So if you're (say) reunited with them in (say) Heaven, you won't be close to them? Do you expect the same from your own pare - oh sorry. I forgot. Well, your mother?

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Thanks, but I'm certainly hoping my useless scumbag of a father is heading the opposite direction.

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Wrong: when you die, death happens.

It's party time for all the little worms!

Whenever I start pondering death too much, I just remind myself of this Mark Twain quote:


“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

About whether I would want there to be anything after this life, then both yes and no.
This lyric from a song by Christian Mistress always stuck in my mind, especially the bolded...:

Don't believe in heaven
Don't believe in hell
There isn't anything
Beyond the physical

Eternity is a long time
Would you want to know yourself that well
Eternity is a fine time
But it's all in your mind

As a few posters have already described, I've always believed that death will be no different than what it was like before we were born.

I’m also going with a big fat “no” for belief in the afterlife. I prefer to trust in the scientific method which recommends that we always opt for the minimum working hypothesis, the simplest explanation for the available evidence. So I comfortably dismiss a bunch of mysterious phenomena; ghosts, dragons, UFOs, the afterlife, and ( sorry to break it to you so brutally Trollheart) Leprechauns.

In fact I have two problems about the notion of an afterlife – one frivolous and one serious.

For the first, I’ve never been convinced by anyone’s logistics about heaven. As some posters have suggested, being with your loved ones for eternity isn't necessarily Paradise; tbh, a week with them at the beach is usually sufficient. So let’s say instead that my Heaven would be “Marlon Brando, Pocahuntas and me” sitting around listening to Neil Young cds. Does that mean they’d have to sit through eternity with me? What if they don't like NY's songs? But if they get to choose a heaven as well, chances are they'll have different plans that don't include me at all. So all of a sudden, it looks like everybody is gonna need a heaven of their own….

And my serious issue with the afterlife is this: on the basis of scant evidence, more as a question of faith, religious leaders have used the idea of an afterlife to blight millions of lives. More specifically, (and also adding to the implausability) they have encouraged the idea that your conduct in this life affects the quality of your afterlife. The tradgedy of this misconception is that it has led some people to sacrifice happiness today in hopes of an eternal reward later. There are, for instance, monks in Tibet trying to log up karma for the next bardo, Western religious orders intent on denying or chastising the flesh, and suicide bombers prepared to die because of the virgins they’ve been promised in the afterlife: thousands of lives over hundreds of years that could've been lived differently if people took a more rational approach to the afterlife. It's immeasurably sad imo.

Yeah, well, you've never been to a Leprechaun party. Those dudes rock! :laughing:
Yeah I have a (not entirely serious) theory about that. When you die, you go to this huge waiting room. After what seems like (and may be) an eternity, listening to some truly awful elevator music, you're called into the presence of not God, of course, but one of his aides. A busy man, he directs you to a chair without looking up. He pushes a form over the desk towards you, again without raising his eyes. There are three options on the form, and you are to check one and only one. He informs you (looking up for the first time, with blazing red eyes just for one microsecond) that this contract is legally binding throughout eternity and beyond.

Your choices of Afterlife are:

1. You may choose to go back to Earth, reincarnated in another body. You accept the small print which tells you you will have no recollection of your previous life, and that any flashes of "memory" you may get from time to time are nothing more than what humans call Deja Vu, and should be dismissed as such.

2. You may spend eternity in a room off to the right, which will afford you access (sound and vision) to your loved ones still alive. You may then watch over them. When they too pass on, you will be allowed to choose option 1 or 3 again. The contract states very clearly that you will NOT be able to interfere in the lives of anyone living, just observe.

3. You may opt for your own private Heaven. This will be filled with all the things and people you wish, you can be who you want, do what you want and live any life you want, forever.
But sometimes hilarious. Sort of.
:shycouch: