Afterlife Ideas.
Is there anyway that every idea of life after death can be correct? There apparently are many ideas in different religions and personal beliefs that really seem completely in conflict with one another. But in general most beliefs seem to favor a paradise. Eliminating all pains from this world and becoming young again. Such an optimistic view of what's next. Shouldn't they seem suspicious as well? Simply existing without health problems and with physical and mental energy and focus is enough for me.
Comments (43)
Purgatory and hell are paradise?
Selfishness is the common element present in the course of every evil act ever perpetrated against mankind.
Quoting TiredThinker
Essentially, no. Not simultaneously at least. For obvious reasons.
The idea of life after death seems to have developed from a vague awareness, and attempts to make sense of, a very real capacity to interact with the world beyond one’s physical existence. When we remember and embody the unrealised intentions or preferences of someone who has died, individually or collectively, then what has heretofore defined that person in life is able to ‘live’ on and interact with us - if not visibly in the world, then somewhere, somehow. Given that many people still describe emotion as a ‘force’ of some kind, it stands to reason that they would describe this potential influence of the departed in a similar way. Many questions naturally arise from this, and the possible answers put forward, and subjectivity in validating them, help to shape how one would, could or should live and interact in an eternal, cultural reality. In the absence of any way to verify, and as a comfort to those facing what is essentially unknown, why wouldn’t we favour a paradise, or at least a more optimistic possibility?
No one truly knows what is going to happen in the afterlife, assuming there is one, but if we don't know what's going to happen, then why not imagine the best possible scenario? Like you said, the majority of us are going to look for an unimaginable paradise. This kind of paradise is what I want for myself, but I'm not like other people, and other people aren't like me. I suppose this is where you could ask the question "Do others really deserve the same kind of paradise I do?"
Our views of the afterlife seem to be shaped by the sense of morality we develop while living on earth. Say you have person A and person B. Person A lived what you would describe as a "good" life. A life of helping others before helping themselves. Person A committed no crimes in their life. Person B on the other hand lived a life of violence and crime. A "bad" life if you will. Should person A and B go to the same place? A lot of people form an argument such as the following:
1. If you live a "good" life, whatever you attribute to being good, then you will surely go to an afterlife where "good" things and "good" people reside.
2. Person A lived a "good" life.
3. Therefore, Person A will go to an afterlife where "good" things and "good" people reside.
4. Person B lived a "bad" life.
5. Therefore, Person B will not go to an afterlife where "good" things and "good" people reside.
Obviously there are a lot of scenarios where this kind of argument won't work, which seems to be most places, because life is more complicated than "good" and "bad". This kind of argument just shows one of the ways we can begin to imagine what the afterlife would look like. There seems to be infinitely many ways the afterlife could be and no one will ever truly know the answer to the question "What is the afterlife?"
I appreciate your thought provoking forum post. If I were to directly answer your initial question "Is there anyway that every idea of life after death can be correct?" I suppose I would just have to say maybe and move on. It's an impossible question to answer unless we could actually travel there ourselves before death.
Like "life before birth"? Or "north of the north pole"? No.
Quoting bcccampello
I'm partial to this view of 'after birth'. There must be some way to make life ... "worth living." :chin:
Spreadsheets.
Time is the substance of human life. The money that is lost is gained again. Time, never. Make your time worthy.
If one is psychological, are they mentally sound and responsible for their actions? If one creates a world for themselves, assumingly of their own free will and desire, what reason would one have to seek elsewhere? Curiosity, perhaps as a result of boredom? Perhaps. I'm reminded of the old adage, as one man's trash is another man's treasure, one man's hell is surely another man's heaven.
There are Christians for instance, who by believing they have a loving father like figure by their side 24/7, are comforted and are happy. But there are also those that are miserable despite their religious beliefs. The difference between the two is thus because some train their minds through their religious practices to be happier and those who don’t.
But this is not unique to religious belief. There are also non-religious people who are unhappy and those who are happy. I’ve mean, I’ve met happy non-religious people, you’ve never? Speaking as an atheist, I regard this category as those who pursue both happiness and rationality.
For example, what is gastronomic pleasure? Can you eat gastronomic pleasure? Of course you can't. You will have to eat something concrete. This thing can give you pleasure or displeasure. Saint Thomas Aquinas is absolutely right. You ate it, it worked, so you say you're happy. Pleasure is the name you give to the subjective side effect of something. Happiness is the same. Seeking happiness is the most useless thing in the world, because you never know what will make you happy or not. It is true that some things make you happy and others make you unhappy, so these are the things you will have to look for. Our effort is always directed to do something, to achieve something, and not to an abstract thing called happiness. This I understood a long time ago: to seek happiness is to make a hole in the water. If you seek happiness you will be unhappy, so it is better to seek victory, self-assertion, strength, etc.
