What are your beliefs on an afterlife?

Question

Do you think there is a heaven and/or h**l? Some other plane of existence? Are you afraid of the unknown aspect? Thanks for your thoughts.

Answer 1

i dont have any beliefs of the after life, but i hope is all good.

Answer 2

I think that my personal identity, my point of view as an individual, exists only because I am/have a living body. Once my brain is dead, there's no way my individual point of view or sense of myself as a separate thing from the world "out there" can possibly persist. It's not just nonsense, it's insidious nonsense, the idea of a person proceeding as him/herself into an afterlife.

I'm not confident that my awareness is entirely dependent on having a functioning brain. Just my sense of myself. So I think it's conceivable that - in some manner I can't comprehend or explain to you, because it doesn't involve anything we think of as "real" but which does not need to be "supernatural" either - it's conceivable that something "about" my consciousness, that does not include my personal point of view, might be roughly said to persist beyond my death, and eternally. But to say that "I" will be "aware" of that, in any familiar sense, seems pretty farfetched to me.

I think if there is any quality to death at all, it should be something like bliss. But I don't really think it will even have a quality, per se, since there can be no point of view that I have on it...

My ego naturally fears and resists its own destruction. But it has died before, and each time has been woah, d**n good, so I'm not really afraid of that either.

Answer 3

well, where are you before you're born?

Answer 4

I would hope there's an afterlife, I really want to see my grandparents again one day.

Answer 5

I do believe in heaven and h**l. But I also believe that angels can embody living things on earth. For instance, since my grandmother died, Monarch butterflies seem to follow me everywhere. It seems they are either sent from her, or are her in another form. Or I could be completely mistaken and butterflies just like me. Who knows?

Answer 6

When you die nothing changes except you dont have a body. Death is very similar to dreaming. I am not scared of dying. We expereince heaven and h**l just about everyday and that wont change after u die except that you exist in a place where all things are good. Till you get bored and then you can come back to earth for some more chaos , pain & joy!!

Answer 7

I believe that after my death I return to the oblivion that was my state before my birth.

premortem oblivion---->life---->postmortem oblivion

Answer 8

It's childish.

Answer 9

There is a heavenly kingdom and someday it will arrive upon the earth.

The lake of fire is all too real and many paths lead to there.

Answer 10

If there were any proof of the existence of life after death, it would have been in the papers by now.

But hey, if people find comfort in deluding themselves, that's fine. What bothers me, is when they inflict their mental illness on their children.

Passing on religious/supernatural delusions to your children is a form of child abuse.

Answer 11

i believe the the only heaven or h**l are those that we create in this world. i believe that after we die we are reincarnated. no i am not afraid of the unknown aspect.

Answer 12

great question.I am a christian.There is Heaven and there is h**l.Heaven is for baptized(immearsed) believers and unaccountable people.h**l is for nonchristians and others such as atheists and homosexuals.But any accountable person that unimmearsed is doomed to h**l

Answer 13

I think there's a h**l.  I think there might be a heaven.  Of course other world's exist within our own, or even outside our own.  I am afraid to float around for the rest of eternity and after when I die.  But I do believe in resurection.  If I were to be resurrected, I would go back in time.

Answer 14

When you die you simply enter a life as a mind no senses or body just your mind and you survive in people who knew you who are still alive or your descendants who are alive. Basically it will be like a dream the only thing is you will have full control in the dream you can go anywhere in the universe time travel etc you can only meet people you can remember. The most best thing is you can communicate with the living but only when they are dreaming.

If you had no children and all your friends have died who knows what happens then maybe you are born into a new life.

Who knows for all we know this is the dream and we are all dead.

