But in general most beliefs seem to favor a paradise. — TiredThinker

Purgatory and hell are paradise?

Simply existing [...] is enough for me. — TiredThinker

Selfishness is the common element present in the course of every evil act ever perpetrated against mankind.

Is there anyway that every idea of life after death can be correct? — TiredThinker

Essentially, no. Not simultaneously at least. For obvious reasons.

Is there anyway that every idea of life after death can be correct? There apparently are many ideas in different religions and personal beliefs that really seem completely in conflict with one another. But in general most beliefs seem to favor a paradise. Eliminating all pains from this world and becoming young again. Such an optimistic view of what's next. Shouldn't they seem suspicious as well? Simply existing without health problems and with physical and mental energy and focus is enough for me. — TiredThinker

The idea of life after death seems to have developed from a vague awareness, and attempts to make sense of, a very real capacity to interact with the world beyond one’s physical existence. When we remember and embody the unrealised intentions or preferences of someone who has died, individually or collectively, then what has heretofore defined that person in life is able to ‘live’ on and interact with us - if not visibly in the world, then somewhere, somehow. Given that many people still describe emotion as a ‘force’ of some kind, it stands to reason that they would describe this potential influence of the departed in a similar way. Many questions naturally arise from this, and the possible answers put forward, and subjectivity in validating them, help to shape how one would, could or should live and interact in an eternal, cultural reality. In the absence of any way to verify, and as a comfort to those facing what is essentially unknown, why wouldn’t we favour a paradise, or at least a more optimistic possibility?

in general most beliefs seem to favor a paradise — TiredThinker

No one truly knows what is going to happen in the afterlife, assuming there is one, but if we don't know what's going to happen, then why not imagine the best possible scenario? Like you said, the majority of us are going to look for an unimaginable paradise. This kind of paradise is what I want for myself, but I'm not like other people, and other people aren't like me. I suppose this is where you could ask the question "Do others really deserve the same kind of paradise I do?"

Our views of the afterlife seem to be shaped by the sense of morality we develop while living on earth. Say you have person A and person B. Person A lived what you would describe as a "good" life. A life of helping others before helping themselves. Person A committed no crimes in their life. Person B on the other hand lived a life of violence and crime. A "bad" life if you will. Should person A and B go to the same place? A lot of people form an argument such as the following:

1. If you live a "good" life, whatever you attribute to being good, then you will surely go to an afterlife where "good" things and "good" people reside.
2. Person A lived a "good" life.
3. Therefore, Person A will go to an afterlife where "good" things and "good" people reside.
4. Person B lived a "bad" life.
5. Therefore, Person B will not go to an afterlife where "good" things and "good" people reside.

Obviously there are a lot of scenarios where this kind of argument won't work, which seems to be most places, because life is more complicated than "good" and "bad". This kind of argument just shows one of the ways we can begin to imagine what the afterlife would look like. There seems to be infinitely many ways the afterlife could be and no one will ever truly know the answer to the question "What is the afterlife?"

I appreciate your thought provoking forum post. If I were to directly answer your initial question "Is there anyway that every idea of life after death can be correct?" I suppose I would just have to say maybe and move on. It's an impossible question to answer unless we could actually travel there ourselves before death.

Hell consists of being separated from God, therefore excluded from the infinite possibility and locked up forever in the psychological little world you created yourself, without even a little window to peek outside. Examine your thoughts and you will see the trouble that awaits you.

Is there anyway that every [ANY] idea of life after death can be correct? — TiredThinker

Like "life before birth"? Or "north of the north pole"? No.

... locked up forever in the psychological little world you created yourself, without even a little window to peek outside. Examine your thoughts and you will see the trouble that awaits you. — bcccampello

I'm partial to this view of 'after birth'. There must be some way to make life ... "worth living." :chin:

I'm partial to this view of 'after birth'. There must be some way to make life ... "worth living." :chin: — 180 Proof

Spreadsheets.

What we genuinely desire from life, our deepest and most true dream, is a secret that God only reveals to us little by little. Until we catch a glimpse of it, we confuse it with all sorts of copied desires - the mimetic desires as René Girard used to call them, things, sensations and situations that we barely know about, which in general we don't know is nothing, and that only seem desirable to us because we saw that other people wanted them and, despising ourselves in the dark depths of our hearts, we imagined that we would feel a little less miserable if we became like these people. There is nothing sadder than a life devoted entirely to the search for these mirages, which, the more we adore them, the more they disappoint us.