It is true that the happiness that can be achieved in this world is modest and fickle, but real. One of the keys to obtaining it is: that the joys of others do not sadden you, nor do their sadness rejoice you.
If we could find a way to get dead people to answer questions in an interview, that would be a help, but since dead people are completely unresponsive to questions due to them being dead we're stuck in a state of uncertainty; therefore if anyone speaks of life after death with a notion of certainty then you know, with certainty, they are full of bullshit. (so every idea of life after death share an equality in that they are all bullshit...)
You contradict yourself. First you say "with a notion of certainty", as opposed to just a plausible theory, like alternate universes. Now, suddenly and somehow, you attempt to cast any theories of a field you've clearly made up your mind on as "bollocks", to be polite.
So seeing as, by your own standards, any theory about an afterlife is nonsensical and to be dismissed, does that not include your own statement? Schrodinger's Cat. It's as alive as it is dead. Until?
I fail to see where there's a plausible theory in play.
A notion of conjecture yes, but a theory: a coherent group of propositions formulated to explain a group of facts or phenomena in the natural world and repeatedly confirmed through experiment or observation... I don't see that as in play. Life after death is not a fact or phenomena of the natural world... it is simply conjecture.
Conjecture presented as certain without any evidence other than preference is bullshit (the same as bollocks... I'm not British, nor does the social construct of 'polite' enter into the picture).
No claim of certainty can be made that there is life after death nor that there is not life after death without evidence to back the claim. The latter was not the point of focus in the OP, so it was not the point being addressed.
As to the cat in the box, I agree... thus the cat cannot be said to be alive or dead; thus any claims of certainty either/or are bullshit.
What makes life worth living again and again, is really the question. It's more, why go through the routine of it, not just the fact that one can feel something positive at some points. It's the tawdry everydayness. I always bring it back that to live in a non-utopia and then to claim that it is good because it is not a utopia, has to be justified. It is not, without performing many contradictions, post-facto rationalizations for suffering and tedium that characterize life. We all know its one thing after the other. Its survival, comfort, entertainment, contingent harm, circular repetition. It just keeps going until death, ugh.
Maybe the carrot and stick obfuscates. It feels like you are reaching next levels of some game or gaining experience points. Head shake, head shake.
And yet: so what? "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." :fire:
Finding this life worthwhile is a different matter from living with a belief in an afterlife. When religious believers encourage us to put our hope in an happiness in a life after death rather than encouraging us to find it in this one is missing the point.
Everyone has different life experiences and some know hell and some know both. I do experience periods of depression but do have peak experiences too, moments where I feel in touch with the transcendent.
If you get locked in feelings of monotony it is worth considering what you think would make you truly happy. I am not of the belief that happiness is bound to material goals or completely separate from it. Some people have material and social factors to bring pleasure but are still unhappy. Others go through hell by sheer lack, such as the homeless. Even then, a homeless person may experience a greater sense of heaven within than some others although as far as I see it sleeping outside in winter must be horrendous.
I guess the point I am making is that 'heaven' is an inner experience. There is no easy way to get to that. Pleasures and even antidepressants can lessen the experience of suffering but probably the spiritual teachers can lead the way to heaven within.But even this is not simplistic as our own fears and struggles can blind us when reading sacred literature.
Of course there are mind altering drugs, which can bring one to hell or heaven. But this was viewed by Rudolph Otto as profane rather than sacred mysticism.
I am sorry that I am not giving you any easy aid to the problem of monotony. All I can say is that it is possible that we may go through hell before heaven. Or, perhaps you have not been to hell, but whatever heaven is about somehow gaining access to higher states of consciousness pointed to by the mystics and, as their experiences show, this can be in life rather than after death.
The image of the self as something that resides in the body or identifies with it is fantastic, illusory, sick. It imposes limitations on consciousness that are by no means natural, much less necessary. All spiritual traditions in the world, all wisdom disciplines start with the obvious realization that the self is not the body, it is not “in” the body, but in a way it encompasses it as the supra-spatial transcends and encompasses the spatial (this is marked out by certain mathematical relationships that, in themselves, are nowhere in space).
Strictly speaking, a single episode of this type would be enough to completely refute with the nonsense that the brain, that is, the body, “creates” cognition, thought, consciousness. But the episodes are thousands, and the lack of interest of believers in this type of phenomena (more studied by atheists, New Age followers and Buddhists than by Catholics, Protestants, or even Jewish believers) denotes that the religious mind has already conformed to a diminished state of existence, in which the supracorporal soul, a fundamental condition of access to God, will only come into existence in the other world, through some magical transmutation of the bodily psyche, instead of already constituting in this life our most concrete, most substantive personal reality and more truthful, present and active in our most minimal acts as in our highest and most sublime experiences.
We do know what happens, actually, and we have the cadaver farms to prove it.
Quoting bcccampello
1. "Clinical death" =! irreversible brain death.
2. Memories only can be formed (i.e. encoded in traces of stimuli-reconfiguring neurons) in a live brain with a functioning sensorium. This includes 'memories of perceptions - sensory or otherwise.
3. The term "extrasensory" is underdetermined and / or as incoherent as "disembodied" (woo-woo).
4. Not only not a "fact" - "well-proven" or inferred - not even a possible (i.e. self-consistent, conceptually coherent) state-of-affairs. (NB: "proof" pertains only to formal theorems and not to (alleged) matters-of-fact - vide Peirce, Wittgenstein, Popper, Haack, et al).
The whole area of altered states of consciousness and near-death experience gives us room for speculative, but lack of certainty.
The whole debate about the mind and body is important too. Are mental states dependent on a physical body? Or, we can ask whether the Eastern traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism correct in seeing the material world as an illusion?
Are we just bodies destined to collapse alongside our ego consciousness? Or, is the mystery of mind much more complicated? Perhaps, we are spirits, experiencing earthly lives, but part of a further complex plan, as the theosophists maintained.
Of course, all the belief in life after death maybe rubbish. But what is the ego we know so well? Are we fragments of evolving consciousness?
The Buddha was not really clear about whether this life is the only one, from my reading of the Buddhist perspective, but what does seem clear is that we are in need of enlightenment in the present form of our bodily existence.
If physicalism is true, then yes we have proof of what happens in the afterlife. Nothing. If dualism is true, however, you've only shown what happens to the body and not the spirit or the mind.
Seems like a debate I don't want to get into.
It would be a tough debate for the dualist, certainly. We can literally watch what happens to us after death, and can refer to the entire history of humanity to confirm it. I imagine one would have to invent a variety of invisible entities in order to convince himself.
You say that you don't want to get into this debate, but why? Are you afraid of the negative or positive possibilities of exploration?
Once again, assuming dualism is true, what makes you believe you can see one's spirit or mind in the afterlife? Unless there is some sort of physical connection between the spirit and one's body you could never know what happens. You can't see my spirit/mind just as I can't see yours.
Lack of available time.
Why is there lack of available time? What is more important?;We have all day and nights, unless we choose to sleep and be so immersed in the mundane. Perhaps you are lucky to be immersed in this way, but I have dark, sleepless nights in which I am condemned or free to wrestle with the big questions, especially life after death.
Perhaps everyone could experience (or not experience anything) what they believe will happen or what they yearn for. I can't see how we can rule that out, though there's no evidence of this multi-afterlife ('multi' as in the multi in multiverse).
I don’t think one can see another’s spirit or mind because I do not think either exist.
I suppose that answers the question, then, as I'm not the one to tell you what you should believe or not believe. I'm just simply stating there are other viewpoints to look at when considering the possibilities of the afterlife.
They are welcome to their viewpoints. I just wanted to state that I don’t think there is any merit to their beliefs.
I am convinced that the Miracle of Fatima is the central event of the 20th century, but it certainly does not enter modern culture. So who’s wrong? Our Lady of Fatima or modern culture? I think one of the two must be right; and the two cannot be at the same time.
When Our Lady, in Fatima, 1917, said that Russia would spread its errors throughout the world, She was not referring only to communism. She said: Russia’s mistakes. Communism was the first step, and now they have invented another, even worse. On the rubble of communist society, the same authors, creators and supporters of communism, want to build another empire, even bigger, on a world scale. But what do they have to offer? Russia’s own corruption and misery. There is not one miracle of Fatima, but an incredible succession of miracles
Do not forget that, in the very prophecy of Fatima, the first thing that Our Lady does is open hell to show it to the children. That is, even before making the prophecy, it already shows what hell is like. The depth, breadth and infinite clarity of what the three children saw in Fatima illuminate the historical process in such a way that everything else we think about is only a shadow...
Is it "must" because there is no other choice? In other words, if one does not, then we are all doomed? Or, is it a moral imperative? In other words, there is some duty to imagine Sisyphus happy?
Either case seems to fail to me. Sisyphus must be happy because there is no other reality except he current one (and so we must accept the current one). Thus turning what is truly negative into a positive is the only move one can make. But just because that is the only move, doesn't mean that is the ideal or preferred move in the first place.
Given that the details contradict but that there's an overall thematic similarity, I can say that the question is a sensible. Answerable in any satisfactory sense, I don't know. Perhaps this is the correct answer: I/you/we don't know.
