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before you incarnate in a physical body, you are planning your life and the things you would like to do to grow and advance and become more kind, generous, and compassionate in how you treat others, using your free will to choose how to respond to the situations that you will face in your upcoming life.
after you die, you review your life and see how well you did in making those choices using your free will.
based on what you "learn" in reviewing your life just finished, you then decide whether or not to incarnate again, and if so you plan your next incarnation.
I give it a 50% chance there is an afterlife and 50% not. But if there is one no way do I believe we plan out our lives beforehand. Can't you just see Hitler going before the council and saying "I want to wipe out 6 millions Jews" and the council giving their approval? Or someone saying "I want to die of starvation and dysentery in Africa before I'm one" or someone saying "I want to live a life so miserable that I'll decide to commit suicide at the age of 25" or someone saying "I want to die in a tsunami when I'm 5 so I can hurry back here". I mean the whole thought is simply ludicrous.
What I believe is that male and female spirits have sex and produce little baby spirits who then are shipped down here into human babies who just got born. Isn't that as rational as the idea we plan our lives beforehand?
I said to a friend "I wonder what it's like after you die?" He said "What was it like before you were born?"
When you die, you experience the worst pain of your entire life along with panic, fear and terrible torment, far worse than you can even imagine was possible. Then suddenly you experience a total orgasmic release of everything negative within you, followed by a sensation of passing through a dark tunnel towards a bright light that is full of feelings of love and inclusion.
Then you wake up nekked on a table surrounded by bug-eyed aliens and find out your entire life was just a simulation.
I think maybe our subconscious has a big part to play in this, if we have hatred or guilt in our hearts when we die, maybe we sort of create our own 'hell'.
Whether we admit it or not every one of us on here has a 'worst case scenario' they have imagined in their head, relating to what their afterlife will be like. I have a fear of confined spaces, so my absolute worst case scenario of hell, would be buried alive or something similar...and since I am already dead, anything is possible in that sense, my own consciousness could 'create' this reality. (btw, this is really scary to me!I hate thinking about it).
My other thought is the afterlife may be NOTHING, and I mean, NOTHING like any of us anticipates! It could be so bizarre and different than the mental image we have, our minds could not even make sense of it.
before you incarnate in a physical body, you are planning your life and the things you would like to do to grow and advance and become more kind, generous, and compassionate in how you treat others, using your free will to choose how to respond to the situations that you will face in your upcoming life.
after you die, you review your life and see how well you did in making those choices using your free will.
based on what you "learn" in reviewing your life just finished, you then decide whether or not to incarnate again, and if so you plan your next incarnation.
That's ridiculous.
In fact, this view of the afterlife even sounds like an excellent preconceived justification for victim blaming - something that right-wing Christians have down to a science (in as much as they actually believe in science, that is).
"Why should we spend taxpayer dollars on programs to help the poor, sick, and disabled. They put themselves in that position when they planned their lives -- those people were leeches and parasites on society even before they were born! To hell with them (literally)."
Or ...
"No WAY should we allow a woman to get an abortion even if the pregnancy was caused by a rape. Obviously she planned her rape AND her child before she was even born, so obviously she wants that child. At the very least, she wanted to get pregnant just to have an abortion! Yeah!"
And believe me, there are people out there batshyte crazy enough to think that. In fact, the county poorhouses we used to have before FDR initiated a welfare program were predicated on this idea. Living in a poorhouse was akin to living in a prison -- those places were deliberately made to be godawful to live in so that the able-bodied would be heavily discouraged from shirking work and living in one.
As for the sick, disabled, and the impoverished eldery -- those who had to live in a poorhouse through no fault of their own, well, they must be there for a reason. Obviously that reason was sin. God is punishing them by putting them in a poorhouse because, you know, they planned it this way before they were born! So there's no reason to make life any easier for those people!
When I look at my own life, I can guarantee you that I did not, nor would I have EVER, picked the way things have turned out for me. I'm not growing or accumulating wisdom -- and there is barely anyone left in my life to be kind, generous and compassionate toward! All of my worst fears are coming true, all of my dreams are ashes and rubble ... and being in pain all the time, yeah, I guess that was my highest ambition.
I can see it now:
Random Soul: "Okay, I'm done planning my life now."
Life Planning Coach: "But, uh, I only see one page there ..."
Random Soul: "That's right. I want to be born in Namibia during a horrible famine. I want to be that child in that infamous photograph ... the one where he's doubled over on the ground with a bloated stomach and spindly arms and legs, dying a horrible death by starvation. And nearby is a vulture just waiting to feast on my corpse. YEAH! My life is going to be awesome! Though I will die at age four, and all of those years will be spent suffering from malnutrition, viral diseases due to contaminated water, HIV thanks to Catholic missionaries who told my parents not to use condoms AND all the while living in a nation ruled by vicious tribal warlords, so if I did live to be at least nine years old, I would be forced into servitude to one of those warlords, brainwashed and tortured, then handed an AK-47 before I go out and kill a bunch of innocent people for being members of a rival tribe! C'mon, this is going to be outstanding!
Think how much wisdom I'll gain. Think of all the compassion, kindness, and generosity I'll deliver as I hose down a refugee encampment with 7.62mm bullets!"
Nah, I don't buy it.
"Why should we prosecute those Catholic priests for all the raping and molesting they've done? They were just doing what the victim wanted them to do!"
Which brings us to the next problem. If someone planned their life to be molested by priests, does that mean he has to wait until someone else says they want to be a priest who molests little kids? Or does some poor sod end up becoming a child molester more or less against his will because there's a kid out there who wants to be molested by a priest?
