To Atheists, I Have a Question

reply to post by Badge01


Thank you, very nicely put. My thoughts explained in a few paragraphs. I echo your statement, religion is nothing more then a tool. Some people need it but some people don't. I don't need to believe in a higher being to be a good person and at peace with my life's journey. I raised my children the same way. You are all you need to be complete and love life.

I believe that people made up the whole "afterlife" to make themselves feel better about death. I mean face it, everyone WILL die and there is no getting around it so why not make up a story to make ourselves feel better about it? When you die you will be disposed off and thats it, end of story.

im an athiest and i dont belive anything will happen after i die. But i would like to belive that we are reborn cuz i hate my life and just wanna put a #ing shootgun to my mouth. So this is the only life i get and i just wanna die

Shall i twist the words to my own purposes, just like i did with 'universal aliens'?

I will anyway;

I believe that nothing happens after i die - because anything that happens will seem like nothing.

EDIT:

Oh my :giggles: i forgot about that idea.




[edit on 23-11-2007 by Throbber]

Originally posted by wisefoolishness
so my question is this: what do you believe happens after you die?

Worm food

Thats it, it doesnt bother me, in fact looked at in some way, by being recycled through Nature our existence continues on in some small way.

reply to post by wisefoolishness


nothing. i die and rot.
or maybe i get cremated. depends on what i put in my will.

end result, no longer existing in anything but memories.

RANT

This forum is called " Conspiracies in Religions"

CONSPIRACIES!

This is not a friggin' conspiracy and oh so belongs in BTS.

/RANT

I wish this board had the same moderation as the 911 one.

I considered myself an atheist for a while, mostly after I concluded that religions were forced on the people as tools for manipulation.

After some time and a long search inward, I had to acknowledge that there were many things about my life and the experience of living that I could not explain without acknowledging some powerful essence in the universe.

But if you asked me what happens to a person when they die during my atheist stage, I would say this.

"Your consciousness, memories, and personality as you and others see them simply cease to exist. The biological processes which gave rise to these emergent properties are no longer active, so the properties themselves must concurrently cease with them. Your body then becomes material which returns to the earth along with the potential to be used by other living beings."

...or something to that effect.


[edit on 23-11-2007 by dionysius9]

Originally posted by wisefoolishness
...so my question is this: what do you believe happens after you die? .

Personally, I believe our fleshy bodies cease to function. However, we have an energy within (sometimes referred to as a 'soul' or 'spirit'). As energy can not be destroyed, it must "go" somewhere, right?

I believe the energy returns to a collective whole and is mixed in and reborn into another fleshy body at sometime or another. So the new body would have a spark which is made up of bits of other sparks, i.e., the same person's spark is not plopped into a body part and parcel.

I believe that we are all like waves on an ocean. We are born "the wave starts" then we live "the wave travels" then we die "the wave breaks on the shore" but since the wave was part of the ocean. Or you could say that your atoms are part of the world, which was once part of a star which was once part of the singularity that for some reason just blew up and everything as we know it was spontaneously created out of nothing, But anyways since the wave is part of the ocean, yes the wave dissapears there is nothing left of it, its gone, poof, nothing left of it. but the ocean still exists doesnt it?

Explain to me how you can just rise up into being out of nothing, and then go back to nothing, that sounds fantastical to me. if you believe in that then how can you bash those fundamentalist christains who say the world was made in 7 days? I mean the idea that yourself just appears in this body and then dissapears forever when this body dies is at least just as fantastical as the whole world being created in 7 days.

Personally i believe in rebirth. Back to the first paragraph, So if your a wave that thus breaks when you die, then naturally another wave will rise up. Rebirth anyone? I dont think there is a soul, i believe that we are all the same, litterally all the same. Just like every wave on the ocean is part of the ocean. so are we all part of a cosmic energy. But just like one wave cannot be another wave simultaneously, we cannot be someone else simultaneously as we exist as our own wave. But the ocean which here im going to say symbolizes god, is all of us. But no one wave (person) is the entire ocean. (god)

This theory makes alot of sense to me. Alot more then just poof your born, poof you die, end of story. If thats true then whats the point of living? to just enjoy the few silly comforts we have here on the physical world? Why do all the enlightned saints say thats not true? Like the buddha, he spend years and years searching himself through meditation and austerity for truth. On the day of his enlightnement he was able to recall thousands of past lives. People should look within themselves for truth of this nature. Not without.

As an Atheist I don't think much about anymore. I'm sure I'll get there in due time and find out, but I would rather think about the present. We all live in one time - that is NOW.

