see? or does everything just stop and your just gone spiritually and mentally because you need your brain to think? i mean, what would be of you? would you just be reborn? go to heaven? and this brings me to my next topic about Catholicism, I am catholic but I don't get why people think that is God is so good and just and kind, then why would be be so mean to condem anyone that dosn't believe in him or catholicism to hell? I know lots of great people who arn't religious will they all go to hell? what I am saying is that i think we all end up wherever we think well end up, if i believe in heaven and hell it will be heaven or hell, if a budhist believes he will be reincarnated then he will be, our after life is decided upon us...


and again i believe that we live in hell today, if we have been good this his hell we will go to heaven or somewhere better, but if we don't we just keep reliving this life. does anyone have any comments? agreements? objections?

 

[RAD4921]

I think you may benefit from reading about NDEs (Near Death Experiences). The first widely read book on NDEs was published in the 1970s. It is called "Life After Life" wriiten by Dr. Raymond Moody. There is also the more recent book called "Lessons From the Light" by psychologist Dr Kenneth Ring. There is also the 2,000 year old story of Christ being resurrected from death so there is the possibility that the soul surrives bodily death.
On the other hand, I have grown a little skeptical of near death experiences for several reasons that I won't go into here.It is a possibility but if I don't survive bodily death and I enter nonexistence after death then that isn't such a bad thing.
I do believe in some type of organizing principle that is governing the universe but I hate to use the term "God" since it implies some type of personal "God" that rewards and punishes which is a primitive design of a creator and is an idea used to try and control the moral conduct of the masses. Einstein also believed in some type of creator of the universe but his idea was one that was not personal.
RAD

 

[fedorfan]

I believe it is like it was before you were born, nothingness. I don't believe in any god but I believe if there is one or anything beyond this then well see it when we die, but personally I honestly don't know anything on the subject and am not happy with this existence. I would rather not exist at all or know more than we do now about god and everything, when it comes down to it though, everything is meaningless, even if there was a god, he would be pointless. Well actually, we wouldn't know because we aint him so we can't know. Exact same goes for the universe. So basically, we can't know so it eliminates the point for a point.

 

[arildno]

...and i don't mean in the long run, the second you die, what do you feel?, see? or does everything just stop and your just gone spiritually and mentally because you need your brain to think? i mean, what would be of you? would you just be reborn? go to heaven?

My view: Zero,zip, nada, nothing.
It is a chilling thought, but rather liberating, it is like realizing you're on top of the mountain and see before you all that ACTUALLY is, and it is all around you.

and this brings me to my next topic about Catholicism, I am catholic but I don't get why people think that is God is so good and just and kind, then why would be be so mean to condem anyone that dosn't believe in him or catholicism to hell? I know lots of great people who arn't religious will they all go to hell?

Which shows you have strong, good moral fibres in you that naturally revolt at such ideas. Let no one, in particular CO-BELIEVERS, destroy those fibres in you!

what I am saying is that i think we all end up wherever we think well end up, if i believe in heaven and hell it will be heaven or hell, if a budhist believes he will be reincarnated then he will be, our after life is decided upon us...

Which takes out some of the purported "truth" in religions, doesn't it?

and again i believe that we live in hell today, if we have been good this his hell we will go to heaven or somewhere better, but if we don't we just keep reliving this life. does anyone have any comments? agreements? objections?

Well, your post is rather too religious/philosophical for me to comment on further.

 

[pippo90]

cool, thanks for the comments its always fun for me discussing stuff and comparing with other people, and yes it does take out the truth is religions o and fedorfan, i don't think life is completely meaningless, the life that let's say government and all our "leaders" have set up for us is actually meaningless so i agree with you on that but if it weren't for the constraints and the laws and the borders life would be very meningful indeed since you'd experience true happines of being free, but yes when it all comes down to it it is all meaning less but then answer this,,,

why are we here?

waiting for response

 

[arildno]

For no reason whatsoever.

 

[pibomb]

I, like Richard Dawkins, think we, as humans, exist for one purpose: to study our world. To learn how it works. To understand and ponder why we exist (oo...the irony...it burns).

I honestly don't believe in an external force that overlooks us as humans. I think religion may just be a form of science that looks at the world differently (to me it seems to look at it in an erroneous way).

