What do you believe the afterlife is like?

[hrmjustin]

What do you think heaven or hell is like? Is their an in between like purgatory? Do you believe in reincarnation? Are we sent back here to get it right somehow?

I believe in Heaven and I think almost all people get there in the end. I do not believe in hell. I find it hard to believe a loving God would leave anybody in a place of torment. As for what heaven is like I think it is a place of joy and wonder.

[Warpy]

1. It's a one way trip, no one knows for sure

whether we go to some religion's version of a heaven or we just float out of existence on a tide of endorphins and enkephalins, hallucinating about our dead relatives.

In this matter, belief is irrelevant. It's only there to make people less afraid of death.

[safeinOhio]

2. I think it will be just like it was

before I was born.

[notadmblnd]

4. +1

nt

[LostOne4Ever]

6. This

This exactly.

[beveeheart]

26. Agree with above comments!!!

[cbdo2007]

42. I believe our souls travel on to another planet as well.

[dipsydoodle]

3. Might depend

on what you believe reality to be now.

[mysuzuki2]

5. I don't believe in an afterlife but if there is one here is what I would like it to be.

I would like all of my friends and family to be together again. I would like to be reunited with all the dogs I have owned(?) and loved. I would like to have a lot of sex. I would like my ex wife to still love me (note: this may be her private vision of hell).

[bigendian]

7. Reunion

Like seeing a loved one you haven't seen in a long time. The alternative may be never seeing anyone you love again.

[hrmjustin]

8. I would like to be reunited with loved ones.

[BabbaTam]

9. Heaven, or what?

Well now, isn't that a question! You could try reading Robert Monroe's "Ultimate Journey". The place he called 'the park' would seem to be a purgatory kind of place. His inability to sense places that were not part of his experiences seem to suggest that whatever we envision is what we end up going to in an afterlife situation. Try praying a lot and keep your mind open for anomalies or miracles as we call them. It will inspire you to stay open minded and give you hope that there's more to the world than is typically thought. peace

[Phillip McCleod]

10. the after 'life' will be like becoming what we already are..

..minus the hierarchical coherence supplied by the neat system of organs and specialized, hierarchical but largely autonomous cellular activity. kinda like going from being one person to being a bazillion people. each living cell, of course, will die quickly (except for our bone matter, our whole bodies are pretty much replaced by a new population of microbes and mites every few days) but in that brief space of time, we shall truly transcend the limiting oneness of the corporeal form.

[bowens43]

11. there is no after life. when youre dead youre just dead.....

[Gin]

12. Heaven and hell are states of mine...IMO..

I have experienced both in this life.......

[Warren Stupidity]

13. Re this "loving god".

Is this god of yours omniscient and omnipotent?

[hrmjustin]

18. I tend to think yes but I may be wrong.

[Warren Stupidity]

21. Are you sticking with that answer or would you like another waffle?

[hrmjustin]

22. Another waffle?

[Warren Stupidity]

24. I suggest the Belgian.

[hrmjustin]

25. ok!

[backscatter712]

19. This is why I worship Spiderman.

Spiderman has cool powers, but he's not omnipotent. He has Spidey Sense, but he's not omniscient.

This neatly dodges that annoying Epicurian dilemma.

[skepticscott]

14. What evidence do you have

that your "god" is a loving one, other than your desperate need to believe it? And how do you even know that YOUR god is the one that gets to decide who goes to heaven and who doesn't? Is there anything there but your need to emotionally reassure yourself?

[hrmjustin]

20. An interesting question.

I feel my God is loving. My savior said he is loving. That is enough for me.

[gateley]

27. We don't believe the same thing --

but you know what?

As long as one's beliefs help them through this life, to live a better life, to be kind to others, to act out of love instead of fear, I think that's what's most important.

I'm glad you "subscribe" to a loving God and Savior.

[hrmjustin]

28. Thank you gateley!

[Tien1985]

15. I

Believe it will be like what before being born was like. Just nothingness.

However, for the sake of the question, I really wish there could be an afterlife where there was eternity to explore and enjoy whatever place you went to.

[Fumesucker]

16. Assuming that there is indeed an afterlife then this is how I think it might go..

God created the universe and us because He was lonely and wanted some intellectual stimulation, those who can and will give Him a good argument or make Him laugh are the ones He keeps around to talk to. Being sucked up to for all eternity isn't all it's cracked up to be, God knows if you are being straightforward with Him and loathes toadies.

Smoking a doobie with God and shooting the shit would be cool.

[Jim__]

17. James Joyce gave us a hopeful image.

From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

...

—Now let us try for a moment to realize, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison house is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.