Yet, if this question were a game of chance, how would we place our bets? Would we put our money on one possibility and not the other? Considering that there are theists and atheists in significant numbers, it goes without saying that some have made their decision on the matter. Nonetheless, these beliefs are, obviously, giant leaps of faith for both parties involved. It seems then that the truth of the matter is we don't know the truth, as mind-bendingly paradoxical as that sounds. :chin:
I understand Camus' "must be happy" as Sisyphus (every human's proxy) deriving dignity from rebelling - striving - against, or opposing, or refusing to be defeated by, or not conforming - reducing oneself - to, "fate" (i.e. "the gods").
[quote=Marcus Aurelius]The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.[/quote]
[quote=Benedict de Spinoza]Needs must it be hard, since it is so seldom found. How would it be possible, if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labour be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.[/quote]
[quote=Friedrich Nietzsche]The greatest weight.-- What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you:
"This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?[/quote]
As I just said in another thread: Contra Nietzsche's maniacal howls, no this universe with its pain is not utopia. Again, maniacal embracing of what already exists isn't philosophy, its simply making do, at its utmost logical conclusion.
If you can't beat em, join em even harder, with more enthusiasm is just not knowing where else to go, and also a not-so-subtle "man-up!" philosophy.. Typical 19th century macho bullshit. How much stache does Nietzsche need.. Drinking his own kool-aid. Keep climbing those alps Nietzsche-pants.
No we're not. I know perfectly well what you meant. You said:
Quoting 180 Proof
I take it to mean that the striving in itself has a higher meaning.
If Camus means "rebellion against the gods" in terms of being against the fate- let's say via pessimism/antinatalism, that's one thing. His thing however, like Nietzsche, is to accept fate, and accept the conditions. Thus rebelling for him, means liking the bads and goods. That I can't get on board with.
Tough tits, man. You're already born. Either kill yourself now or carry on defiantly affirming (not helplessly "accepting") your/our pitiless condition. One way, of course, is to refuse to breed; okay, but that's only one way. Amor fati - and stop whinging vacuously about it.
:death: :flower:
See here:
Quoting schopenhauer1
I am new here.
I am 71 and it happens that I am a rational man whenever I looked for logical answers (scientific or spiritual) about my being and the world in which I was brought/forced to exist for a certain period of time. I used also the verb ‘forced’ because, to me in the least, the start of my temporary existence has nothing to do with what I may call ‘my will’.
Therefore, one of my crucial questions which I had to find out their answers at the beginning of my life (I mean, soon after being a teenager) was:
“What could happen to me after the death of my living body?”
Fortunately, I had the chance to get its best logical answer. This helped me continue my life in a rather stable balanced way.
Since English is my 3rd language, after French and Arabic, I hope I will succeed, while using my narrow English vocabulary, presenting here what I have in mind about death, 'my' death in the least.
]1] Naturally, the first idea, I had, is that when I will die, my dead body will lose all contacts with ‘time and space’ that define the world/universe in which my living body existed. I will also lose my personal will as well.
[2] Also I used hearing that for a human being to know what will happen to him in the afterlife, he has to die first!
[3] But, based on [1] above, I asked myself: “Didn’t I live the state of being dead?”
I mean; being in a state in which there is a total lack of time/space perception besides losing my will.
This happens, to me in the least, every time I am in a deep sleep.
In other words, if my body dies while being in this state it wouldn’t see any difference.
[4] The obvious next step was the analysis of what happens to me after being in a deep sleep.
I noticed that, sometimes, I find myself existing in what I may call ‘a dream realm’.
[5] And I am brought to live into this realm, also without my will and without knowing exactly how and when my existence in it started.
[6] While I am in this realm, I have the impression as if I really live; till I find out after wake up that it was just a dream.
[7] I also noticed that my dream life reflects, to a great extent, my life in the time/space realm.
[8] After every deep sleep, my living body is programmed to return me back into the time/space realm; till it needs to sleep again.
Conclusion:
{A} To me in the least, whoever or whatever programmed my living body to let me exist (be conscious) in both realms; the time/space and dream ones, is able to let ‘me’ exist in one of them only.
Please note that while I am sure of what I am talking about (being a designer myself), this doesn’t imply that you, the reader, agree on this.
{B} If I will, beyond my will as usual, be born and live in the dream realm after death, my dead body won’t be able to wake up and stop it.
{C} Based on [7] above, the dream realm would be ‘null’ if the person in question didn’t exist/live in the time/space realm first.
{D} Also based on [7], I try my best to live in a way that lets my dreams be as peaceful and joyful as possible. So I have had no reason, at all, to hate, judge or even blame seriously anyone I may meet or know. I even love those who are programmed to play my enemies so that I see them too as friends in my actual dreams and in the possible eternal one... Meanwhile, I missed having nightmares (which I had some when I was a kid due to lack of knowledge).
Wish you all having happy dreams.
Kerim