Time is the substance of human life. The money that is lost is gained again. Time, never. Make your time worthy.

locked up forever in the psychological little world you created yourself, without even a little window to peek outside — bcccampello

If one is psychological, are they mentally sound and responsible for their actions? If one creates a world for themselves, assumingly of their own free will and desire, what reason would one have to seek elsewhere? Curiosity, perhaps as a result of boredom? Perhaps. I'm reminded of the old adage, as one man's trash is another man's treasure, one man's hell is surely another man's heaven.

If you say so. Like Einstein et al, for me (something like) "the god of Spinoza" suffices.

There is something to what you’re saying, if happiness is achieved by having a list of ambitious goals and pursuits in which you expect yourself to be happy if you check off everything and reach the end of the list, then yeah, there are many people who are left unsatisfied. Happiness is thus obviously not that but a day to day “attitude” which you exercise (of course which is not completely flexible and affected to some extent by our circumstances)

There are Christians for instance, who by believing they have a loving father like figure by their side 24/7, are comforted and are happy. But there are also those that are miserable despite their religious beliefs. The difference between the two is thus because some train their minds through their religious practices to be happier and those who don’t.

But this is not unique to religious belief. There are also non-religious people who are unhappy and those who are happy. I’ve mean, I’ve met happy non-religious people, you’ve never? Speaking as an atheist, I regard this category as those who pursue both happiness and rationality.

I understood that happiness is a more or less accidental result. Happiness is like pleasure, said Saint Thomas Aquinas. Pleasure is a side effect resulting from something that worked. It is not an objective. It is never a goal. After all, pleasure is an abstract term that designates a constellation of feelings that can differ greatly from one person to another. The pleasure is too evanescent for you to seek it. You will have to look for something concrete.

For example, what is gastronomic pleasure? Can you eat gastronomic pleasure? Of course you can't. You will have to eat something concrete. This thing can give you pleasure or displeasure. Saint Thomas Aquinas is absolutely right. You ate it, it worked, so you say you're happy. Pleasure is the name you give to the subjective side effect of something. Happiness is the same. Seeking happiness is the most useless thing in the world, because you never know what will make you happy or not. It is true that some things make you happy and others make you unhappy, so these are the things you will have to look for. Our effort is always directed to do something, to achieve something, and not to an abstract thing called happiness. This I understood a long time ago: to seek happiness is to make a hole in the water. If you seek happiness you will be unhappy, so it is better to seek victory, self-assertion, strength, etc.

It is true that the happiness that can be achieved in this world is modest and fickle, but real. One of the keys to obtaining it is: that the joys of others do not sadden you, nor do their sadness rejoice you.

Is there anyway that every idea of life after death can be correct? — TiredThinker

If we could find a way to get dead people to answer questions in an interview, that would be a help, but since dead people are completely unresponsive to questions due to them being dead we're stuck in a state of uncertainty; therefore if anyone speaks of life after death with a notion of certainty then you know, with certainty, they are full of bullshit. (so every idea of life after death share an equality in that they are all bullshit...)

(so every idea of life after death share an equality in that they are all bullshit...) — Mayor of Simpleton

You contradict yourself. First you say "with a notion of certainty", as opposed to just a plausible theory, like alternate universes. Now, suddenly and somehow, you attempt to cast any theories of a field you've clearly made up your mind on as "bollocks", to be polite.

So seeing as, by your own standards, any theory about an afterlife is nonsensical and to be dismissed, does that not include your own statement? Schrodinger's Cat. It's as alive as it is dead. Until?

You contradict yourself. First you say "with a notion of certainty", as opposed to just a plausible theory, like alternate universes. Now, suddenly and somehow, you attempt to cast any theories of a field you've clearly made up your mind on as "bollocks", to be polite. — Outlander

I fail to see where there's a plausible theory in play.

A notion of conjecture yes, but a theory: a coherent group of propositions formulated to explain a group of facts or phenomena in the natural world and repeatedly confirmed through experiment or observation... I don't see that as in play. Life after death is not a fact or phenomena of the natural world... it is simply conjecture.

