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While, I have NOT personally experienced it..I HAVE over 3 decades of ICU/CCU/ER's who have been caregiving such patients who DID experience it! Those that got resuscitated did talk about their various experiences..
Because other than our efforts.. Vital signs were nada/zero Heart beating/O2 given via e-tube having pumped into lungs .. So going by THEIR personal experience .. I tend to believe them.. How could I say anything otherwise??
I, for one, would never suggest there is NOTHINGNESS once your human body no longer functions.
While, I have NOT personally experienced it..I HAVE over 3 decades of ICU/CCU/ER's who have been caregiving such patients who DID experience it! Those that got resuscitated did talk about their various experiences..
Because other than our efforts.. Vital signs were nada/zero Heart beating/O2 given via e-tube having pumped into lungs .. So going by THEIR personal experience .. I tend to believe them.. How could I say anything otherwise??
I, for one, would never suggest there is NOTHINGNESS once your human body no longer functions.
Me too. I believe there is something, that our consciousness survives. But exactly what, we will never know. My husband passed last year and I always ask, "what are you doing right now". But I will never have that answer.
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.
Good, entertaining and clever, or at least informative posts. I might just add my own sideslip comment on 'The atheist afterlife' (incorportating the reverse Pascal's wager). It goes like this:
There probably is no god(s) and no afterlife, but, even if there is, you can lay a sure bet that no one religion has the concession for tickets to the afterlife - that is no more than a scam to keep bums on seats and the money rolling in, and you can bet your life that any afterlife is not in the the power of any god to hand out or with-hold and is as natural as birth and death and something that we ALL get - no matter what we did on earth.
Nature only cares about eating, reproducing and survival. Morals is Man's invention. The Cosmos never heard of good or Bad. That's a fact of life, and our job should be to get a just society here, not rely on Perfect divine justice dished out after Pol Pot died, blandly lying about his guilt.
So if there is an afterlife, it's one that we all get and it is nothing to worry about. Hellthreat is RIDICULOUS, and if you take my word for nothing else, take it on that.
So the way the bet works is - if there is no god and no afterlife, then you should live this life to the full as it is the only one you get.
If there is - then it's the one that everyone gets and is Nothing Whatever to worry about.
So God -belief gains you nothing, but loses you the one life you got. The smart money goes on non -belief.
Nice to see that I consciously or unconsciously, managed to SLIGHTLY move you from your hardcore Atheists position, and now you are moving away from certainty in the belief of Atheism towards the game of probabilities.
While, I have NOT personally experienced it..I HAVE over 3 decades of ICU/CCU/ER's who have been caregiving such patients who DID experience it! Those that got resuscitated did talk about their various experiences..
Because other than our efforts.. Vital signs were nada/zero Heart beating/O2 given via e-tube having pumped into lungs .. So going by THEIR personal experience .. I tend to believe them.. How could I say anything otherwise??
I, for one, would never suggest there is NOTHINGNESS once your human body no longer functions.
You may be interested in this study, and responses by other scientists to it:
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??????
Actually, I'm not so sure that's true.
I mean, why go to a paradise where you have to punch a clock and work all day?
Unless working is your idea of utopia, I would imagine most people would want a paradise whereby they can indulge in their former hobbies, travel, do things they couldn't do in life, and set parameters for things like, "I won't ever get bored of doing this" or "the friends I bring to my paradise won't do what they did in life, which is to find a lover and then abandon me and all his/her other friends."
We could even explore other eras of history, perhaps live in the Roman Empire for a few months or perhaps even BE the emperor.
I will agree that, at some point in a person's afterlife, they will want to experience what it's like to be a king or a billionaire blue-blood.
But in a utopian paradise, would you want to have a functioning economy where you have to keep earning money in order to do the things you enjoy? And then having no time to do those things anyway because you have to work all the time and only get one or two weeks of vacation every year?
Nah.
Actually, truck driving might be an appealing thing to do for those like me who enjoy the freedom of the open road, not being stuck in a cubicle or chained to some factory machine all day. Of course, I wouldn't want what destroyed the appeal of trucking -- which is GPS tracking. Now it's like having your boss in the passenger seat during your whole trip with even your bathroom breaks pre-planned and timed. Nah, I would get rid of that in my truck driving utopia!
But that's what I mean about a person's desires -- you just never know what might be appealing to some and horrifying to others.
This is also why I said earlier that only people of good moral character would end up in Heaven -- because without that, you could have rapists whose idea of paradise is having plenty of women to rape without any consequences. Or Hitler wanting to rule the world -- and getting to do just that -- while making the Jews extinct. Because people will be people even in your paradise, thus, any harm you would do to others would be real. In other words, people wouldn't be holograms or astral projections or some such. They would be real. Of course, in Heaven, people would have to be able to exist in more than one place simultaneously.
That way, for instance, I could have my best friend in my Heaven ... and my best friend could have me in his Heaven simultaneously.
I've always been very critical of the Jehovah's Witnesses on this point (the afterlife).
In most of the Watchtower pamphlets I've received seems to show JWs engaged in farming! And not with tractors, combines, irrigation sprinklers, and any sort of modern technology. No, no, they were in the fields toiling away with hoe and plow. Of course, they were wearing khakis and polo shirts with their hair neatly parted to the side -- gotta have that "Young Republican" haircut for some reason -- but they were still toiling away in the fields as if it were the Dark Ages. The father and son were tilling the soil with a hoe while mom and daughter were dutifully gathering fruit from the trees. I mean, wait, we have to EAT in the afterlife? And wait, wait .. wasn't the entire idea of having to farm a punishment for Adam and Eve's disobedience? So does that mean said punishment even follows us into the afterlife?!?
Yeah, to me, the JWs version of "paradise" looks pretty bleak, to be honest ... and I loathe khaki clothing. Nor will I be caught wearing a dress while I'm out harvesting fruit. If there was ever an occasion to get some lulz from an afterlife, there it is.
I said to a friend "I wonder what it's like after you die?" He said "What was it like before you were born?"
Gene hoping.
I think my genes will hop right off of this earth and spiral though the fabric of space until they land on a magical planet full of peace light and love.
Nope, its as silly as asking what did you think before you started thinking.
Yes, it Is silly - that's the whole point.
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