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No reason to stress over this. Life is short, try to be happy and maintain peace of mind. Develop healthy and good family and friend relationships and maintain an active life to keep yourself distracted. If there is something after death you will find about it. If there is nothing but unconsciousness and cessation of existence for eternity after death, well, at least you will be incapable of experiencing this lack of existence. And sure there is the option to be cryogenically frozen, but of course most people can't afford or are unwilling to go through this.
This thread is interesting to me in that many posts in it seem to illustrate something I've noticed for a long time regarding atheist/agnostic thinking.
When the world is accepted as a place with either no god or a mostly irrelevant god/spirit/metaphysical force, many atheists and agnostics will say "life is good" and they understand not wanting death to be the end. The world is a good place despite its massive faults, and life is great despite its massive hardships.
However, when talking to a theist, many of the same people with that outlook will shift gears and focus on the faults and hardships of living in our world. This just seems to typify the convenient shifting between the two outlooks for the purposes of ideological expediency.
It's also interesting to me how agnostics often tend to lean to the side of atheism despite professing to not "know" that a metaphysical/spiritual/god exists. It's part of the convenience of slipping in and out of atheism for such people. I find it to be more intellectually dishonest, at worst, or wishy-washy, at best.
A perfect example is the OP, where he professes to not "know" whether or not there is an afterlife, and in not knowing, comes up with 2 conclusions:
1) there is no afterlife -- in which case, I won't be aware of anything, or
2) there is an afterlife of some sort -- in which case, it will be a cool new adventure. The only thing that scares me is the idea of a long, painful, protracted death, because I'll be alive and aware that the life I loved is over, and that it's all downhill until the end.
So in not "knowing" if there is or isn't an afterlife, only 2 conclusion can be reached? If I didn't "know", I would come up with many more options, like...
3) There is an afterlife and those who rejected Christ as God are going to be punished for eternity in hell
4) The "afterlife" is really a new life that one is reincarnated into
5) Being dead is horrible because the brain senses everything as if you're a live but has completely shut down as though you are a vegetable, and you are left with nothing but your thoughts for eternity in a box
6) The afterlife is a passing of our souls into another plane from where we have some limited interaction with the physical plane, i.e. we become ghosts and have some ability to interact with the physical world
7) When we die, infidels are not given a good place in the afterlife compared to those who served Allah well
8) When I die, my spirit will enter into another entity - maybe a wolf, maybe a tree, maybe a rock, maybe another person, maybe the sky, maybe the earth...and when I die from being a tree (or whatever I was), my spirit goes into something else, etc.
9) The "afterlife" is when I wake up in a vat of fluid that has kept me alive in the REAL world, where the programmers of the Matrix explain to me that my brain has had their program running in it and nothing I knew in that world is real, and now that my real body is near real death they're just going to throw me in the ocean to drown, and then I'll have another possible afterlife to worry about unless the matrix programmers figured out a way to prove there is no afterlife in which case I'll just die
10) When I "die" I actually wake up in a huge stadium and find out that there is no such thing as "death" but that it is part of an initiation into a world of immortals, where they put on an elaborate "world"-wide play for new initiates, and everyone in my life was really an actor putting on a huge elaborate play to teach me things as well as for their own entertainment, and in reality there is no such thing as "dying" but rather it was all part of the elaborate storyline written for me.
I could come up with a LOT of other possible scenarios, some horrible, some great, some interesting, some boring...the fact is, if I were truly "agnostic", and truly did NOT "know", then I wouldn't select 2 possibilities that seemed the most palatable and dishonestly tell myself "well, either a or b will happen". So, as I see it, most agnostics are not entirely honest about their agnosticism but simply use it as a way to hedge their atheism.
My point is that this type of thinking illustrates and strongly supports the fact that atheism and agnosticism where God is denied are very much a matter of choice, a rejection of God and the spiritual, as opposed to being a belief that people are compelled to hold due to some kind of objective preponderance of evidence.
Oh boy, you got us REALLY GOOD! It took a lot of writing, but man, did you expose us!
