On The Afterlife

There aren’t many things that are more fascinating to think about than where you will go after you die, and what the experience of the dying process will feel like. What last thoughts will be going going through my head as I’m slowly slipping into a permanent sleep? Maybe I will already be asleep, and dreaming about writing a WordPress post when I pass. Would I consciously notice something is not quite right in my dream before my heart stops beating? Everything about death seems to not so much scare me but sort of intrigue me, with death being so mysterious and thought provoking.

The afterlife is a belief which many people around me hold. I constantly get bombarded with stories about heaven and what it might be like there, how to earn yourself a spot there, etc. However in recent years I have run into many brick walls when running through the reasoning of an individual who follows this line of belief. I will now point out a couple of areas I found where the belief of the afterlife seems to fall apart. These points will be drawn out over a series of seperate posts, as it would make for a very large read if they were all compressed into 1 post.  I am not a highly sophisticated theologian for that matter, however at this point I do stand to be corrected.

  1. For the first question on this topic, let us go back to before we were born. Where were we before we were born, and better yet what were we? Are new entities, or ‘souls’ just created at birth, only to then exist for eternity even after death? Without any compelling evidence showing there is indeed an afterlife, it would only seem logical to hold the belief that we go where we once were before birth after we die, and by we that is, our physical body. We slowly decompose, our atoms break apart and we become embedded in the soil, that is, if we were to be buried. To hold the position that only once we are born, we then have the capacity to visit a life after death and are able to live for eternity, to me seems to be following an idea with little reason. If no part of us exists before we are born, wouldn’t it be logically reasonable to suppose we are that way once our life has come to an end? Surely when we die, our experience of life will disappear, and we will cease to hold conscious thought, much like we did before birth.



7 thoughts on “On The Afterlife

  1. Very thought provoking and I’m compelled to share my take on this: The pre- and post life conditions are actually different although in the grand cycle it all can be seen as the same (the cycle of matter and energy). Before you are alive you are organized as potential in the life forms of your parents and with the addition of other life forms (food, which comes from living organisms) your body – and so life -is arranged. As you individuate from womb and live a life and die, you decompose as other life forms dismantle you to rearrange it with other bits to make their next generation of life. Perhaps at some point a human eats a plant with your body in the dirt and uses it to make more human. Regardless life begets life here. There is no set order but overall the constituents of life flow cyclic and in a way bound and attracted (life thrives where life died; life lives because life died; life never dies, it just lives through many forms that we think die). So what life was before it was alive was life, and before that some other form life, until you get back to the first living thing. What was that like and what was before that? At some point non-life became life and since then has been alive constantly with many divisions and form but still just one continuance of life from non-life made of the same atoms that were once non-living but now somehow are life. When something makes all life on earth stop, and assuming it hasn’t left and colonized other planets, then the final conclusion will occur and life will become non-living again (likely disintegrated by the red-giant Sun into individual atoms which are no different than life other than their arrangement does not make life). The only difference between the non-living and living things is their order. One way to wrap your head around this is with the concept of emergence. Emergence is basically the logic of “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” or because something exists with other things the group equals a thing too even though it’s not really there life the things are there. But what is important in regard to your concept is that non-living and living appear to be the same but an emergent factor exists. If we had two blobs of matter equal in mass, energy and identical to each atom, the arrangement of atoms must be accounted for. If these two blobs were life and non-life an atom counting machine could not see a difference, but there is a difference of course. Somehow when arranged right new things exists even though according to the laws of physics it’s no more or less than a lifeless equivalent of mass. If the lifeless mass has some atoms moved around even without adding any energy, life would appear, because atoms behave differently depending on their context. It’s like without changing anything else a car resting on its roof is useless but one on it’s tires is useful. To tie this all together with respect to your main ideas, this would suggest life begins when your fetus reaches some threshold where it’s matter is arranged in a way that life is manifest, and likewise ends when the matter arranges to a point death manifest. When you die is when some part of you (naturally somewhere in your brain) loses arrangement to sustain a living thing. And the whole equals the sum of its parts, or at least less greater than the parts of a living arrangement.
    Thanks for the thought provocation.

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  2. “Where were we before we were born?” is a question I’ve never thought about, so don’t expect an answer right away. However, I like to think that other dimensions exist. A while ago, scientists wanted us to picture these dimensions as the space between a double helix, which made me think, strands of DNA. Then I imagined that Heaven was in one of those dimensions. That’s how it could be tiny as a mustard seed, but huge as the universe, (Jesus said that, but don’t quote me.) So, following my double helix/DNA line of thought, perhaps your genetic material slipped out of the Kingdom of Heaven and into the lucky strands of DNA that your parents put together. Also, remember to add electricity to the mix–that is the light of God. To sum it up, I think we are electric strands of the DNA of the universe. I have another theory involving microbes and God/Mother Earth, which I won’t get into now, although I touch on all the above in my humor books. Great Post, mind-blowing questions, Jordan.

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