Anyway, what is life? Is it simply the absence of death or the presence of something new? What is morality? Is it the absence of immortailty or is it a quantity that we can measure? Humans exist to examine these problems using their amazing brains.

 

[pippo90]

interest4ing point of view

 

[selfAdjoint]

Whether our brains arose through evolution or were somehow intended to happen (I Know that those two possibilities are not strictly independent), it is still the case that we have them, and they can do marvelous things, and it seems to me anyway that it is incumbent upon us to use them well. What "wel"l means in its largest sense we don't know, but in its local, one might say "perturbative" sense we know very well as all our literature and traditions agree.

 

[fedorfan]

I have no idea why we are here, no one does because no one was there when it all started. I believe though that were here for no reason at all, simply because I've found no reason to be here, but Ill take what was given to me and try to make the best of it.

 

[courtrigrad]

it will just be black and darkness.

 

[Math Is Hard]

My view: Zero,zip, nada, nothing.
It is a chilling thought, but rather liberating, it is like realizing you're on top of the mountain and see before you all that ACTUALLY is, and it is all around you.

Just out of curiosity, what does it liberate you from? (I heard someone make that comment before and I didn't understand what it meant.)

 

[pippo90]

liberating you from what happens here on Earth I'm guessing in my opinion it would be crime, drugs, pain, all that bad stuff

 

[arildno]

Just out of curiosity, what does it liberate you from? (I heard someone make that comment before and I didn't understand what it meant.)

Religion, for example.

 

[selfAdjoint]

Math, different forms of religion have different constructions of who will go to Heaven and who to Hell. There was a recent study of how people in the US regarded God. In the North a preponderance saw God as benificent, helping us unite with Him. In the old South, however, they see God as a punishing monster who is ever ready to consign us to eternal torment.

Lucretius, who wrote De Rerum Natura so long ago, saw that people were in terror of what the gods would do if they got angry. He saw it as liberation to sweep away the whole mythical fairy story and content him with atoms and the void. He saw his poem as a public service.

 

[Math Is Hard]

I was expecting religion as the immediate answer, but I was thinking there was something more, since I think a person could live without religion but still believe there is a God. What I was thinking is that the sense of liberation is maybe a freedom from a nagging thought that maybe you have been kidding yourself all along by believing in something that can't be proven or disproven.

I think that study is right on the money, SA. I grew up in the Bible Belt where many preachers are of the hell-fire and brimstone school. Some of them warned that we would be punished during life, some warned that we would be punished after, but eventually we were all going to get it for our sins. This fear led to control by religious groups in places where they should not have had any say (e.g., laws, school policies). If someone like Lucretius had come to my small town and started attempting to free people from their beliefs, he would have been in a peck of trouble with the city fathers.

 

[arildno]

There is, of course, also the rather disturbing side of this that there are no one who is going to make sense out of your life, or show you what its substantial meaning IS. You are stripped bare, it is up to you, and you alone, to create sufficient meaning in your own life. No one else has made it for you, and there are no answers to it existing before you make them, either.

 

[empirical]

Utmost apologies: but might I offer the view that what happens after death is the same as what happened before life. Not a lot. Some recent research suggests NDEs are chemical in nature.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19225731.300&feedId=being-human_rss20

 

[Zelos]

to much to read before so i´ll simply tell how it is
nothing happens after death, your existens end and that's it. no more living its just to accept it

 

[kant]

...and i don't mean in the long run, the second you die, what do you feel?, see? or does everything just stop and your just gone spiritually and mentally because you need your brain to think? i mean, what would be of you? would you just be reborn? go to heaven? and this brings me to my next topic about Catholicism, I am catholic but I don't get why people think that is God is so good and just and kind, then why would be be so mean to condem anyone that dosn't believe in him or catholicism to hell? I know lots of great people who arn't religious will they all go to hell? what I am saying is that i think we all end up wherever we think well end up, if i believe in heaven and hell it will be heaven or hell, if a budhist believes he will be reincarnated then he will be, our after life is decided upon us...


and again i believe that we live in hell today, if we have been good this his hell we will go to heaven or somewhere better, but if we don't we just keep reliving this life. does anyone have any comments? agreements? objections?

It seems you are not smart enough to imagine something beyond your hevan or hell or whatever. I cannot tell your the answer to your question. I don t think anyone can do it.

