Exactly what will happen upon my demise

[DoctorTwo]

You will have noticed the title is a statement not a question. What is certain to happen is you lot and all this will cease to exist.

I'm not trying to be mean, but that's just the way it is.

C/P the post where anyone displays bigotry on this, Dione.

Grow some backbone and start backing up your vile insults, please.

sweeping generalisations like, 'you're all going to hell unless you believe in our god/book/dogma?'.

no, i'm not keen on those either.

Brilliant thread!

I am in bed unwell and this has kept me entertained for the last 15 minutes.

As an atheist I do not belong to any group or follow any set of rules regarding belief; I find the idea of a fundamentalist anti theist highly amusing (mentioned upthread)- to what doctrine do we adhere to?

I am free to agree with whomever I like and curlew and Numty have written some wonderful words on here. niminy, you are extremely erudite which is an indicator of intelligence, I don't agree with anything you have written but I like your style.

I must admit, it does make me chuckle a bit. All this pontificating about a fairy tale. I am allowed to laugh at religion because it is ridiculous. I used to feel angry but now I reserve that for the religionists that try to infiltrate my or my DS' lives, oh and whenever I read or hear about another atrocity committed in the name of some god.

Oh and Dione, oh dear. Bad day?

i'm amazed you understood my posts thecunk given i've recently found out i'm basically illiterate and impossible to comprehend

Maybe I'm just as ill-read and uneducated as you Numpty

Numpty I have been meaning to ask....can you elaborate on what you meant about omniscience...stretching the mind to understand/embrace it (paraphrased because I'm too lazy to scroll back and quote you directly).

I am very interested in omniscience (or the concept of it) at the moment. Been reading up about it.

hi hettie - quick answer (all i have time for but more later) is that religion makes god very small imo, re: they create god in the image of man. by their own logic it is actually blasphemous the way they project onto him/her/it. an all intelligent, all knowing being could not be as petty and small minded and lacking as they form him/her/it as.

if you spend a lot of time meditating, reflecting, working on one's own issues, aspiring to higher levels of consciousness and genuinely trying to be an ethical person and to remove much of their bias and cultural conditioning and ...... yada yada you have a taste of transcendence and true compassion and the reality of what pure open consciousness feels like. a god would have to be that taste and a million times more and that taste/flavour/glimpse is fuck all like the petty tyrant religions turn the ultimate consciousness into.

sorry that has probably clarified little and no doubt my incomprehensible writing style doesn't help

Hello. I've only read the first page so far, but I want to ask the OP - why is talk of an afterlife "bollocks"? Why do so many people assume that? What is it that makes so many people believe that the only things that really exist are those things that we humans can see and touch and hear?

This makes no sense to me on a scientific level. We routinely accept the existence of ultrasonic frequencies, which other animals can hear and we can't, the existence of other electromagnetic wavelengths, birds perhaps "seeing" magnetic fields in order to navigate by them, bats and owls navigating their way around by "seeing" sound, quantum theory even. I could go on.

Why is the concept of another type of existence, which we human beings (not necessarily all animals) happen to be incapable of experiencing in this form, such a nonsensical one to so many people? Just wondering.

i can't see atoms but i believe they exist. i can't touch clouds but i believe in them. please don't equate lack of religiousity with lack of imagination or ability to grasp abstracts.

My post below has nothing whatsoever to do with religion.

ok then replace the word religiousity with the phrase 'belief in life after death' in my post.

OK, then perhaps you could explain the distinction? I take it if you had lived a couple of hundred years ago you would most definitely NOT have believed in atoms?

And I wouldn't call it life after death either. Life and death are human concepts, defined by our present human experience.

As for end of life experiences, I have looked into this a lot recently (I'm recently bereaved so I'm not going to take this thread too seriously) and I was fascinated by the number of accounts I have found written by hospice nurses and the like, which really do suggest that some very strange stuff goes on during the dying process. It's made me think twice, and I am not religious. I think religion is merely a series of different attempts to explain the inexplicable (and impose those explanations on others).

"I think religion is merely a series of different attempts to explain the inexplicable"

Nope- that's science.

I believe that a conscious part of what makes us who we are survives physical death. I have no idea how that's possible, what it looks like, or where it goes, however.

And yes, I tell my children this, and that I believe in a higher power. This is the truth. To tell them anything else would be lying to them.

I think you're missing the point, gaelic.

Would I have believed in atoms a couple of hundred years ago? No, I wouldn't. And I would have been right not to do so. It is entirely illogical to believe in anything without justification - even if that thing much later turns out to be true. We either have solid reasons for what we believe, or we don't.

(Incidentally, atoms is a very bad example here. The history of their discovery goes back much further than a couple of hundred years - but I'll go with your analogy anyway).

You are confusing possibility with probability. Any scientist will tell you that, of course, it's possible that we survive death in some way - the question is whether, on current evidence, it's probable. And the answer to that is, no, it is not. It's is exceedingly improbable.

This isn't just because there's no evidence demonstrating it, but because all the evidence we do have (which is pretty massive) strongly, strongly indicates that death = the end of experience. Not quite the end of existence (depends on how we define existence), because our atoms will continue, and we are, after all, a walking pile of atoms - but our experience of "being" will almost certainly end.

While there's no solid understanding of what consciousness actually is, it's pretty well understood that it's an emergent property of brain matter. When brain matter has rotted into nothingness, how will consciousness continue? My voice is an emergent property of my vocal cords. When they are gone, what happens to my voice? It no longer exists. Thoughts and experience almost certainly go the same way when the brain goes.

Believing in life after death without good reason is, by definition, an unreasonable belief. And there is never any justification for holding an unreasonable belief.

If I find, after I'm dead, that I am somehow able to come back and spook my grandkids then that wouldn't mean that I was wrong not to believe this was a possibility while I was alive. Since I have no reason to believe that now, it would be unreasonable for me to do that.

I'd say they're two sides of the same coin. And I was about to say that the pursuit of science hadn't been responsible for killing millions. Then I thought better of it due to WW2. Humans will always fight and kill, no matter what lies behind it. But I do think that you can believe there is more out there than the everyday material world without being religious.

Xposted. There is a well known saying: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I am not aware of any evidence that positively proves that our mortal bodies and mortal consciousness are the sum total of all that exists in this universe or elsewhere. I'm aware of plenty that points to the contrary, including much of science. I would be genuinely interested if you're aware of any studies that objectively prove that?

Numpty

Yes, I get you...and totally agree. The gods that the major religions worship is stunningly banal and petty - a reflection of the people who invented and continue to worship him/her/it.

I would (being very black and white about these things) quibble over the use of the word "omniscience" though which I consider a logical impossibility for god or man - throws up all sorts of brain twisting paradoxes & contradictions (especially when it's teamed up with omnipotence & omnibenevolence).

But yes, if there's some kind of universe creating entity who brought all of this into existence (although I don't think there is) he/she can bear absolutely no relation to the ranting loon who likes the smell of burning human flesh and had himself sacrificed to himself for the mistakes that he made.

Understanding reality is the closest we could get to it - not making up childish, illogical stories.

There is a well known saying: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

And it's not a particularly good saying, is it?

If I said I had an elephant living in my bedroom and you came round and found no elephant, no elephant dung, no signs of disorder and a bunch of neighbours saying, "Well, we've never seen an elephant there", this lack of evidence would be good evidence that, in fact, there's no elephant living in my bedroom.

No evidence when you'd expect to see some is good evidence of absence.

I am not aware of any evidence that positively proves that our mortal bodies and mortal consciousness are the sum total of all that exists in this universe or elsewhere

Er....what? Of course our mortal bodies & consciousness aren't all that exists in the universe! Ever heard of planets?

What is "elsewhere" to the universe? Universe means everything. Something other than "everything"?

But you have completely missed my point. Doesn't matter what evidence we haven't got (that x is all there is) it's all about what evidence we do have.

Have you got evidence that there's more than science can say there is presently? That's the relevant point - not whether I've got evidence definitively saying there isn't. Course I don't - just like I don't have definitive proof that a pink and purple spotted unicorn called Harry didn't fart the universe into existence!

Oh, and possibility/probability are not remotely two sides of the same coin. They answer different questions.

Possibility is the chance that something is true - probability is the odds we give that chance of being true.

There is a possibility that Harry farted the universe into existence - but the probability tells us whether we should believe it or not.

Science and religion are two sides of the same coin. They are both human attempts to explain the universe.

Why does this argument always come back to religion and God? I don't believe there's a sentient being who created and controls all of the universe any more than some of you. People have always invented stories to explain the world around them. Hence the sun god riding his chariot across the sky, the pagan gods of nature, were all different stories invented to explain things which have subsequently been better explained by science.

Religious efforts to explain the events that occur around the time of death are at the root of the various stories that exist around heaven, hell, the underworld, and whatever else these concepts are called in other religions. All cultures observe the self same things and they explain them in their own way.

Please explain to me why exactly you would expect to see evidence in this consciousness of things that de facto exist outside of it? And assume you do know about the multiple universes theory? Have you given any thought to what lies beyond the known universe, what we are expanding into, etc.?

news.nationalgeographic.co.uk/news/2010/03/100322-dark-flow-matter-outside-universe-multiverse/

Sorry Dark flow

Sorry to go on, but picking up on the possibility/probability point. Where do you stand on the probability/possibility/belief in life on other planets?