Is there life after death ??

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I think it's more beneficial to believe we carry on in some form than to think it all just ends.

How could it be more beneficial to think death is the end?

Why believe in false things?

Dead is dead.

ruveyn

I had an NDE as a child and while for some it's a paranormal experience, for me after the physical trauma of the event the light began to fsde and I felt really good and then everything went black. No dreams or anything. People who discount my experience usually say even though I was a child I was still a Jew and that's why, or I wasn't dead long enough, or I just blocked out the memory.

That happened before I really understood that some people believe in souls and so on, but I think that it is directly related to why I never wondered if there is anything after we're dead. I think I only asked my Bubby(who was an atheist, even moments before her own death) were things like did people REALLY believe that and WHY, and she usually told me people are afraid of things they don't understand and they have a poor concept of the world outside of their own life etc. Usually, and I can't blame her entirely because her family all died in concentration camps, she said that most people have an easy time believing in anything that makes their life more bearable even if means belieing other people deserve pain and suffering.(hell, is what she was talking about, I didn't understand being told by anyone that I was going to be burned for all of eternity)

Belief in life after death is reassuring to the individual and doesn't really cause any harm.

I believe in ghosts, but not Gods who throw people into torture chambers. The torture thing is too material and physical.

I agree. It's also imperfection(BIG understatement) and cruelty. I'm going to assume that if there is a real god, it probably doesn't care what humans do or don't do. Why it would have created the universe with the big bang, I wouldn't know. I consider the existence of a god or gods to be a possibility but do not know for sure and will not pretend to know.

I think its possible that there may be more of the same. Its probably not overly better or worst than what we have now if mind does re-manifest or recycle itself. I don't really believe u get sent to an eternal torment or eternal bliss that you'd remain in forever, just because of the laws of homeostasis. Things tend to blend balance out in nature, and I don't see why the psyche would be any different. Its beside the point though. We need to live whatever moment were given with passion and wisdom and not worry so much about the past or the distant future.

How is it false? I thought you reject the question as nonsense? Dead is just what we call it because we don't know if we know better.

Yes, I do believe that if I where to die today, say by committing suicide, there would be life after death. Though I am quite sure that it wouldn't be my life (the whole point of my last act). As I see it, death (to phrase it in existential terms) is the negation of life. To say that there can be life after death appears to me as a contradiction in terms. And if by "life" we mean not a biological process, but rather a state of consciousness, then it becomes a question of what consciousness actually is. Well, if consciousness if a function of the brain, which is part of an organism, then I don't expect there to be "life" after death.

"Death is the cessation or permanent termination of all biological functions that sustain a living organism." - That's according to Wikipedia, one of the few digital phenomena that acts almost organically and is close to being omniscient.

The citation above is a simple definition of death, it's the scientific answer, the rational thing to believe. As far as I know we are such living organisms. The trouble is that we are conscious living organisms, we are aware of our own immanent death. The fact that we can think about death can make life unbearable.

I too have the tendency to fabricate illusions when confronted with the prospect of my own death. I have never felt so strong a desire to kill myself as when I considered things rationally. Therefore, even though I disagree with many forms of religious thought, I must declare my solidarity with those that conjure up fairy tales.

Here's some bad medicine from Cioran: “If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.” - Spiritual answers? Stupid. Effective. Give me one, for I feel like s**t right now.

I don't believe in afterlife, as mental processes can't occur after death of brain cells.

There is no logical reason to believe that anything happens after death.

After you die you probably just decompose in the ground and become food for some plants and insects and that is probably the end of the story.

My argument is simple: there is not sufficient evidence to believe in an afterlife, so we ought not to.

The idea of an afterlife dates back to antiquated notions of a "vital spark", "spirit", or similar nonmaterial substance or energy which was supposedly responsible for animating living things.

But modern science has shown that life, including humans, operate through complex chemical reactions, and does not need an extra vitalistic "thing" in order to function. Bacteria do not seem to need souls in order to move about; nor do venus flytraps, jellyfish, squirrels, golden retrievers, or humans. Rather, our bodies move and function through physical and chemical processes.

Per this process-based view of life, the idea of an afterlife (i.e., some place for the "spirit" to go after the body it inhabits has shut down) is similarly antiquated.

When a computer ceases functioning, we do not imagine that its software is spirited away to some heavenly programming paradise; we see no problem with the idea of that software simply "blooping" out of existence, so we should likewise have no problem with the idea of the mind just ceasing to exist when its "hardware," the brain, stops functioning.

So is there life after death? I think the answer has to be no.

http://www.thekeyboard.org.uk/Is%20ther ... 0death.htm

Of course there's life after death. Worms are alive aren't they?

Do all of you lack the ability to believe what is beyond reality? You can't prove it wrong, even if you can't prove it. Have any of you denied Satan's existence? You have to acknowledge your enemy before going to battle, in that sense, why are you not bashing on satanism all the time like Christianity, the two both believe in the same things, yet one serves evil and the other God. If you are going to critique us, critique us both by all means. Atheism is the state of disbelief, the fact atheist can't ignore us or stop talking about ghosts or arguing about God when they say they don't believe is odd in the least descriptive way. Why are atheists even bothering to answer if they don't believe?

And yet you resurrected this old crusty dead-thread to argue your point.

I think you should revise your question to mean "is there CONSCIOUSNESS after death" in which it would be a more accurate question which would in turn get more accurate answers.

Because there IS life after death, depending on what you mean by life. Cellular life still exists in various states after the heart stops beating or the brain stops firing synapses. Organic matter still exists but may not exist in a system as a unified, complex organism. The energy or glue that holds it all together does get dispersed. We do not know much about parallel universes or near-parallel universes or multiple universes and how they may even coexist in our conscious or unconscious realm and what that means in the wider picture. Human beings are the most arrogant of creatures. They do think they will at some point be able to know everything, which to me is a pretty ridiculous assertion. So life after death? First you will have to prove that time exists in a linear fashion in order to even start answering that question. And I don't mean you should look at your digital watch when you answer that question.

I don’t believe in such a thing as life after death, but I wonder what exactly happens to your consciousness when you die. During your whole life, there’s never a “gap” from your point of view: you fall asleep and, next thing you know, you either dream or wake up. The same happens when you lose consciousness—your memory is always a continuum in which you were always conscious, as if the periods in which you were not had never existed. People suffering heavy physical damage which rendered them unconscious for a long time have reported to experience the same, some even resuming at the hospital the motions they were previously making as soon as they woke up again. It’s impossible to know how our consciousness came into being, because we have no memory farther back than a certain point in our early childhood. For all we know, it could be the same consciousness that at some point experienced the life of another living being, and we can’t know, because memory definitely isn’t preserved beyond the death of the brain cells it was encoded in.

In fact, none of us can even know if other people have a consciousness just like our own, or just behave as if they did (philosophical zombies).

Oh, and I do think belief in an afterlife can be very harmful, because it encourages wasting the only true life we are sure to have.