Conjecture presented as certain without any evidence other than preference is bullshit (the same as bollocks... I'm not British, nor does the social construct of 'polite' enter into the picture).

No claim of certainty can be made that there is life after death nor that there is not life after death without evidence to back the claim. The latter was not the point of focus in the OP, so it was not the point being addressed.

As to the cat in the box, I agree... thus the cat cannot be said to be alive or dead; thus any claims of certainty either/or are bullshit.

What makes life worth living again and again, is really the question. It's more, why go through the routine of it, not just the fact that one can feel something positive at some points. It's the tawdry everydayness. I always bring it back that to live in a non-utopia and then to claim that it is good because it is not a utopia, has to be justified. It is not, without performing many contradictions, post-facto rationalizations for suffering and tedium that characterize life. We all know its one thing after the other. Its survival, comfort, entertainment, contingent harm, circular repetition. It just keeps going until death, ugh.

Maybe the carrot and stick obfuscates. It feels like you are reaching next levels of some game or gaining experience points. Head shake, head shake.

What makes life worth living again and again, is really the question. It's more, why go through the routine of it ... We all know its one thing after the other ... It just keeps going until death ... — schopenhauer1

And yet: so what? "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." :fire:

Finding this life worthwhile is a different matter from living with a belief in an afterlife. When religious believers encourage us to put our hope in an happiness in a life after death rather than encouraging us to find it in this one is missing the point.

Everyone has different life experiences and some know hell and some know both. I do experience periods of depression but do have peak experiences too, moments where I feel in touch with the transcendent.

If you get locked in feelings of monotony it is worth considering what you think would make you truly happy. I am not of the belief that happiness is bound to material goals or completely separate from it. Some people have material and social factors to bring pleasure but are still unhappy. Others go through hell by sheer lack, such as the homeless. Even then, a homeless person may experience a greater sense of heaven within than some others although as far as I see it sleeping outside in winter must be horrendous.

I guess the point I am making is that 'heaven' is an inner experience. There is no easy way to get to that. Pleasures and even antidepressants can lessen the experience of suffering but probably the spiritual teachers can lead the way to heaven within.But even this is not simplistic as our own fears and struggles can blind us when reading sacred literature.

Of course there are mind altering drugs, which can bring one to hell or heaven. But this was viewed by Rudolph Otto as profane rather than sacred mysticism.

I am sorry that I am not giving you any easy aid to the problem of monotony. All I can say is that it is possible that we may go through hell before heaven. Or, perhaps you have not been to hell, but whatever heaven is about somehow gaining access to higher states of consciousness pointed to by the mystics and, as their experiences show, this can be in life rather than after death.

If there is a well-proven fact in this world, it is the extrasensory perception during the state of clinical death. An inert body, with no heartbeat or any brain activity, suddenly awakens and describes, in great detail, what happened during his trance, not only in the room where he lay, but in the other rooms of the house or hospital, which from where he was he could not see even if he was awake, in good health and with his eyes open. This has been repeated so many times, and it has been attested by so many reputable scientific authorities, that only a complete ignorant in the matter can insist on remaining incredulous. But even some of those who recognize the impossibility of denying the fact are reluctant to draw the conclusion that it necessarily imposes: the limits of human consciousness extend beyond the horizon of bodily activity, including that of the brain. The reluctance to accept this shows that the “modern man” — the product of the culture that we inherited from the Enlightenment — has identified himself with his body to the point of feeling frightened and offended at the mere suggestion that his person is something else. It is evident that this is not just a conviction, an idea, but an incapacitating self-hypnotic trance, an effective block of perception.

The image of the self as something that resides in the body or identifies with it is fantastic, illusory, sick. It imposes limitations on consciousness that are by no means natural, much less necessary. All spiritual traditions in the world, all wisdom disciplines start with the obvious realization that the self is not the body, it is not “in” the body, but in a way it encompasses it as the supra-spatial transcends and encompasses the spatial (this is marked out by certain mathematical relationships that, in themselves, are nowhere in space).

