To want to believe in life after death

[Jezebell]

Part of me really wants to believe in this. Part of me is cynical. I’m still grieving but comforted a little by hearing anecdotes where people’s lost loved ones visit somehow, in any form… Can anyone give any personal stories where they feel this might have happened?

Interesting take on Heaven. What makes you think Hitler or a murderer would be there?

I think it needs to be looked at scientifically, like @MrsTerryPratchett and I firmly and absolutely believe this. My son is a Doctor of Science and I sent him that post and he agreed.

We attribute things we can get our heads around to it to help explain but we are creations and are derived from the universe. We are just stuck in this 3D life whilst we are alive

If you believe in ghosts but not an afterlife as such, what do you think they are?

Sorry, that was @YanTanTetheraPetheraPimp

The night my mum died & after we had gotten back from the hospital, she came to me took my hand and told me all was ok, she’d been very ill for a number of years but she was whole again. It felt so real, I’m not sure if it was my mind playing tricks as I’m not a believer of ‘ghosts’ in any respect but it did give me some comfort

Who knows what happens when we pass away?
We all have our opinions but we don’t actually know and like another poster said earlier, if there is a heaven then it will be pretty busy.

I would like to think that I will see my mum and dad and my husband again when I am no longer here but who knows?
Its the unanswered question .

I would like to believe in an afterlife, even if it feels like wishful thinking.
I would like to think I'd see friends and family again.
Mostly I crave some kind of understanding / explanation for why things happen the way they do, why some people die tragically or commit suicide or don't seem to get a fair 'roll of the dice', and others live into their 90s.

Tennyson describes bereavement and grief as leaving us feeling like "an infant crying in the night / an infant crying for the light", like whatever you thought was 'God' has abandoned you. And I sort of dream of somewhere where the reasons for whatever we've been through in life are explained to us.

I think heaven as your own space.i don't no how, but I don't see it overcrowded.its your own endless space with whoever is there for you.

To quote Dumbledore, "Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light".

There is plenty of room in the heavens. Jupiter alone can fit 1300+ earths inside it and an exoplanet 9 times the size of Jupiter has just been discovered. Only around 107 billion souls have ever lived and there are approximately 100 billion planets in our galaxy alone - more than enough to go around! Having said that, Heaven is not located in this Earthly world, but in a different dimension altogether.

To answer the question of animals, they have the breath of life, not a soul like humans have. On their death the essence that gave them a unique little personality returns to creator God. He holds the 'blueprint' for them all, including your beloved pets. It is my firm belief that these will be reborn on the new earth and we'll be reunited once again. As for babies (aborted/miscarried/unbaptized, it doesn't matter) their souls automatically go back to Heaven, are given new spiritual bodies and taken care of by the angels and family members already passed. They get to grow up in a place more beautiful and perfect than we can possibly comprehend.

You don't have a soul, you are a soul and have a body.

What a sad life this is if we don't believe in life after death!

All the unfairness of this life! Our profound existence reduced to just the rat race of this life, imagine!

Your question is a very good one and I really suggest you to keep looking for an answer even outside Mumsnet till you find a very satisfactory answer.

If time and space are ultimately illusions then why not?
I don't see the afterlife as a very crowded mansion full of humans doing human stuff.
That said I have no idea what it would really be like.

Well that's a fair point actually - I wasn't really thinking that through - I think I was thinking more about an afterlife in general. But you still might have to see people you didn't like.

I don't think you would feel the same in Heaven. The little irritations and annoyances of every day life will be absent. Bob from down the road who keeps forgetting to take his bins back in; not a problem anymore. In fact you will see Bob in an entirely new light. Heaven is free from death, mourning, crying and pain with no concept of earthly time as we experience it.

@whatislove123 I wholeheartedly agree 👍🏻

As for the soul, this from Chabad.com puts it beautifully.

Last line reads '...Can even feel it. And at those moments when you feel your soul, you will feel your brother's soul too'.

I see afterlife as where your soul goes, your very existence, to join up again with the closest people who left before you, whilst you wait for those coming after you.
I see it as like going home.

What a sad life this is if we don't believe in life after death!

I don't believe in any kind of anything after death, how does that make my actual life sad?
My life is here and now and I'm living it, why should I want there to be more?
I really hope there's nothing, just an end, a release of energy and done.

What a sad life this is if we don't believe in life after death!

That's pretty patronising. My life isn't sad - I think the fact (or my belief, anyway) that our time is finite makes it more precious.

I don't believe in life after death and I have a perfectly happy life thank you very much.

I don't think people have a sad life if they don't believe in life after death. I do think though if they feel certain there isn't an afterlife they are narrow minded.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion but they cannot be certain

The fact there might not be evidence or proof of an afterlife does not mean it does not exist. There are undoubtedly gaps in our understanding of physics and how the universe was created - the fact we don't fully understand something doesn't mean that it isn't/wasn't real.

By the logic that only demonstrably proven things are real, the world really used to be flat because it wasn't proved otherwise. It was nonsense to suggest someone could sail off in one direction and eventually arrive from the opposite point of the compass, because nobody had done it.

Equally wrong of course is to assume that because we want something to exist, it does. The fact is there is no proof of an afterlife at the moment, nothing concrete, because nobody who has truly died and not been resucitated has come back to life to tell us.

Ghosts might exist. They might be conscious entities, they might simply be shadows burned into the material fabric of the universe at some point in the past (just like the shadow of the guy at Hiroshima, a shadow burned into the ground by an atomic blast to save countless lives by bringing forward the Japanese surrender in WWII.) It might also be that all time exists simultaneously, and that ghosts are just echoes from a different time in the past or the future that are being shown in our own experience of time, bounced or twisted through physics we don't understand.

We just don't know.

Afterlife believers instinctively assume it's a benign, even blissful environment, but what if it isn't?

I'm content in my acceptance that there's no reason to think one exists, perhaps in no small part because of that possibility.

What a sad life this is if we don't believe in life after death!

No, yours is the sad mindset. You've robbed yourself of seeing the fleeting beauty of this existence because something better might be just around the corner.

Do you think people who are certain there is one are also narrow minded?

@SleeplessInEngland I respectfully disagree. I don't take life for granted because 'something better might be just around the corner'. This life is a wonderful gift and should be lived to the full. I think the point whatislove123 was trying to make is to not believe in life after death is to live without hope. What is the point of a life spent racing about or climbing the greasy ladder of some corporate company or the constant collection of material 'stuff'. There's no prizes for being the richest person in the graveyard.

As for there being only a blissful or benign environment waiting, I don't think that's true either. For those people who have chosen to inflict pain and misery on others, turned a blind eye to suffering and lived only for themselves it will be the polar opposite. To use a quote from Meet Joe Black; "Make no mistake, should you choose to test my resolve in this matter, you'll be looking at an outcome that will have a finality that is beyond your comprehension and you will not be counting the days or the months or the years, but millenniums in a place with no doors".

It's not going to go away because you don't believe in it.