Catholics don’t believe that, either; we believe that God will not punish a person for ignorance if it’s through no fault of his own. It’s people who know the truth and turn away from it who are in trouble.
I don't believe in an afterlife in the way that the question was meant. Not meaning to sound facetious, but I do believe that the works that survives one can amount to a meaningful afterlife, for a period at least, and the absence of them can amount to an eternity of nothingness. Works would be a more meaningful afterlife, or absence of it, in my view, than any possible reincarnation in a new body. Even if reincarnation was a universally accepted fact, I think ones works, the works that this body one is now in has made, would be a truer continuation of the self than the same essence starting all over again in a new body, shorn of memory and lumps and the bumps that made one. I just don't think our essences are that interesting or important without everything that has happened to them. The second, reframed, question someone posed about half way through the conversation was which afterlife would you choose to believe in? I am comfortable not believing in heaven and in fact I think the idea alarms me. I would choose what I currently believe; extinction of the self on death. Or rather --- given that the self formed out of bits and pieces of the pre-existing universe some point between conception and childhood (for me I think it was when I was about fifteen years old... slow developer) and sheds itself back into the universe throughout ones life through works, then finally and totally upon death --- that the parts of ones old self are all still there, but they no longer know they are there. What are those parts? A coffin, a long lasting deed here, a rotting home-made garden shed there, some old forum post elsewhere...
In my initial choice for an afterlife, if I was forced to adopt one, there is no god involved. Though one might suggest that the travel agency handing out tickets to heaven acts as a god figure. Some theories suggest that energy isn't lost and will be reused. Perhaps that could be considered a form of reincarnation. Mind you, I haven't paid a lot of attention to the theory, and I'm not scientifically skilled enough to understand what actually happens to energy when you die. Perhaps I misunderstand you, but it's really easy, I would say. If there's falsifiable proof of gods or afterlives I will believe. Since there is not, I do not believe.
Ah, but aren’t you the one who decides whether a proof is sufficient for you? Some of us have given proofs in this thread, but you don’t consider them sufficient. Therefore we all choose what we believe.
That's why I said option. When alive, the body produces energy through it's biological processes - of course, this ceases when dead - and heat energy of the body is lost to the environment. All that's left is mass energy, a property of all matter. Which energy did you have in mind? Yes, we can have all sorts of beliefs, what I meant is that it is not a matter of choice. If I ask you 'do you believe in god?' in all honesty, can you choose to answer 'yes'? Of course, beliefs can change given further information.
Marcus Aurelius wrote, in his Meditations, “If you are pained by any external thing, it is not the thing that pains you, but your judgment about it. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgment now.” He would say that belief is a matter of choice, and I think he’s right.
Stoic advice in the face of adversity? - a kind of ancient precursor to the popular song 'Don't worry, be happy'. But a wise and heroic attitude no doubt. I don't think I've made myself clear - Belief, no matter how it comes about (from a hunch to a stack of evidence) must come first to inform the choice, so there is no choice - and choice is redundant in saying something like 'I choose to believe that Jesus is our saviour'. Of course, beliefs can still change or disappear. And maybe 'belief' is in the same ballpark as 'love' ?
The Second Step in Twelve Step Programs is , "We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity." Millions of people have made a conscious choice to learn to believe in that power.
I think that people try on new beliefs all the time like old coats in thrift stores, and also that lots of people don't really believe anything at all. Another thing is that there's a difference between assent to specific propositions and the deep-seated intuitions and presuppositions that inform the assent. But lots of times people choose to believe things that don't dramatically conflict with their unconscious assertions. I chose to believe in anarcho-primitivism once, but I didn't really like it so I quit. The key was that relatively few of my fundamental beliefs conflicted with the specific tenets of anarcho-primitivism. The thing that made me quit believing in it as a viable political philosophy was that I wear glasses, and mass-produced, high-quality, light-weight lenses are a product of industrial civilization. My own case is an example of the fact that people believe things for all kinds of different reasons, often in a self-serving way and with little regard for actual truth. However, once the initial romance of anarcho-primitivism had worn off because of my poor eyesight, I discovered all sorts of other reasons why it's a flawed philosophy (I actually just read a fairly insightful critique by the Unabomber which you can find online). It's simplistic to claim that people's evaluation of beliefs is based on a sort of cold-cognitive, rationalist approach to the truth. It's just not. People could work themselves up to really believe that the sky is green if it benefited them to do so. And they wouldn't be faking it either. They would really believe it. Another point is that beliefs impinge on one another, so beliefs that are necessitated by prior beliefs automatically appear without any thought. A really lucid example of this is the dogmatization of the Immaculate Conception by the Roman Catholic Church, which resulted from the Augustinian formulation of original sin. If X is true about human nature, and Y is true about the nature of Christ, then Z must be true about the human nature of His Mother to reconcile the two.
If there is an afterlife, I hope it's like Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld, but I suspect it'll be somewhere a lot less interesting. As long as it includes a right to return and take another shot at this 'life' thing, I'm good.
Part of faith is deciding that you believe it’s true. Of course, there’s more to faith than that; after all, as the Bible says, the devils also believe there’s one God, and tremble. That doesn’t mean they have faith, or that belief is enough.