Strictly speaking, a single episode of this type would be enough to completely refute with the nonsense that the brain, that is, the body, “creates” cognition, thought, consciousness. But the episodes are thousands, and the lack of interest of believers in this type of phenomena (more studied by atheists, New Age followers and Buddhists than by Catholics, Protestants, or even Jewish believers) denotes that the religious mind has already conformed to a diminished state of existence, in which the supracorporal soul, a fundamental condition of access to God, will only come into existence in the other world, through some magical transmutation of the bodily psyche, instead of already constituting in this life our most concrete, most substantive personal reality and more truthful, present and active in our most minimal acts as in our highest and most sublime experiences.

No one truly knows what is going to happen in the afterlife, assuming there is one, but if we don't know what's going to happen, then why not imagine the best possible scenario?

We do know what happens, actually, and we have the cadaver farms to prove it.

Gotta call bullshit. :mask:

If there is a well-proven fact in this world, it is the extrasensory perception during the state of clinical death. — bcccampello

1. "Clinical death" =! irreversible brain death.
2. Memories only can be formed (i.e. encoded in traces of stimuli-reconfiguring neurons) in a live brain with a functioning sensorium. This includes 'memories of perceptions - sensory or otherwise.
3. The term "extrasensory" is underdetermined and / or as incoherent as "disembodied" (woo-woo).
4. Not only not a "fact" - "well-proven" or inferred - not even a possible (i.e. self-consistent, conceptually coherent) state-of-affairs. (NB: "proof" pertains only to formal theorems and not to (alleged) matters-of-fact - vide Peirce, Wittgenstein, Popper, Haack, et al).

The whole area of altered states of consciousness and near-death experience gives us room for speculative, but lack of certainty.

The whole debate about the mind and body is important too. Are mental states dependent on a physical body? Or, we can ask whether the Eastern traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism correct in seeing the material world as an illusion?

Are we just bodies destined to collapse alongside our ego consciousness? Or, is the mystery of mind much more complicated? Perhaps, we are spirits, experiencing earthly lives, but part of a further complex plan, as the theosophists maintained.

Of course, all the belief in life after death maybe rubbish. But what is the ego we know so well? Are we fragments of evolving consciousness?

The Buddha was not really clear about whether this life is the only one, from my reading of the Buddhist perspective, but what does seem clear is that we are in need of enlightenment in the present form of our bodily existence.

We do know what happens, actually, and we have the cadaver farms to prove it. — NOS4A2

If physicalism is true, then yes we have proof of what happens in the afterlife. Nothing. If dualism is true, however, you've only shown what happens to the body and not the spirit or the mind.

Seems like a debate I don't want to get into.

If physicalism is true, then yes we have proof of what happens in the afterlife. Nothing. If dualism is true, however, you've only shown what happens to the body and not the spirit or the mind.

Seems like a debate I don't want to get into.

It would be a tough debate for the dualist, certainly. We can literally watch what happens to us after death, and can refer to the entire history of humanity to confirm it. I imagine one would have to invent a variety of invisible entities in order to convince himself.

["Isaac242;459797"]
You say that you don't want to get into this debate, but why? Are you afraid of the negative or positive possibilities of exploration?

It would be a tough debate for the dualist, certainly. We can literally watch what happens to us after death, and can refer to the entire history of humanity to confirm it. I imagine one would have to invent a variety of invisible entities in order to convince himself. — NOS4A2

Once again, assuming dualism is true, what makes you believe you can see one's spirit or mind in the afterlife? Unless there is some sort of physical connection between the spirit and one's body you could never know what happens. You can't see my spirit/mind just as I can't see yours.

You say that you don't want to get into this debate, but why? Are you afraid of the negative or positive possibilities of exploration? — Jack Cummins

Lack of available time.

Why is there lack of available time? What is more important?;We have all day and nights, unless we choose to sleep and be so immersed in the mundane. Perhaps you are lucky to be immersed in this way, but I have dark, sleepless nights in which I am condemned or free to wrestle with the big questions, especially life after death.

Is there anyway that every idea of life after death can be correct? — TiredThinker

Perhaps everyone could experience (or not experience anything) what they believe will happen or what they yearn for. I can't see how we can rule that out, though there's no evidence of this multi-afterlife ('multi' as in the multi in multiverse).

Once again, assuming dualism is true, what makes you believe you can see one's spirit or mind in the afterlife? Unless there is some sort of physical connection between the spirit and one's body you could never know what happens. You can't see my spirit/mind just as I can't see yours.

I don’t think one can see another’s spirit or mind because I do not think either exist.