 

[nannoh]

...and i don't mean in the long run, the second you die, what do you feel?, see? or does everything just stop and your just gone spiritually and mentally because you need your brain to think? i mean, what would be of you? would you just be reborn? go to heaven? and this brings me to my next topic about Catholicism, I am catholic but I don't get why people think that is God is so good and just and kind, then why would be be so mean to condem anyone that dosn't believe in him or catholicism to hell? I know lots of great people who arn't religious will they all go to hell? what I am saying is that i think we all end up wherever we think well end up, if i believe in heaven and hell it will be heaven or hell, if a budhist believes he will be reincarnated then he will be, our after life is decided upon us...


and again i believe that we live in hell today, if we have been good this his hell we will go to heaven or somewhere better, but if we don't we just keep reliving this life. does anyone have any comments? agreements? objections?

No one has returned after an extended period of death to tell us what's going on on the other side of life. So we can only speculate about what death means to the human organism. As is painfully obvious, this fact hasn't stopped people from professing to know exactly what the state of death entails and its effects on an organism's "spirt", "soul" or other literal interpretation of the organism's existence.

What seems to happen is this - whenever there is an unknown it is usually exploited by a small group of people who falsely claim to know what the unknown is. The group exploits people's fears of the unknown and begin to manipulate those fears with conditions that must be met to avoid a bad experience with the unknown. These conditions almost always work toward padding the lifestyle of the small group with social graces and material wealth.

This sort of manipulation not only applies to the unknown condition of death but is also a tactic used when the actual, living public are not involved in foreign and distant events during life. They are told a story about what is happening yet there is precious little the average member of the larger group can do to confirm the story they're being told.

 

[Kerrie]

...and i don't mean in the long run, the second you die, what do you feel?, see? or does everything just stop and your just gone spiritually and mentally because you need your brain to think?

i would imagine most people either think about the person that is closest to them, think about all the things they did or did not do, or welcome it if they are in a lot of discomfort...as far as after consciousness has deceased, it's probably not any different then what you experienced before you were born.:tongue:

 

[octelcogopod]

...and i don't mean in the long run, the second you die, what do you feel?, see? or does everything just stop and your just gone spiritually and mentally because you need your brain to think? ...

That depends a bit of course on the way the person dies.
But I saw in the movie Waking Life that there can be remnants of thoughts and activity in the brain 6 minutes after death..
It is a movie and I have not read any evidence of this, maybe someone can enlighten us?

Also I think if you die a normal 'healthy' death, like lying in a bed and just ceasing to breathe, then most reports I have gotten have said that it's been very peaceful.. Most people who die that way just 'fall asleep', so I imagine it might not be too unlike.

 

[PIT2]

Whatever the reality of near death experience, it is what is experienced at dying. Most of who experienced it claimed it was the best thing ever. Go to http://video.google.nl/videoplay?docid=8225341779641252488 and fastforward to 52:30 to get an idea.

Someone at work recently told me about her 27yr old brother who had comitted suicide. He had been born dead but was resuscitated. From the age of 6 he started talking about how peaceful it was (he could remember it apparently(im not familiar with the details of his experience, but 'peaceful' is what the colleage told me)), and kept telling his family that he wouldn't be with them forever, because he wanted to go back. But she said, he wasnt depressed at all and lead a normal life. So at age 27 he killed himself just to go back to what he remembered from being born dead.

Also on another forum on which i opened a topic whether we should feel sorry for dying people, i talked to a person who didnt believe in an afterlife at all, yet he had a near death experience and simply thought it was the most peaceful feeling he ever had.

 

[RVBuckeye]

Hello PIT2,

Nice talking with you again, hope you are well. You are already aware of my attitude towards the Near death experience. There's a reason why I highlighted near; they weren't actually dead!

Here's a good definition of death for you: The irreversible cessation of brain activity.

No one has ever come back to life to tell what happens after-wards. I tend to agree more with Kerrie. There's no way for anyone to know.

 

[PIT2]

There's a reason why I highlighted near; they weren't actually dead!

Here's a good definition of death for you: The irreversible cessation of brain activity.

No one has ever come back to life to tell what happens after-wards. I tend to agree more with Kerrie. There's no way for anyone to know.

