What does God have to do with religion ? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Fantasy isn't really the thing to validate anything with. Where ? Reread that post.
:mPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image! yet you want us to believe that you are familiar with all religious claims sufficiently enough to have credibility when you deem them as fantasy Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! golly I didn't mention religion yet you somehow took the liberty of mentioning it Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I see currently four think: "Dead people remain able to watch their loved ones from the "other side". " Does "fact" that your mother is watching you (or ex-spouse if dead) cramp your style, especially your sexual behavior?
I believe in life after death..... in that you can fart or defecate, and your fingernails will grow for a while or so I've heard..
What the hell is "death", is it when I see an animal that isn't moving or breathing and with flies all over it? Sorry, I can't conceive of this thing unless I look outside myself at "dead things"; I can't, somehow, manage to connect this external reality with any internal pov, that includes that internal pov and the eternal "reality". What do I do now?
That's not an animal. It's the matter that used to be organized in such a way as to comprise an animal. Now it's just a pile of rotting tissue. When it's a human we call it a "corpse," but that's just a polite word for a rotting pile of tissue like "breast" is a polite word for a mammary gland. "Death" is the cessation of life. It's something that happens and then it's over. It's not a condition. What we call "dead animals" are not animals in a certain condition, they're piles of rotting tissue. The same goes for what we call "dead people." After you die, you're not "dead." You're not anything. You don't exist. Rather than saying "He is dead," it would be better to say "He has died." To say "He is dead" makes it sound like he still exists and is merely in a different state than the last time we saw him. This problem is a linguistic accident. "Dead" was originally the past participle of "to die." Some verbs used to form the perfect tense using "be" as the auxiliary verb instead of "have." We still have a few archaic instances of that, such as "Joy to the world, the Lord is come," instead of ". . . has come." So to say "He is dead" was merely the grammatically correct way of saying what we now would phrase as "He has died." Somewhere along the way we began using the past tense of die, "died," as the past participle, normalizing it to the standard English paradigm, and we began using "have" as the auxiliary verb for all perfect tenses, except in Biblical quotes. So we began saying "He has died" instead of "He is dead." But at the same time we began to regard "dead" as a condition rather than a completed action, so "He is dead" came to mean "He is in a special condition that people achieve after they have died." There is no such condition, this is just a fantasy provided by religion. To say "He is dead" is to unconsciously buy into that fantasy. It's better to say "He has died." That's because there is no internal POV. You have to exist in order to have an internal POV. Death is the cessation of existence. We do indeed talk about "dead things" as a shorthand way of referring to rotting piles of tissue that used to be "live things." It's just another way of saying "meat" or "offal," depending on whether the culture you belong to considers it edible. In America a sheep's stomach is offal, but in Scotland it's meat. In both places it's a piece of a "dead thing." We also sometimes use "dead things" to refer to inanimate objects that were never alive to start with. I think that just makes more confusion so I don't talk that way. "Non-living things" is much more precise and scientific. I don't understand. What are you trying to accomplish? Death will happen whether or not you understand it. Once you cease to exist, none of this will matter to you anymore because there will be no more "you." If you're trying to understand death, it's rather simple: First you're there, then you're not. Like a house that's been knocked down by a wrecking ball. The bricks are still there, but the organization of the bricks that made them comprise a house is gone. Your tissue will still be there, but the organization of the tissue that made it comprise a human being will be gone. When you die, you're not "dead." You're nothing. Literally.
Thanks, Fraggle, that's a quite reasoned exposition, on the very subject. Although your response to my closing query, an attempt to rationalise this thing you say cannot have an internal point of reference, in essence speaks to the (mind-boggling) factoid that "we are information". Because when we "die", it's the same amount of information, but now it's being processed differently, is all.
Very interesting informative post Fraggle. You probably know already but speaking of "dead things" I think it was Shaw (a strident vegetarian) who defined a fork as a common tool, used to place pieces of dead things in the mouth.
My POV exactly. We are ONLY information.* This MAY (by making us non-material) open an escape from the control of natural laws over our every thought and action. (I.e. may make Free Will possible without either violation of the natural laws or postulating a "soul."): For for more details, and evidence supporting this non-standard POV. See: http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=1294496&postcount=52 It is a long read, about 8 pages if printed. ------------- *I also hold the strange POV that we cease to exist whenever in deep dreamless sleep.
I experienced life after death on 10/29/04. I died and was shown the complete afterlife and the big picture. I'll start a new thread to answer questions.
I believe that after I die, I will immediately be reborn into a new body with a new imperfect ego (keeping my same "spirit", my pure consciousness). This will happen for all eternity, so that I may never again feel the pure meaninglessness of existing as an omnimax being. So that I can feel hope and terror and love. However, I'm not allowed to believe this, by definition, so my ego kicks in, and I'm just another Atheist who believes that when we die and our brains (the seat of our egos) rots, then our egos cease to exist.
I don't believe in a LIFE after death, only an existance. You wouldn't be alive physically, only mentally.
Don't know for certain. I know what I'd like to believe, but we'll know for certain when the time comes.
i came across this: "Man come back to life after 45 days..." “Honey, I love you and I wish you could hear me.” But then, the Rusts say a miracle happened. Kevin shook his head up and down.
the only difference i know of is if you come back to life you were clinically dead and if you dont...you are dead.
There are three ways to go about this question from my point of view. You can either take the eastern view - there is no "I" - there was never anything that was born, therefore there's nothing there which can die. Or to look at it another way - there is a process, something in this process wound itself down, but there is nothing much to worry about, since there's always something else in the process to 'wind itself up'. Or you can take the empiricist view - this is tricky because human experience reports both a sense of 'life after death', some sort of bardo state inbetween (in which you almost appear to be in munchkin land) and a complete absence of a persistence of experience after death altogether. The most compelling evidence for life after death in this sense, is probably the work of ian stevenson. Stevenson manages to establish both a regular patter of these experiences, the pan-cultural nature of the phenomena, and that past-life memories; particularly from small children often tally up remarkably well when you start looking at things like medical records. Best evidence against life after death is probably the hypothesis that NDEs are simply the brain in free-fall. Problems: speculative as hell, evolutionary function of these mental states? And NDE reports that seem to suggest genuine knowledge of surrounding environment (Pam Reynolds would be a good example). I think the third approach to this subject would be one that questions our commonsense view of temporality. In this sense, questions like: "what happens after we die?" become virtually meaningless. There is no 'after' and there is no 'before' once youre dead because there's no brain there to order reality into linear sequences. On this view, at the point of death time simply 'reverts' back to containing all events simultaneously. In other words, since experience doesnt 'go anywhere' and time doesnt 'lose' events, from a certain perspective youre still alive. Note: Vonnegut seems to have had a similar idea in his book 'Cat's Cradle' in which the alien species in the book dont look upon death as anything to get particularly depressed about because they exist in the 4th dimension - so seeing someone dead on the floor simply elicits the response: "this person doesnt seem to be moving much at this particular point in their life, but from another vantage point they seem perfectly well".
Personally, I do not believe in an afterlife, and have never quite understood why most other people do. It has always seemsed to me that Death is life's only real guarantee, and as such, requires no action or concern on my part, it will come. If I live life fully and well, why would I have any need for an afterlife? Life is enough.
