Ask Your Question today
I was told after you die there is nothing, like before you were born there was nothing? so after you die there will be no more desires, happiness, or pain? do you agree?
If we didn't exist before, and we don't exist after, then how do we know we even exist now? What we call life could be just a hallucinatory blip in the eternal continuum of our nonexistence.
Just think about that the next time you're high.
Or just look at the stars one night and realize how pathetically small we are and how meaningless everything we do actually is.
You mean wonderfully free? If everything we do is meaningless then everything is meaningful because it's all there is in our experience and if you feel pain and joy then you can see there is in fact meaning, because these experiences are real everyone feels them so the more people that feel joy the better
It all depends on where you go when you die. We can all have are beliefs, but truthfully we won't really know until we go. It's a mystery.
I struggle with this one too.
Every religion says they are right,
only them.
Everyone else is going to hell.
But is that logical?
Ive known really crappy 'christians'
'Catholics', 'mormons','muslims' etc.
And really nice, best friend youll ever have athiest.
So, is god gonna let
hitler ' catholic '
Romney 'morman'
Trump/ bush ' christian'
Into heaven.
But tell Prince, Robin Williams, etc
to go to hell?
Neuroscientist here. I'm going to give you a couple of explanations, some of which are more science-fiction than fact, but bear with me:
Religious perspective
Let's start with the obvious: the religious perspective. Many (if not all) religions focus heavily on the concept of an afterlife, with emphasis on your mortal deeds as a way to gain entry into a particular post-death realm. The Abrahamic religions (i.e. Islam, Christianity, and Judaism) all speak of an afterlife in God's new Earth (interestingly not "heaven"), and many religions of antiquity (Greek Mythology, Ancient Egyptian Religions, Buddhism, etc.) do the same (Note: Some describe the "afterlife" though as reincarnation). As many other users have pointed out, these religions likely arose from a human need to explain the world around them in such a context that would give otherwise unexplainable phenomena meaning and purpose. We as humans vehemently reject the notion that life could be spontaneous and due to chance, doesn't have a purpose, or is due to something we can't explain or understand. This is why many early religions of antiquity have names for star constellations or supernatural explanations for them or other celestial objects; before we knew much about the Earth's place in the universe, we had to give them a purpose.
The most interesting of these explanations to me is the sun in Egyptian mythology. They believed that the sun was a god, named "Ra", who would each night descend into the underworld to do battle with Apophis. When he was victorious, he would reemerge in the east to once again light the land of Egypt. Another interesting example is the coming of winter and spring in Greek Mythology. Like the sun god Ra, the Greeks believed that winter was due to the goddess of vegetation, Persephone, going to be with her husband Hades in the underworld. When she would return to Earth, springtime would once again emerge and things could grow.
Neuroscience perspective
Unlike the religious perspectives, modern neuroscience does not provide any scientific evidence to suggest that your conscious existence (i.e. "you") persists beyond death (known as "eternal oblivion"). This is because there has been substantial evidence to suggest that the mind (how you think, feel, and express yourself) and your brain/body are heavily intertwined and inseparable from each other (called "monism"). How you think, feel, act, interpret, and respond to the world around you heavily relies on how the neural circuits of your brain are setup or adversely affected by trauma or drugs. If the mind and body were separate, why would alcohol cause you to act differently or affect your ability to store memory? Why would patients act differently after a trans orbital frontal lobotomy? Why would pharmaceutical drugs affect your emotions?
There are a lot of specific examples of how the way people think, act, and feel can be altered by brain changes or trauma. The most notable example is Phineas Gage from the 1800s, who had a tamping iron go through the front of his skull and destroy much of his prefrontal cortex. He survived, but acted very differently after the accident than before (his friends began to treat him as a whole different person, e.g. "he's not phineas anymore"). Other examples of brain changes altering how someone acts are, but not limited to, brain development changes seen from your teen years into adulthood (the frontal lobe isn't fully developed until 21-25), hemispatial neglect (patients ignoring half of their world due to parietal lobe damage), intoxication (how people act when they're drunk), split brain patients (perceiving the world differently when the corpus callosum is cut), and so on.
If we accept the premise provided here, that the brain and mind are inseparable, then the logical conclusion is that when the brain dies upon death, so does the mind.
Physics
Here's where things get interesting. When you die, we've already established from the neuroscience perspective that your brain and mind (i.e. "you") also dies. It ceases to exist. But, if the multiverse or "Multiple Worlds Interpretation" of quantum mechanics is correct, and there are other versions of you that DIDN'T die, are you still technically "alive"? Is the other version of you, you? What if technology were sophisticated enough to recreate your brain (every neuron and every synapse exactly in the right spot) in virtual space, so that the "virtual" you thinks, feels, and acts like you. Is it you? What about the energy stored in your body while you are alive? Given the first law of thermodynamics, energy cannot be created nor destroyed, so could you consider the energy that leaves your body upon your death "you"? What about 4th, 5th, or 6th+ dimensions? Do you exist in all of them, or somewhere beyond the 3 dimensions we know and understand? What about time? If, say, someone were to figure out a way to move through time (just as we do in space) and "meet" you before your death, wouldn't that classify you as "alive" but just locked within a particular window of time?
You can see how, even given our most sophisticated understanding of the universe, there are still some gray areas in which you could possibly still exist. So whether you continue to live, exist, think, feel, or perceive is a matter of interpretation depending on who you ask.
People have died and been resuscitated with cardiac defibrillators. They talk about their death experiences. It appears that there is something after life. Read this -> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience
That’s what I believe personally. No one can really prove or disprove the afterlife. But it’s more likely that than anything else.
Well, I believe that that is true for the time that you are dead, which the Bible refers to as sleeping sometimes.
However, after that, I believe we'll be resurrected, "some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt."
Personally I dont believe in any religions. The only thing I can believe in are my own experiences with hauntings and spiritual happenings. I think we go someplace after we die. We might go to heaven, or into the sun which is the source of all life. We might be reborn as someone else or someTHING else. Too many possibilities. I often wonder if maybe life is hell, and you have to do right by others and be kind and loyal and all that good stuff and if you do right by everyone around you, you'll be accepted into another higher place. And if you dont, you get reborn back into hell to start all over again, till you get it right. That would be why people are progressively getting worse at being human. Just a theory, like any religion or afterlife. I hope that wherever I go, I can be with the people I love.
The same way your physical body lives in that house. Your soul / energy lives in your body. When the body gives up ( death) the soul carries on.
After a while we are reborn into another family, in a different culture, you will get drunk again, have fun, children again, back to HS again and so on.
Stay away from that foul that preached you that crap.
Yes before we lived there was something. A mother cannot conceive if she is not fed any food. The food nourishes her then nourishes the fetus.
No. The point where we were conceived was a beginning we had.. as far as we know... remember we weren't conscious about it, though we had a beginning there and we know that because science tells us. Now we may have had a beginning somewhere in creation much before that and we don't know. That's a possibility.
As regards life after death, everything has a meaning. Even photosynthesis going on in a small leaf, has meaning. Your emotions, your complex brain, all your life experiences... if we go back to nothingness after so much, it's way more confusing. It's not possible. This life has to lead to something. Imagine. People born, living a life and dying, and going back to nothingness in a small planet in our universe. Doesn't make sense. Afterlife's a reality. You don't need to be religious bigot to get it.