All I know for sure is that if you can remmber a dream for more than a day it means something from your ancestor a warning or showing you something which will happen

Answer 15

I feel like human life is the first step to a long educational experience to become more pure creatures. I believe we are just to experience life and learn compassion and self improvement. I believe that having children gives us a glimpse of our makers love for us, so the parenting experience helps us understand the first step. After we die I feel we will go on the next step with what we have learned, each life getting us closer to full awareness or perfection. Kinda like life itself. We are born learn to take care of our selfs by seeing and doing, go to school, then college for more advance training and work is the practice of our learning and when we are older we teach others our experience.  I don't like organized religion because I feel its more rituals and traditions that clash with other religions causing problems. I feel God is more interested in a personal relationship with all his creatures than having them fight over who's rituals are right. I also feel compassion is the biggest lesson for us to learn and practice on earth. I think h**l is more of a human interpretation and one thing I stress to 'non believers' is God doesn't cause or let bad things happen (war, killing) that is a result of FREE WILL.

I'm not afraid of the unknown because I really like studding how the universe works and find it fascinating. God / creation  is very scientific (a reason for everything and everything is for a reason). Science (as we learn more) proves the existence of a creator. I just want to live a long life so I can watch my children grow and maybe see my great grand children, then I will be ready for the next step.

Answer 16

Jeesh I hope not, after 90(Or so) years(hopefully) I think I can call it a day!

Answer 17

There is no such thing as heaven or h**l.

There is no such thing as planes of existence.

Thus, I have no fear of death, other than to put it off as long as possible.

I know what happens after you die:

The same thing that happened before you were born.

Nothing.

Answer 18

Well, here are my "beliefs"...which are very strongly informed by science.  :-)

Everything about you--your memories, knowledge, personality, talents, experiences, attitude, dogmas, quirks, worldviews--in short, everything that defines you as a person, is stored in your physical brain as patterns of interconnections between neurons.  New memories & knowledge form new connections, and damage to your brain can alter or destroy information stored there, affecting you as a person.  Everything that makes you, "you" can be accounted for by the workings of your physical brain, without need of adding a "soul" or some other magical process.  While there are still a lot of fine details about the brain that we're still figuring out, the brain is no longer the mysterious black box it once was.

Now, a few minutes after you die, your neurons start to shrivel up from lack of oxygen.  In doing so, all the interconnections between them get severed, erasing any and all information stored there.  Everything that defined you as a person is permanently lost, even more effectively than erasing files off of a hard drive.

Of course, you also are completely reliant on your physical brain for thinking, for being self-aware, for being conscious.  If this were not true, a person could get shot in the head and still walk around as if nothing had happened; like a zombie.  :-)

So when you die and your physical brain stops functioning, that's it--there is nothing left for you but the eternal dreamless sleep of oblivion.  No conscious thought, no memories, no identity, no more experiencing the world around you.  The afterlife, it would seem, is an impossibility, just another invention of the human imagination embraced as a warm lie to comfort us against the utter finality of death.

So make the most of the life you have now.  Live it to the fullest, both in quantity and quality.  There are no do-overs, this is your one and only shot.  That, I think, makes living all the more valuable.

Answer 19

Since we are just energy and energy can't be created or destroyed, only transformed, then it stands to reason that we will be transformed into something else.  I don't know about all of you but I'll be ready for a nice change after about fifty more years on this rock.

Answer 20

I agree with Nicks!  Hear Hear!

Answer 21

The idea of living forever (heaven or h**l or anywhere else) has always frightened me, so I like to think that when I die it's over.

Answer 22

Once you die you're dead, there is no afterlife.

Answer 23

I think that after we die in this lifetime we are reborn in another place and time to learn what we need to in our souls path to enlightenment

Answer 24

i beleve that religon is a load of bullshit,  and is just a total scheme to make money, and everything they brain wash to you is sooooooooooooo unrealistic

Answer 25

death is the end that's it.  Not afraid of "nothing"

Answer 26

"I" (being life itself) don't end when my current life ends. Every end is a new beginning. I think that after my current life ends it's quite possible that I'm going to live all possible lives (one by one), an infinite number of times in my infinite future. it's also possible that i may just live my own life again, and again, in an endless broken record ( just like Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence).

Of course there is a heaven and a h**l! They both exist in life! I've experienced them both. If I'm going to simply die and wake up having to live a new life, then I'm going to die and wake up in a new heaven, and a new h**l (a new life.) If I'm going to simply die and wake up having to live the same life over again, then I'm going to die and wake up in the same heaven and the same h**l that i just lived through (the same life).