What do you think happens when you die?

[mintcorneto]

I genuinely interested in people's beliefs. I've been thinking about it a lot recently and despite always being an atheist, I still believe the soul lives on and is around the people you loved and that loved you. Maybe I'm more open to religion that I previously thought. What do you think happens?

I think that you do live on after death. Some people refer to that as your soul, although I don't. I believe that every good thing you ever did lives on as does every bad thing. So after your death you are still influencing those that you knew in life.

My hatred for my mother is very real and in that respect she still influences me . I hear her acid tongue constantly and vow never to be like her. Her vileness is a tangible thing to me.

My dad, who I adored, but who died young governs the way I live my life. I have raised my children as he would have wanted. To me he lives on through them.

So to answer your question, although your physical body is dead, your essence lives on for eternity, through others.

@Robin2323 That was beautiful

I don't believe in heaven, but I do believe in the Rainbow Bridge, even though I know it's bollocks really. But part of me does believe that I'll meet up with the souls of the non-human animals I have known, and then we'll just stop existing.

Nothing.

We cease to exist except in people’s memories.
I don’t like the idea of anything coming after death.

When you die you go to sleep! When the world ends everything will be revealed their will not be one thing hid we will all go to our destination another new earth or heaven if we have been true and know that our Lord Jesus is our saviour.

When the world ends everything will be revealed

Fantastic. Looking forward to it. Only a billion years to go before we find out if any of the thousands of documented gods exist.

You fall asleep and don't wake up. Your consciousness dies with you. The only way you can be said to have "lived on" is by helping other people during your life and them having positive memories of you because of it. However, people can also harbour unhappy or negative memories of you: I don't know why people always forget that one. In short, your death is sad for the people who love you, but meaningless in every other way.

And the flaw in your " physicist in the pulpit at a funeral" speech is that it provides no comfort whatsoever to tell a bereaved widow that she will never see her much loved husband again.
It is cruel and despicable to set oneself up as an authority on death, in direct opposition to no less a person than Jesus Christ, to promulgate your own belief in atheism (and it is only a belief, you cannot prove God's non existence) in order to hurt people who are already suffering.

I'm glad the idea of Jesus gives you comfort. But the idea that my atheism in some way is designed to hurt you/other bereaved people is and bizarre and narcissistic.

Belief either is or isn't. And I don't 'believe' in atheism. Any more than you 'believe' in not being a Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, Animist, Pagan, Hindu, Jain, any other religious person. You're practically as much of a nonbeliever as me with one exception. You are presumably setting yourself up in direct opposition to Zeus, Mohammed and Ra.

That eulogy gives me comfort. You can take comfort where you find it, without what I do being a direct insult to you.

@babdoc You realise that what gives you comfort isn't neccessarily what gives other people comfort, right?

Your heart stops beating.

absolutely nothing. No reincarnation or spirits living on - I can see why people would want to think that, but I think there's just blankness, peace, nothingness, zip, zilch, nada.

I’m going to be a tree.

I think our soul lives on. When my grandfather died (at the same time as dying) he appeared in my parents’ bedroom to say goodbye. My mum saw him and said that it looked as though he were a normal solid human. I asked her if he spoke and she said not. I asked her why she wasn’t weirded out by it and she said it just felt very natural. She’s not one for woo or nonsense. That’s not the only family story of seeing someone just at or post death. I think we have an energy that we can’t explain properly yet.

I hope that it’s right that we live on in some form. I would really, really like to see my brother and my son again.

When I was little I was convinced that when I died and was buried, I'd then grow from the ground into the trees berries, the birds would eat me then the foxes etc etc until I was born again as a baby.

Unfortunately I don't really think this now but it must have given me some comfort, no idea if I made it up or someone told me.

I really don't want to believe in reincarnation. Imagine coming back and future generations of politicians are still arguing about Brexit .

@NeedAnExpert

Thanks for posting the Tim Minchin link. I hadn't seen it before. Very clever and very funny.

On the science and religion point, to quote a renowned professor of cosmology:

'There is only one conclusion - God is intrinsically in physics. God is in the universality of laws.' Prof Carlos Frank, cosmologist.

Or to quote Stephen Hawking:

"There is a fundamental difference between religion which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works."

I believe that we’ll be with God, just as Jesus promised.
The physicist quote is thought-provoking. If I was going to have a physicist speaking at my funeral, I would have this one Alister McGrath

Probably there will be nothing but I love the idea of Heaven and I even more love the idea of Rainbow Bridge. I'll see what happens when I die I guess!

Love the physicist quote. That's going in my "book of quotes" for when I die and come back as a tree. (Which is my current preferred funeral option. Though by the time I get there the "green" option might be to be dissolved in alkaline solution along the lines of Years and Years.)

Recently I did some translations for a guided meditation company and several of them were about black holes and white holes, which got me thinking. Along the lines of the film Interstellar.

I do believe that no energy disappears; it mutates, it transforms, but it does not disappear. And who's to say we don't end up in a different part of the multiverse, perhaps on the other side of a white hole.

I do also have a strong belief in reincarnation and karma, but the multiverse/white hole theory isn't necessarily incompatible with that. I do think if people understood how karma really works they'd be a heck of a lot more careful about their thoughts and actions...

I would love to believe that our souls live on but I just don't. I think when we die, we're done.

Really interesting thread; and intriguingly, one of the most spiritual individuals I ever met was a quantum physicist. He was especially interesting because he took an extremely scientific approach to something which we cannot, as yet, prove in a way that our current Establishment will acknowledge or accept. A bit like the Earth going round the sun, or electricity, or carbon monoxide before we had efficient ways to prove the first, or harness those last two.

And I always found Carl Sagan's views fascinating.

Nothing. I saw my dad dead and he was just a shell. Like a scraped out taxidermy version of himself. Infact his face didn’t even look like him.

Where he lives on is in my memories. In the conversations that I have with my mother. The stories I share with my kids. He has gone though.

You live on in the memories of those you leave behind which includes how they go on to live their lives and in the ways you influenced the world before you died.