It's all over now guys, little Johnny has figured out our big secret - we actually DO believe there is a God, but we just don't like him very much. It's just like it says in those little tracts sweet Johnny hands out in front of his church: We atheist believe in God, but we have chosen evil over good because we like evil more! (admittedly, it's a lot more fun!)
(I assuming dear Johnny is talking about the real God, and not one of those funny hindu jokers.... you'd have to be a fool to belive any of those silly stories. Johnny's God is 'fer sure the real deal. All the other ones are just stupid fairy tales.)
Oh boy, you got us REALLY GOOD! It took a lot of writing, but man, did you expose us!
It's all over now guys, little Johnny has figured out our big secret - we actually DO believe there is a God, but we just don't like him very much. It's just like it says in those little tracts sweet Johnny hands out in front of his church: We atheist believe in God, but we have chosen evil over good because we like evil more! (admittedly, it's a lot more fun!)
(I assuming dear Johnny is talking about the real God, and not one of those funny hindu jokers.... you'd have to be a fool to belive any of those silly stories. Johnny's God is 'fer sure the real deal. All the other ones are just stupid fairy tales.)
It's always amusing to hear people act like they know you better than yourself, isn't it?
It's amazing how wrong some people can be and not even realize it.
if people can undersdtand that life comes from life and not from a bunch of chemicals that decided to explode- then you will see that we came from an eternal world
if people can undersdtand that life comes from life and not from a bunch of chemicals that decided to explode- then you will see that we came from an eternal world
[citation needed]
Where did all this straw come from? No doubt to your ignorance of organic chemistry. What does that have to do with a "guy in need of God?"
This thread is interesting to me in that many posts in it seem to illustrate something I've noticed for a long time regarding atheist/agnostic thinking.
When the world is accepted as a place with either no god or a mostly irrelevant god/spirit/metaphysical force, many atheists and agnostics will say "life is good" and they understand not wanting death to be the end. The world is a good place despite its massive faults, and life is great despite its massive hardships.
However, when talking to a theist, many of the same people with that outlook will shift gears and focus on the faults and hardships of living in our world. This just seems to typify the convenient shifting between the two outlooks for the purposes of ideological expediency.
It's also interesting to me how agnostics often tend to lean to the side of atheism despite professing to not "know" that a metaphysical/spiritual/god exists. It's part of the convenience of slipping in and out of atheism for such people. I find it to be more intellectually dishonest, at worst, or wishy-washy, at best.
A perfect example is the OP, where he professes to not "know" whether or not there is an afterlife, and in not knowing, comes up with 2 conclusions:
1) there is no afterlife -- in which case, I won't be aware of anything, or
2) there is an afterlife of some sort -- in which case, it will be a cool new adventure. The only thing that scares me is the idea of a long, painful, protracted death, because I'll be alive and aware that the life I loved is over, and that it's all downhill until the end.
So in not "knowing" if there is or isn't an afterlife, only 2 conclusion can be reached? If I didn't "know", I would come up with many more options, like...
3) There is an afterlife and those who rejected Christ as God are going to be punished for eternity in hell
4) The "afterlife" is really a new life that one is reincarnated into
5) Being dead is horrible because the brain senses everything as if you're a live but has completely shut down as though you are a vegetable, and you are left with nothing but your thoughts for eternity in a box
6) The afterlife is a passing of our souls into another plane from where we have some limited interaction with the physical plane, i.e. we become ghosts and have some ability to interact with the physical world
7) When we die, infidels are not given a good place in the afterlife compared to those who served Allah well
8) When I die, my spirit will enter into another entity - maybe a wolf, maybe a tree, maybe a rock, maybe another person, maybe the sky, maybe the earth...and when I die from being a tree (or whatever I was), my spirit goes into something else, etc.
9) The "afterlife" is when I wake up in a vat of fluid that has kept me alive in the REAL world, where the programmers of the Matrix explain to me that my brain has had their program running in it and nothing I knew in that world is real, and now that my real body is near real death they're just going to throw me in the ocean to drown, and then I'll have another possible afterlife to worry about unless the matrix programmers figured out a way to prove there is no afterlife in which case I'll just die
10) When I "die" I actually wake up in a huge stadium and find out that there is no such thing as "death" but that it is part of an initiation into a world of immortals, where they put on an elaborate "world"-wide play for new initiates, and everyone in my life was really an actor putting on a huge elaborate play to teach me things as well as for their own entertainment, and in reality there is no such thing as "dying" but rather it was all part of the elaborate storyline written for me.
I could come up with a LOT of other possible scenarios, some horrible, some great, some interesting, some boring...the fact is, if I were truly "agnostic", and truly did NOT "know", then I wouldn't select 2 possibilities that seemed the most palatable and dishonestly tell myself "well, either a or b will happen". So, as I see it, most agnostics are not entirely honest about their agnosticism but simply use it as a way to hedge their atheism.
My point is that this type of thinking illustrates and strongly supports the fact that atheism and agnosticism where God is denied are very much a matter of choice, a rejection of God and the spiritual, as opposed to being a belief that people are compelled to hold due to some kind of objective preponderance of evidence.
A perfect example is the OP, where he professes to not "know" whether or not there is an afterlife, and in not knowing, comes up with 2 conclusions:
1) there is no afterlife -- in which case, I won't be aware of anything, or
2) there is an afterlife of some sort -- in which case, it will be a cool new adventure. The only thing that scares me is the idea of a long, painful, protracted death, because I'll be alive and aware that the life I loved is over, and that it's all downhill until the end.
So in not "knowing" if there is or isn't an afterlife, only 2 conclusion can be reached? If I didn't "know", I would come up with many more options, like...
I'm not the OP, but since you're quoting one of my posts in response, I'll grant that you got me on a verbal technicality, but not in terms of what I meant. Sure, I can come up with a bazillion other possibilities, too, but as another poster pointed out, they would be, like yours, all variations on possiblity #2. For the sake of technical accuracy, here are my two conclusions:
1) There is no afterlife -- in which case, I won't be aware of anything, so there's nothing to worry about.
2) There is an afterlife -- and since I have no idea what it might entail, I'm not going to worry that it might be hell in some sense, any more than I worry about the possibility that I might be hit by a truck tomorrow and suffer permanent brain damage, or that I might ingest some rare parasite that makes me blind, or that I might [fill in the blank with other horrors of your choice].
In short, I don't know for a fact what happens after we die, and neither does anyone else. The only reason I entertain possibility #2 is because I've heard of and read about enough convincing stories of ghosts, NDEs, and reincarnation for me to unequivocally say that every last one of them is a fabrication, a misinterpretation, or a false memory. Some skeptics take the approach of, "Show me a mechanism by which these things could happen; otherwise, I'm going to assume that none of them are true." I take the approach of, "There's enough convincing-sounding anecdotal evidence for me to think that there might be a mechanism by which these things could occur, and quantum physics theory offers possibilities from a scientific standpoint, but until and unless such a mechanism is explained, I can't call myself a believer in the sense that I claim to know for a fact, as so many people do." My problem with "received knowledge" (or whatever you want to call it) is that different people claim to know different, contradictory, and mutually exclusive "facts." Each claims that received knowledge is valid -- and each claims that everyone else's received knowledge that contradicts theirs is wrong. So all you have is one person's word (no matter how sincere) against another's. Science, at least, has objectivity: "Here's what I found in my experiment. If you do the same experiment, you should get the same results. If you don't, then one of us obviously did something different -- in which case, let's figure out what happened and keep at it until we get a repeatable experiment with consistent results."
well thats not my problem but yer man says that hes in need of a God- hows he gonna find the awnser off an atheist who dos'nt beleive in Him
dobeable,
As the guy in need of a god, I can tell you that I'm almost assuredly not going to find him, god. Essentially all the evidence of there being a god is in, and it isn't enough to convince me. For some folks it is sufficient evidence, but it isn't for me. Yeah, I might come upon a potato chip in the vague image of Jesus, or an oil stain on a parking lot that somehow looks like someone's version of god, but these things still won't be enough. I'll assume that they are just strange bits of happenstance, and not signs of an almighty.
But I'd like to believe in god. He could give me an afterlife, and that would be very comforting. But with the current evidence, combined with my own powers of logical thinking, I just can't believe. And that's the paradox and the reason for the thread.
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