The problem with "planning" your life in the way you describe is that it requires a whole lot of people throughout your life doing exactly what you want them to do -- whether their acts are good or evil, doesn't matter.
Considering the complexity of anyone's life -- even those whose lives are relatively simple -- it would be damn near impossible for there to be a massive crowd of people who all just happen to want to do the very same things someone else wants them to do.
"I want to be gay, and I want to have a 7th grade math teacher who hates gays and fails every assignment I turn in. Then I want a dog that likes to chase his tail even when he's old, and I want him to get hit by car on my 9th birthday. I want a mom who smokes Camel cigarettes, wears flouncy skirts, and listens to Lawrence Welk songs while in the bath tub. My best friend will weigh 297 pounds but kicks ass at Call of Duty and he's read all of the Robert Jordan books, he'll wear glasses, loves Speghetti-O's, and grows up to be an alt-right evangelical who ends up hating me because I'm gay. My neighbor will be this hottie who likes to undress with the lights on and the curtains open ... and her bedroom will be directly in line with my bedroom! The cashier at the local grocery store has a crush on me and loves to give me free stuff, then she steals the missing money from someone else's register and THEY get in trouble for coming up short. And ... and ... and ..."
The trouble is, waiting for just the people I mentioned to all fit the bill for this ONE person's life means it is terribly likely that SOME people aren't getting the life they planned. SOME people would have to be acting against their will. Because some plans will be so specific, so detailed that the odds of there being all of these people -- right down to people he/she might only see once -- who match exactly in appearance, personality, and in actions are so incredibly astronomical that it makes the Christian odds of evolution seem like a certainly by comparison.
Since we know precisely nothing about what happens to us when we die, we are free to invent thousands of speculative theories and possibilities -- none of them being any more plausible than any of the others.
Though I'm reasonably certain that it isn't what religious believers think it is whereby paradise is some exclusive little club that only accepts those who worshiped a specific god.
What I would like it to be is a paradise of my own construction. I certainly DO NOT want the afterlife being eternal servitude to a despotic tyrant which is what the Abrahamic religions seem to believe.
What's interesting about religion-inspired afterlives is how detailed the visions of Hell are while Heaven is kept deliberately vague -- and there's a good reason for that.
When you're making up a religion, it's easy to describe Hell because there are things which are universally loathed and feared; those things can be included in any description of Hell and everyone will agree that existence there would be, indeed, hellish.
However, it is far more difficult, nigh, it is impossible, for one singular place to represent paradise for everyone simply because human likes, desires, and preferences are all over the place. Some are even quite bizarre. There's just no way to describe a Heaven that everyone everywhere will find desireable. This is why Hell is so vividly described while Heaven is simply left open to interpretation. However, this does stand as evidence that the Bible is a complete fabrication.
For a utopian paradise to work effectively, it would almost have to be as I decribed it. We get to create our own afterlives -- we decide the setting, the people who will be in it, the things we do, etc. etc. It will be a lot like the holodecks from Star Trek, in fact.
Another thing I find interesting is how what little we do know about the afterlife coincides precisely with what someone living in the Bronze Age would find appealing. In other words, Heaven is NOT timeless. By today's standards, Heaven is obsolete ... and has been for centuries. In fact, not only is it obsolete, the decriptions are written entirely from a man's perspective.
For instance, I believe it was in the Qu'ran where I read about Heaven being this place with rivers of wine and beautiful women everywhere. That is the kind of primitive paradise that someone from the Bronze Age would like to see -- as well as useless things like streets paved with gold.
Of course there is no mention of handsome men everywhere for the women to enjoy -- and women apparently do not receive any male virgins when we arrive in Heaven. To me, at least in the Islamic faith, women will be almost as oppressed and subjugated in the afterlife as they are in the real world -- put here to please men.
And I'm confident that, should an afterlife exist, it isn't limited to Bronze Age pleasures nor is it there to be a pleasure club for men.
I also don't believe the afterlife will be at ALL about "serving God" ... because there's just no reason for it. An all-powerful God doesn't need servants running around doing his bidding. Moreover, we're already in Heaven thus ... we've made it! Ergo, there is no further need for God to "test" our faith by giving us tasks to perform or challenges to overcome.
Finally, I don't believe that anyone of good character will be tossed into some ridiculous fiery pit simply for failing to believe in the right deity or because they died too suddenly to repent for those last few sins. Assuming the afterlife has anything at all to do with a God, it won't be as the Abrahamic believers envision Heaven.
Atheists, for instance, will not have a trap door open up under their feet through which they plummet into Hell for their lack of faith. If this God, assuming there is one, is truly good, just, fair, loving, and forgiving as the believers continuously claim, then this God will understand perfectly why we did not believe and understand that his own holy book is the number one reason why believers become atheists.
We cannot help who we are and what we believe -- in fact, it can easily be argued that God created our brains to operate in precisely the way they do, making it virtually impossible to take things on faith, to believe in something so completely and so passionately without one single shred of good evidence showing why we should believe in it at all.
A good and just God would never punish us for being who he made us to be to begin with.
I have quite a few theories about the afterlife, and I try to make those theories based on certain logical truths, but even with that, my theories are as speculative as anyone else's -- including those of the Bible's authors. If I even outlined them here, I will have written another long post that SOME people obviously don't like.
If we really got to choose we'd all be kings or billionaire blue-bloods. Can you imagine schmucks choosing to be a truck driver slaving to support an alcoholic wife and 5 delinquent kids??????
Your friend is a wise person, because that is exactly what it is.
How do you know that?
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