Ask Your Question today
This life is unjust and consists of mostly suffering. Why would anyone expect the afterlife to be different?
I think religion is a tool created by man for peace on earth. ..and they created a hell of fire to persuade.
I think what one expects from the afterlife depends on what one believes with regard to religion.
I also think I need more information about you, your life, habits, religious beliefs, and how you view yourself to try to make sense of this.
I was a Christian as a teenager but lost faith after I realized the how little sense it all makes. I think the super natural may exist but no current religion has the answers. I also have always have a deep sense of dread about the future.
I am ok with that if in after life I have to serve beautiful cruel goddesses
i believe if there is a power of evil in the world there is an equally powerful power of good.
Well, the stereotypical image of hell is a horrific torture dungeon where you’re burned with fire and stabbed with pitchforks and forced to suck demon dicks for all eternity. That doesn’t sound like the world we live in, does it? If the afterlife was as bad/good as this life, I think we’d be a hell of a lot better off than what hell “supposedly” is like. Lighten up :)
Not everyone has a miserable life, the world isn't only evil, its a mixture. It is you who have some problems personally. Dont know what your main problems are, but hope you find a solution/things get better.
nah bruddah, I goin to heaven when I dye wit yung megan fox suckin me off 24/7 dawg :3
I don't know if there's life after death, but I'm bringing along a change of underwear just in case.
well why is the idear there & so commonly discussed if its so unbelievable?
Wishful thinking combined with egotism; it's human nature to believe deep down that we're a vital component of the cosmos, and we all want to believe that our existence isn't limited to the few years our body is alive.
As a contrarian, I believe many people are too dumb to realize their own woefully low ability to recognize logical reasoning. Some people are able to work the mathematics behind the astronomical permutations of chemical events in abiogenesis, as well as recognize the very simple rules under which randomness gets us from accretion in planetary formation to our present biosphere. This demonstrates that we are nothing special. And, also that a few of us have proved to be intelligent enough to recognize that this recognition in itself is a satisfying accomplishment.
I'm with you Booj. The universe is cold, empty and indifferent. I'm happy about that reality because at least it's real (not existentially absurd). Warning: my mindspace isn't for everyone. Clunk42 please take note.
I think a big part of the problem is that the vast majority of people (including myself) have problems really grasping the absolutely enormous numbers involved in describing the natural world.
You've probably heard the parallel used before, but I only recently heard someone in a YouTube video using the number of seconds in various periods of time as an aid to understanding. So:
A thousand seconds is 17 minutes (Easy enough to grasp.)
A million seconds is 12 days (Hmmmm... okay.)
A billion seconds is 31 years (Say what?)
A trillion seconds is 31,000 years. (Damn!)
This came up in an atheist YouTuber's critique of a video by a creationist, where they pointed out how the bible-thumper constantly referred to evolutionary biologists saying that all living species had evolved over MILLIONS of years, when in fact it's estimated that life first arose more than 3.5 BILLION years ago. Creationists - especially young-earth creationists - are fools, but it takes a rare sort of blinkered ignorance to get the numbers behind what they consider their competing theory wrong by a factor in the hundreds or thousands.
And while we all would like to believe that we're super-special, the fact is that we're not. First, more than 100 billion people have ever lived and around 8 billion people are alive today, so we're all just a single face in a vast crowd. Then there's the fact that there are around 100 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy alone, and it's very likely there either are now, have been or will be other intelligent species (who quite possibly each consider themselves super-special too) on planets orbiting thousands or even millions of those stars.
Expanding the view, there are about 2 trillion galaxies (so, a count equal to all the seconds in 62,000 years) in the universe. Each of those will contain around 100 million stars, and so there will be vast numbers of planets in the Goldilocks Zone in those galaxies too.
It's simply absurd to believe that the deity in charge of this whole shebang only got around to letting humanity know about his existence a couple thousand years ago, and this omniscient being chose to do so via a bunch of blood-thirsty, barely-literate sheep- and goat-herds in an arid, backward corner of the Middle East. (I mean, if an omniscient deity really wanted to make a splash so humanity would bow down and worship his needy ass, he would know that the time would come when a huge proportion of the world's population was walking around with a device that allowed instantaneous audio-visual communication in their pocket.)
It's even more ridiculous and narcissistically egotistical to believe that this deity cares enough about individuals to punish and reward them for what they do during a lifetime that would be less than the blink of a hypothetical eye for such a hypothetical eternal being.
Well, take heart buddy. What you lack in mathematics, you have compensated for by using common sense. Just a couple of loosely related points of interest.
1. Large numbers are best grappled by using powers of 10. Adding exponents to multiply is simple. (2 * 10^12 galaxies times 10^11 stars per galaxy is 2*10^23 stars).
2. Evolution has programmed people to over estimate small probabilities. In fact, Statistics is the branch of Mathematics with heaps of counter intuitive theorems.
3. I am regularly accused by philosophy majors of obnoxious ignorance for failing to accept that the certainty of God could only by expressed by an infinitely long number.
I respond by saying the number of milliseconds since the Big Bang is only 1.044*10^23. Certainty beyond that point is irrelevant. And, assert that their philosophical pedantic attitude is what’s obnoxious. (They don’t appreciate my straw man.).
Anyway, check the chapter in your daughter's algebra book on permutations, combinations, and factorial functions. It’s easy reading that is absorbed quickly. Your daughter might enjoy using the material to help support her Dad with quantitative arguments. I have found that kids can be nice people sometimes.
Are you referring to the pirates character? I’ve only seen the first movie and that was a long time ago. If you are referring to the Monkey I doubt he would ever say anything like that!
Naïve children believe in Santa Claus; the Israelites of biblical times believed that breeding animals in front of striped sticks produced striped offspring (Genesis 30:38-42); there are a couple of communities in Vanuatu who worshiped the late Prince Philip as a living god; there are people who are certain that there are minute alien lifeforms in Covid vaccines. People have always believed all kinds of really stupid shit, and we're all prone to fall into the trap of allowing our wishful thinking to delude us.
maybe the petty absurdity of this life is payment for petty misdeeds of a past life
That makes just as much sense.
I'm pretty sure there have been (and may well still be) religions which held that we are, in fact, living in hell right now. That's a pretty grim doctrine, so it wouldn't appeal to many. On the other hand, holding the threat of hell over the heads of people is a damn fine way of keeping them in line.