The Valley Of The Shadow Of Death, as the Bible calls it. It kind of makes sense. You're not connected to your brain or body anymore. This valley is just that. It's dark because you have no eyes. It's quiet because you have no ears. You can't feel anything because your body is not with you there. You don't feel the urge to breathe because it's your body that needs to breathe not your mind. Nothing can hurt you in the valley. I see people describing it like that who have suffered a severe truama to the body, or who have drowned. They all describe the same thing. For them to be able to describe it they must first have had to have been there. To observe is to be aware and to know. I remember one person stating that they knew what deathw as like and that it was exactly like the moment when you sleep and upto the time you start dreaming. I said to them that they must have been in that void inbetween otherwise they wouldn't know what it was like to describe it. They shrugged their shoulders then and said "I don't know really". I believe the mind is eternal for one reason and one reason only. That is that something can never become nothing. That's what science states and it includes consciousness. Once you are you can never not be. Unless of course of course there is a process after death where you can become undone and in a humain way. For instance our identity, our knowledge of ourselves is ultimately formed by memory. Without a memory who are we? I believe souls that have violated life in cruel and selfish way are undone by having the memory centers of the consciousness removed. THis makes them forget who they are and ultimately their identity, the glue that holds their entire consciousness together, dissipates and then they vanish. I believe the filter in place to prevent such people living again is the valley. It is there where you will either be ended or you will be allowed to continue. That's what I believe!
First, I believe it's wise I emphasize that I feel people should believe whatever they like. I tend to sound harsher than necessary or intended sometimes. As I might have done in my initial statement about falsifiable proof. You are right, there is no proof for me. No specific sort of energy. I don't have the science skills to determine anything reliable about my argument, and I can't find the article which I refered to. At this point, I'm not even sure I actually read it, in fact. It's just a nugget of info that got lodged in my brain at some point, not unlike the info on why Sith lightsabers are red. Also undeniably true, by the way. ;o) I would say my energy-theory is akin to "belief". I like this. It's there, or it isn't, and you feel it when it is. That's what religion should be and that where one should leave it. And then I come and analyze it down the toilet. Is this really love, or is it just my dick talking because neither he or I are used to being smiled at by a pretty girl? I don't know how to translate that back to a religion reference, and I think it's best if I don't. The point we can probably agree on is: don't think too much about what makes you feel good.
Okay, belief versus the faith that is complete confidence in the higher being's (or afterlife's) nature as it relates to oneself. I've always imagined it in more strict terms: god (supernatural force) IS or god ISN'T, but it makes sense that there can be more nuance than that. We still deviate on the nature of 'proofs,' of course, but to each his own as you/Bakker rightfully indicated. There are a lot of things I strongly believe IN that do not have actual proofs (no axiomatic bedrock, not objectively and repeatedly demonstrated, not both inclusively true and exclusively true) due to both my feelings about and evaluation of the supporting evidence. I think having faith in god/afterlife is to do with one's relationship with evidence more than proof.
Belief vs faith - my take on it.... Beliefs may vary in strength, but can apply to just about anything - Faith can be a strong belief, but it only seems to apply to wishful concepts and outcomes. Of course, if you have proof, you don't need either.
I do. To put it in terms I'm used to, I think I'll get a debrief, some time off and then a new deployment.
I hope I will get an explanation to all the weird stuff in my life. Like a sitting down and some supreme being going all: "You see, this is why..."
That is figuring you don't get the mushroom treatment. I try to keep expectations to a minimum, so any results will be a surprise, a pleasant one would be nice
Regardless the complexity of things (any thing) coming into existence within an eternal context. I believe that whatever happens will again or would not have at all. Which isn't really an afterlife per se, but more a re-emergence of life ad infinitum.
I remember watching a Stargate episode where they were stuck in a time loop. For me, that kind of thing sounds like another version of hell.
That's not far off from a lot of people's beliefs. As I understand it, and I'm oversimplifying here, I'm sure, but the never-ending cycle of reincarnation in Hinduism, Buddhism and others is something to escape if possible. Life is suffering, and the ultimate goal, Nirvana, is not just a state of bliss, but one's final liberation from the torment of living over and over and over. Personally, I'm agnostic, which can mean a lot of things. For me, though, it means I believe there's probably an energy or a force or a god (if you need to personify) of some sort responsible for existence. I just don't have a solid definition of said entity. I feel like if there's a religion around that somehow got everything right, I wouldn't be able to guess which, and more likely we're all wrong about at least some of it. The same goes for an afterlife. I think there's probably something after death, but I don't know what. I'm almost sure we won't live on clouds though, and I'm absolutely sure there's no hell. What kind of god would condone that? Not a remotely benevolent one. It seems obvious to me that we're not being micromanaged down here, because I don't see evidence of divine intervention anywhere. Still, I pretty much only entertain concepts of God that include love for us lowly creatures, and the idea of a god who sentences people to eternal torture is extremely counter to that. If you screw up badly enough or get fooled by the wrong religion, you get handed over to the devil? I don't buy it. These are just some ideas I have, though. I could be wrong.
Life can be Hell for some, and even though the concept of Hell doesn't seem to make much sense from a gods' perspective, it fails logically as well. The concept of Hell combines incompatible forms of time and the absence thereof. Existence and non cycles through eons of time where eternity would encapsulate everything. Anything that has a beginning must also have an end (finite linear time), and by definition eternity is that without beginning or end. So, anything that has a beginning cannot enter into a continuous and unbroken eternal context as by definition it is already disqualified.
There are approximately 4000 religious religious beliefs that prevail in the world today. However in the past when people used to believe in all sorts of things there were 10,000+. Not to believe in an afterlife or god is counted as a belief too.