Oh and i was just thinking about NOTHINGNESS. Physicists have known for awhile now that in a perfect vaccum there is anything but nothing. There are particles popping into and out of existence, like a quantum foam. They cannot proove where these particles come from or where they go, all then know is that they are there for a microsecond, then they are gone. I think this accurately represents life in this world only on a much smaller and faster scale. I believe that everything is tied together in the physical world. By observing one thing we can make theories about other things as they follow similar laws. Well people are always being born and then dying, just like these particles are popping into and out of existence. We will never know where the particles go, we will never know scientifically where the consiousness goes. My theory is that consciousness is on the quantum scale. And effects everything.

reply to post by wisefoolishness


Religion is poison. For what I'm saying I've got a strong religious knowledge, I've been trough the Bible, the Kuran and my parents obliged me to go into a private school. So, unlike others, I made my opinion by myself I have no problem with people, believers or not, but I think we should reconsider our way of """believing""".

When you die, you die. Your body dies. Your eyes, dying, create the illusion to your brain that there is a tunnel and a light at the end, but it's just a biological thing. When you die, you die. End of story. We think we are so important so we believe we have a soul. BS ! it's just a whole lot of psycho-biological phenomenons, nothing more.
But I won't criticize you for believing. For as long as you don't try to impose your belief to your neighbor.

sounds like everyone in here thinks that growing humans are no different than growing a plant or bacteria. that would be the case if we were just walking meat popsicles. Stick an egg and a sperm in a warm place and see if a living baby comes out after 9 months.

This question will only have an answer when humans understand what life is. we're WAY behind on that. the day that a human is build cell by cell, nerve by nerve and is giving life, that should be a sign we're getting closer.

I myself don't believe in what people force on me, only what i've learned from experience.

I believe sadly, that nothing happens. We are machines made out of meat, when we break, we die. That's it in my opinion.

Frankly the idea of an afterlife seems proposturous to me. An entity that controls the universe is something I cant accept. But only controls it when (s)he wants tois even more unbelievable.

I consider myself an open-minded atheist...I've watched programs like TABS ghosthunters which makes wonder about the possibility of another existence outside of the physical body...and there is still so much science has yet to discover. I can't offer a positive answer...physics concludes that we live in a multi-verse of infinite realities and possibilities. So...all I can say is perhaps we will find out....won't we?

Is believing an alien race seeded the earth the same as being atheist? I don't worship them so i guess i count.

I'm not sure about death.

I've been a bit of an amateur ghost hunter for about a decade and some things seem to point towards something further, but my own theory kind of cancels it out.

My idea is that ghosts are simply a replay of sorts of past events, not the actual person's 'soul' communicating with our world. If an event is traumatic enough i believe our brains can leave an imprint of sorts that causes what we know as 'ghosts'.

Anyway, kind of getting off topic. Basically i think that when you die, you die. End of story.

I'm agnostic, so I'm not really the one that the OP directed this question towards, but I'll toss my two cents in.

How can any of us truly know what happens after death? We can certainly see what happens from this side (decay/loss of consciousness), but no one can claim to know what happens from the other side.

I also do not believe that our existence is pointless. Everything, and I mean everything, has a purpose. Think about it long enough, and you can find a meaning for even the most useless of things.

Human purpose can be very hard to find... We have a nasty habit of destroying everything we come in contact with, accidentally or not. Perhaps that is our purpose, to be the antithesis of life, to keep things in balance so to speak. But that's just my speculation.

On another note, a fundamental aspect of life is the cycle. Nothing truly begins and ends. There is even evidence that the universe itself has been undergoing an epic cycle of expansion and collapse since long before we can comprehend. Like the fine example of the wave given earlier, it might not be the same after it has broken on the shore, but it is still there in a sense.

In any case, none of us can truly know what happens down that path. I certainly don't. I just try to do what I believe to be the right thing at every oppourtunity. I plan to treat death as an adventure, if I see it coming.

[edit on 23-11-2007 by SeekerOfAUTMN]

Originally posted by wisefoolishness
as i said before, i have a problem with nothing. i really cant wrap my mind around it, and when i try, i always end up with a headache, but i dont know why.

I used to get the same thing, but my head would really heart when I tried to imagine life that didn't end

In the end I tossed the question out the window as a mystery unanswerable until I do kick the bucket, its the one question you can't truly answer without actually dying so why stress so much over it?? The only stuff we have are near death experiences which may or may not be actual glimpses of "another side" but those vary quite a bit and therefore must be taken with a grain of salt...

For the record I am not an atheist, or a believer, I'm more or less agnostic, I don't believe the Big Bang and Evolution or God (as religion sees him) are adequate explanations for the incredible complexity of our Universe and life on Earth...

So enjoy life, try to be a good person, and don't worry over the inevitable or the uncertain

Originally posted by wisefoolishness
reply to post by makeitso

 

ive never thought of it like that, but that would seem likely. i just have trouble seeing nothing in my head.

This might be seen as a rude reply, but I believe it to make sense and I'm sorry if I offend anyone: People who arent atheist *needs* something to believe in. Either it is a purpose of life, or just a reason as to why their life isnt great (Gods wants you to learn or whatever..), and because of that they can't see a why one could die and never reappear, ie. nothing. They need a *positive* reason for everything.

Being an atheist i believe as was posted earlier - Molecules stops interacting due to no ATP (Due to no oxygen), and then they go still... You die. Nothing less, nothing more, and nothing ever more.