No need to test it. It's easy to believe it's there, simply because a lot of faiths have an afterlife. Christians get harps, muslims get virgins, some get reincarnated... They can't all be right, so at least some of them must be imagining it. Hence - easy to believe. I'm not interested in proving that you can't "see" an afterlife actually, as it has no relevance to my point.
You cannot point at planet Earth. Whatever you point at, it will be "a patch of grass", "a rock", "soil" and such, but not planet Earth. That does not mean that planet Earth is untangible, it is just that it is too big for our usual notions of tangibility, and so additional concepts are required to understand something as "planet Earth". Similar with, say, protons, or bacteria, which are on the other end of the spectrum, being so small in proportion to our usual experience of things, and so additional concepts are required to understand something as "protons". "God" and "afterlife" are, per definition, out of the range of our usual experience, like planet Earth or protons are out of the range of our usual experience, so in order to understand them, we need additional concepts.
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That doesn't really matter does it? It's easy enough to make up new stories about what the afterlife is. You can even make up ones that contradict eachother (I'm sure they do already) so that you have two beliefs that have mutually exclusive afterlives.
You didn't answer my question. You seem to think that there can only be one, uniform answer to everything, regardless of time, place and circumstance.
I don't need to answer your question. I'm not arguing that there is no afterlife. What I have been saying all the time is that, ASSUMING that there is no afterlife, the belief that there is one, could be used as a defense mechanism against fear of death. Again... Just to make myself perfectly clear. I'm not arguing that there is no afterlife. It's not relevant to this particular discussion.
or alternatively The answer is that some people want to believe that there is no reason why we exist other than a simple accident. They want to believe that we create our own purpose, with nothing superior to it - for some gross materialists, this brings comfort, for others it doesn't.
Or they remain curious and keep asking questions, instead of accepting ancient tomes as the universal truth?
What is there to question? You have accepted ancient philosophy as universal truth, though it may not be presented in the form of books. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cārvāka http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/atheism/history/ancient.shtml Nothing has changed, and nothing has been added' The modern atheist is expounding an ancient philosophy. jan.
No one takes Epicurus or Lucretius on faith, not even themselves. They expound on their process of reasoning in great detail. And in modern times, the atomic theory has proved more or less correct.
The belief that God does not exist is taken on faith. Expounding anything which cannot actually be known, as true, is based on faith. The atheist philosophy, worldview, dogma, religion, whatever you want to call it, it based on faith. jan.