I agree that the people who came back didnt suffer from irreversible cessation of brainactivity But, that doesn't mean their experiences arent an indication of what is going to happen. The experiences are the nearest to death that we have, so looking at them is the best we have. Also, the distinction between death as irreversible cessation of brainactivity, and death as the temporary cessation of brainactivity (it is also debatable whether this happens during NDE), may be an artificial distinction that only occurs afterwards. Like we can say that a rock is a rock, or a rock is a future statue. But a rock being a future statue doesn't mean it isn't a rock now. Similarly when someones brainactivity returns later doesn't mean he wasnt as-dead-as-it-gets while it was gone.

 

[RVBuckeye]

I agree that the people who came back didnt suffer from irreversible cessation of brainactivity But, that doesn't mean their experiences arent an indication of what is going to happen.

I agree with your last sentence to a point. That point is it trying to extend what happens in the moments leading up to death, shouldn't be used as an indication of what happens afterwards

The experiences are the nearest to death that we have, so looking at them is the best we have. Also, the distinction between death as irreversible cessation of brainactivity, and death as the temporary cessation of brainactivity (it is also debatable whether this happens during NDE), may be an artificial distinction that only occurs afterwards. Like we can say that a rock is a rock, or a rock is a future statue. But a rock being a future statue doesn't mean it isn't a rock now. Similarly when someones brainactivity returns later doesn't mean he wasnt as-dead-as-it-gets while it was gone.

Although I don't get your rock analogy, the problem I see with your analysis is there is no way to determine exactly when these experiences occur. I know our disagreement is based on the initial assumption of whether the brain produces consciousness, but I have not yet been convinced that it doesn't. (but I applaud your efforts for trying as hard as you do to convince people ofthe opposite)

 

[fedorfan]

I believe near death experiences are what they sound like, NEAR death experiences, not death experiences, I believe death is when everything just quits, like before you were born, just nothingness. They say NDE`s are when your brain starts fading or something or other like that. I don't believe in afterlife though just because it doesn't seem reasonable to me. If there is an afterlife though I believe no religion or science will be able to explain it.

 

[metaquantum]

BUT if there is nothing after death, how can you remember what your doing now? it would be like a black out when your drunk, and you wouldn't be able to have any control of what your doing.. or something

 

[fedorfan]

Why would you remeber anything in the first place if your brain shuts down? That doesn't make sense to me.

 

[fedorfan]

Why would you remeber anything in the first place if your brain shuts down? That doesn't make sense to me.

 

[mgiddy911]

I agree with all who posted the logic that Noone has ever come back to say what life after death is like, all we can do is speculate, we don't have any hints or clues. However, this being said, it is more of a personal bias, but I believe in life after life, the karmic cycle, and the idea that there is another life after this current one, the only connection between the different lives being karma, but again thatss just my thoughts, I have no proof, or evidence of this, its simly an idea I like to believe in

 

[Blueplanetbob]

When you die the macro aspect of you is abandoned by your perception, which exists as quantum information that is inviolate and specific to you and your superposition.
Somewhere in the region of zero point energy and quantum foam your displaced perception or personal energy, which is immortal, and which can access any neighbouring universe, because that energy is timeless in ALL universes, will entangle and fuse with the perception of your nearest self, which is so near it is inside of you,
and you will not even notice that Now has changed.

 

[nannoh]

I agree with all who posted the logic that Noone has ever come back to say what life after death is like, all we can do is speculate, we don't have any hints or clues. However, this being said, it is more of a personal bias, but I believe in life after life, the karmic cycle, and the idea that there is another life after this current one, the only connection between the different lives being karma, but again thatss just my thoughts, I have no proof, or evidence of this, its simly an idea I like to believe in

Personally I'm more interested in what happens before death. How we live our lives quite probably determines the quality of any possible events thereafter.

Blueplanetbob and yourself have pointed out that it's how one lives one's life that quite possibly determines what happens next. This is verified by observing the nature of sequence and consequence as it is presented to us by nature during life.

Of course, so far, our brains are only capable of perceiving life as a series of sequences and so, our death will seem to be, naturally, the next step in that sequence. If, during life, one is able to transcend the accepted and ingrained idea that everything must take place in sequence, one may be able to avoid the hum-drum type of death everyone else experiences. One may be able to experience death while they live, and visa versa. This could be viewed as a form of immortality. Hypothetically speaking.

 

[Rade]

Death as a "thing" does not exist, thus nothing can "happen" either before or after that which does not exist--the OP question lacks meaning.