—They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light. As, at the command of God, the fire of the Babylonian furnace lost its heat but not its light, so, at the command of God, the fire of hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, burns eternally in darkness. It is a never ending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air. Of all the plagues with which the land of the Pharaohs were smitten one plague alone, that of darkness, was called horrible. What name, then, shall we give to the darkness of hell which is to last not for three days alone but for all eternity?

—The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

—But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts, whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible, so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns, so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property, that it preserves that which it burns, and, though it rages with incredible intensity, it rages for ever.

...

[Phillip McCleod]

23. hell.

if it exists at all.. it will be like hell, no matter what it's like.

if it's 'heaven', then trust me .. eternity with your relatives and friends? hell. they won't be either in short order.

c.f. sartre, 'no exit' .. 'hell is other people.'

other people in heaven? that's hell, too.

..

oblivion.. sweet oblivion.. *is* 'heaven'.

[Turbineguy]

29. We were visiting the Callaway Gardens in Georgia.

In one part we had to park the car and cross a street. Through a hedge, we walked into a beautiful garden with flowers, herbs and fruit trees. And I thought, yes, this is what I think Heaven should be like.

[No Vested Interest]

38. You may be correct

It may be like the Garden of Eden.

[Old and In the Way]

30. If I were God.....

I'd want to forget myself by being born.

[BeyondGeography]

31. A place where nothing, nothing ever happens

&feature=youtube_gdata_player

[DreamGypsy]

32. An eternal jam...of You Better Get It While You Can...

...with Carl Martin and Steve Goodman, and a host of other great musicians.

Doesn't matter if you're rich or poor,
And it's the same for a woman or a man,
From the cradle to the crypt is mighty short trip
So you better get it while you can.

[LunaSea]

33. Just the documentary for you

[aristocles]

34. ** crickets **. nt

[Newest Reality]

35. It is not nothing

and it is not something. It is not both, nor is it neither.

There is nothing to believe or not believe and there is no after or before or life or birth or death.

It is vast like space without a point of reference, infused with a lucid, boundless light of ten thousand suns, timeless, absent, open, spontaneous, unified.

It is this as an appearance seen as real and about self and other in one sense and just a dynamic churning of self-knowing awareness without the naivete that veils the unthinking sameness as an even, boundless flow. Its center? Everywhere. Its circumference? Nowhere.

Bliss that is perfect from the beginning and always now.

Well, you asked.

[GeorgeGist]

36. Same as the before life.

[DeadEyeDyck]

37. At death, you awaken into your God

consciousness, much as you awaken into your day now.
You will remember this life as a fading dream and realize how insignificant it was as eternity moves on.

[goldent]

39. Tomorrow Never Knows

Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream,
It is not dying, it is not dying
Lay down al thoughts, surrender to the void,
It is shining, it is shining.
Yet you may see the meaning of within
It is being, it is being
Love is all and love is everyone
It is knowing, it is knowing
And ignorance and hate mourn the dead
It is believing, it is believing
But listen to the colour of your dreams
It is not leaving, it is not leaving
So play the game "Existence" to the end
Of the beginning, of the beginning

[Marrah_G]

40. I have no idea what really comes after death

I don't believe in heaven/hell.

There might be something or nothing at all. I don't think anyone knows.

I think human beings desperately want there to be something and they want to think that something will be better then their life now.

[grantcart]

41. I believe that religion should concentrate on making earth more like heaven

and less like hell while we are here and stop worrying about the after stuff.


I will add this that nothing is less interesting or attractive to me than the current popular vision of heaven.

If you understand that you are going to be in the presence of God, and you understand how much greater that presence is to you then it will be like holding a match up next to the sun. It is not possible to maintain an individual existence next to a presence that strong. If you then assume that you will be subsumed into the being of God and become one with the ultimate reality of God then you are becoming very close to what the Buddha thought Nirvana is.

In one sense passing your genes on is a kind of reincarnation, and passing your wisdom on an even more important.

If I had a choice I would beg to let me come down and play with the homo sapiens one more time, I have a deep affection for them.

[cbdo2007]

43. The universe is full of different dimensions, galaxies, planets, civilizations, etc....

and our souls cycle through many of them with each existence to learn different things. Some people's souls are sent back to Earth to learn things here on Earth and others are sent elsewhere in the universe to learn something different.

I think immediately after death, you experience the afterlife you are expecting based on your own individual religious beliefs to allow you to process that you have died. Then, your family comes to you (or people you would be comforted by) and helps you reflect on your life and where you should go next based on what you have learned and experienced and your soul's goals.

[edhopper]

44. I see no plausable way

for the conscious mind to exist outside of the biological brain.

As far as i have seen, there is no evidence it has or can.