What happens to people after they die?

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I believe in a sliding scale after life.. from very good to very bad conditions depending on your own (the real you, not your ego) judgement of yourself, where we can progress into brighter and better conditions and not be stuck forever in the same place. Similar to the afterlife portrayed in Anthony Borgia's book, 'Life in the world unseen', which incidentally I highly recommend. I think we have also have the option to be reincarnated should that be our will. This is where I stand at the moment but sometimes I update my views..

I lean somewhat towards what I understand of Reincarnation.

It's not that the whole personality transfers to a new body with perhaps a kind of amnesia. It's more like their core spark of consciousness.

Now maybe that carries a trace of the person's essential nature or traits. Were they good or bad? Generous or selfish? Loving or hateful? Wise or foolish? In this way consciousness builds and grows more complex.

Sort of like succeeding generations of DNA as strands merge with other strands and over time evolve.

I should say this is not a concrete belief but a whimsical speculation I entertain as one possibility.

People often say that we "cannot know" what happens to us after death. But actually, I think that we do have some pretty clear evidence. The way I look at it is this. We have a physical brain, and we also have a conscious experience. Notice the correlation:

development of infant brain <----> beginning of conscious experience
hit your head <----> temporary loss of conscious experience
new neural pathways <----> forming memories
brain disease / trauma <----> change in personality, loss of memories
destruction of brain <----> ????????

I'm divided between the heaven/hell belief and reincarnation.
Too many fairly consistent reports of people seeing and/or experiencing things at the moment that they pass into death for me to honestly say that nothing happens.
Same goes for people that, while under hypnosis, have described life experiences that they did not have or couldn't have known about from their current lives.
I place a lot of faith in science but I also strongly believe that not everything, at least at this time, has a logical scientific explanation.

After a person dies he/she is no longer a person.

ruveyn

I don't think anybody knows for sure what happens to our spirits when we die, if anything, but one thing we do know, is that life here on earth is a dynamic, and continuous cycle, where living things are born, grow up, then die. This is repeated over and over again. Humans are just one small part of this cycle. Also, when something dies, it provides food and nutrients for the ground, and other living things, in order to maintain this cycle. One thing that seems backward to me, is how dead bodies get embalmed and buried in rot proof caskets. This disturbs the natural cycle of things.

IMO, heaven and hell are in all the worlds of God, including this one. However, the condition of the soul in the next world will, IMO, be the result of one's spiritual condition in this world.

SilverStar wrote:

So the mortuary industry can turn a profit under the pretense of sanitation or whatever else they've sold the lawmakers on.....
That's pretty much he gist of it regardless of any other arguments.
I can go along with having designated areas for burial and requirements governing grave dept for the obvious reasons but not much beyond that.
I find the idea of embalming and being forced to spend all that money on an approved casket and services to be invasive and just plain piracy.
Dying shouldn't be that expensive and invasive. Cremation doesn't set well with everyone, ether, so that's not always an option.

An angel?

Their body decomposes. During the brief period of death for the brain, what is left of the consciousness does its best to interpret what is happening (somewhat like how a dream is formed). This interpretation of random neuronal discharges is sometimes seen as a brief encounter with the afterlife in people that are revived, but it is no more real than a dream

A physical heap of rotting flesh. There are no angels.

ruveyn

I find this much more fascinating than thinking about fantastical things like reincarnation or "going to a better place". It's actually quite a moving thought, my brain chugging along as best it can til the very end. Such a trooper

When slain or weary of the world, the Firstborn find rest in the Halls of Mandos. However, Eru has not disclosed what will happen of the Followers after their death.

I think that is a very fine way to put it. However, this is still no certainty.

Non-nihilistic positions on life after death argue for a certain form of dualism, in which an immaterial soul is involved which interacts with its material body (and possibly vice versa). Now, this can't be proved, but it cannot be disproved positively either.

My answer would be: Impossible to know, but probably nothing.


As I understand it, decomposition starts after consciousness is gone.

Last edited by enrico_dandolo on 15 Jul 2012, 11:52 pm, edited 3 times in total.

If you accept that memories have physical cognates, then why does it even matter if your soul survives? If you can't remember who you were, it might as well not be you anymore.

I agree with all that you said. I would also say that "souls" don't add anything to the problem and are not necessary to explain human experience, and I don't believe that they exist at all. However, they cannot be disproved. What I said is that, because life after death rests solely on the continued existence of the soul, it cannot be proved that there is no life after death.

The exact details of a hypothetical life after death are also impossible to know, but not for the same reason.

Got me hungry!

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer