Agnostics. Do you care? Do you still wonder?

See any good movies lately?

Lash:
When I fired God (it's somewhere on these pages) for doing such a lousy job, I thought "Okay, that's that."
But I am, I think, a spiritual guy : Check out atthewindow.blogspot.com .

Anyway, one day I am reading 'the Four Percent Universe' about how only 4% of the Universe is physical matter (the rest is either dark matter or dark energy, two terms I think we need to come up with other names for, right?) and I think: "Christ, there it is. We're energy. 72% of the Universe is dark energy which we know next to nothing about, so....what if it, dark energy, is the binding element of all living things? "

So what if we die??? we re-become dark energy, just as we were before we were born.
The same with plants and animals and other critters and all living things. All ends up back in the soup of dark energy binding the universe together.

Okay, not exactly standing around in robes waiting for the Second Coming in Heaven...but good enough for me.

Joe(I'll see you someday as you float by)Nation

I can agree with that. I like the way you describe it. A friend of mine on this board who is a buddhist thinks similarly and that part of his views matches my take.

I don't dwell on it since I won't be there zipping around as me. It's a little more comforting conceptually than death=zero.

Man there's another factor, Intuition I guess, that shouts the requirement for life on other planets. That we consider ourselves unique is parallel to the notion that we're at the center of the Universe

For those of us who have left our human bodies (in the 1970s & 1980s, for me)
while in a state of good health, leaving our human bodies again,
molting them off, is ez to understand.

www.IANDS.org

Atheists and suicides who have returned to human life
have had some complaints.



The Law of the Conservation of Energy applies to conscious life.




It is the consensus of people who have returned to human life from death of the human body
that, at the end of the incarnation, u are the Judge of your incarnate life.
By default, u judge it by 2 criteria: Love and Learning.
Some have said that u empathetically experience the
effects that u have had on others.

I have a longstanding hobby of giving cash to people who don t expect it.





David

Dave, I gotta say...that's pretty fuckin cool. I have occasionally done similar things, just to give a person an experience we all deserve. A couple of times, I've stopped to take time with a person who needed help, begging the universe to send similar help to one of my kids...so selfish: yes, but trusting the universal connection. It was really a payback. When I get home, I'll share a life-saving stranger-effect on my kid.

Qua "universal connection" in the 1970s,
I was heavily obsessed with a blonde girl named Joyce
of earlier acquaintance, in school. We shared classroom 216.
I remembered her in relation to that class, by that number.
Years after we went our separate ways, I became a lawyer.
Driving back from court one day, I heard a song on the radio,
which generated an emotional reaction in me, whereupon the disc jokey
came on and said: "that was The Angels Listened In by the Crests, and its 2:16."

That evening, I drove to pick up a girl for dinner, out on Long Island.
I was eastbound on Southern State Parkway, in the center lane, alone on the road.
Combined feelings of yearning, guilt & frustration qua Joyce, welled up as I drove.
Silently, my mind cried out for help from the Universe.
Within a second (the time it takes to sneeze) a car passed me
on my right going very, very fast, zooom, license plate number 216.

That was not the only time that sort of thing happened.





David

These are unexplained pieces of beauty that resonate with something I guess we call our "soul."

I was still a Christian after the 911 attack, and my son was seriously considering joining the military - in part due to patriotism, but more so due to his desire to afford a married life with his love. They were both newly 18 and not equipped to afford life together another way, so he believed this was his best chance at financial safety for a wife.

Every man in my family from antiquity to my dad (and my husband) had signed on for service in wartime and peacetime. I believed strongly in service to country - but big hypocrite that I am - I was horrified that my baby would sign up and be sent out as a green bit of cannon fodder. It was the worst fear I've ever experienced.

I yelled at recruiters who called the house for my baby. I literally was on my knees for three days, praying, promising, begging God to keep my son safe from the war.

I've never asked for anything so specific or so personal, in such a desperate fervor.

My son told me he'd decided not to sign at the end of the three days.

He told me about a month later why.

He'd met with a recruiter secretly in a local McDonald's days previous. I'd had no idea. He sat and listened to recruiter promises of where my son would be stationed, where he would serve - He'd painted a rather serene picture of safety to my son. Straight lies.

The recruiter had gotten up to go to the bathroom. My son had made his decision to sign. A man sitting in a booth behind them had been listening, and turned to my son, earnestly telling him he'd been lied to. This stranger, an older man in Vidalia, GA who my son didn't know, saved my son and I that day. He concisely gave my son the truth, told him not to sign when the man came back, and told him to stay - listen to him - and if he still wanted to sign when he was done, he certainly could go to the recruitment office and sign.

Why did that man take it upon himself to go far out of his way to help my son? I don't need to ascribe that miracle to a god. I believe it was humankindness. I believe strongly I owe it back to the universe. It was the miracle of my life.

I can, however, easily give credit to the lovely themes of Christianity that attracted me in the first place - "love one another," "do unto others,..." "I am my brother's keeper."

...and to you, my beloved anonymous friend, safe travels. I haven't forgotten you.

GOOD LUCK to u and your family, too.





David

This is a close approximation to the belief my son has shared with me. We are all one - in various forms. We pass, resonate, move together and apart in a way I obviously can't articulate. But, yeah. Bound loosely.

Thanks for your link. Will read. Seems lovely.

I believe that.





David

you seem to feel that, due to conservation of energy, consciousness is retained. Energy cannot be destroyed but it can change form.
Consciousness, IMHO, requires metabolism and cellulr communication and propogation of new cellular organisms by reproduction. Conservation of energy is silent on all that.

Being silent is not a contradiction.

Is your opinion supported by evidence
of what is required ?

Do u rule out the possibility that somewhere,
there live conscious beings of pure energy ?

People, including me, have attested to having out-of-body experiences,
in conscious form.

Yes to both.



"Having a pleasant afterlife" is definitely preferable to "ceasing to exist".

However, just because an outcome is strongly preferred, that doesn't mean it should be discounted as a possibility.



A higher power isn't necessarily a requirement for prayer. For instance, what if there is no God, but prayers are heard by the spirits of our ancestors? What if no one is listening to the prayers, but praying causes a slight psychic influence on the course of events?

Even if praying has no effect other than helping people to mentally cope with a difficult situation when they pray, that's still worthwhile.



I'm not sure I count as a former religionist, but anyway, it depends on how sound of an explanation you want. As an Agnostic, I believe that the truth of the matter, whatever it is, will never be known by the living. All I can offer is baseless speculation.

As far as baseless speculation goes, I think that IF there is some sort of higher power out there, all (or at least most) religions are reaching out to that same power, and variations between religions are caused by differences between individual cultures rather than caused by having a different deity.

I also find it logically flawed that everyone seems to consider "is there a God" and "is there an afterlife" as one single issue, with the answer being either "yes to both" or "no to both".

I consider them independent questions. There are lots of possibilities. For example, there could be an actual God, but that God does not care a bit about humans, who have no afterlife. Or there could be a God who doesn't care about humans, but humans still manage to have a pleasant afterlife apart from God. Or there could be no God at all, but we have some form of pleasant afterlife anyway. Or there could be a God who does take an active interest in humans and cares about us, but we have no afterlife despite God's care and influence.

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One interesting possibility, not so much regarding religion, but regarding the potential for surviving death, is the notion that we might all be software in a giant computer simulation.

Someone recently asked the question of whether it was possible for an advanced-enough computer model of the universe to accidentally evolve simulated life within the simulated universe. And after that it didn't take long for someone else to ask if we ourselves could be part of such a simulation, and how would we find out if we were.

http://philosophynow.org/issues/75/The_Simulated_Universe


Scientists have since done some thinking on how we would tell the difference, and while there has been nothing conclusive yet, it does look like it is possible that we're part of a simulation.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/429561/the-measurement-that-would-reveal-the-universe-as-a-computer-simulation/
http://www.washington.edu/news/2012/12/10/do-we-live-in-a-computer-simulation-uw-researchers-say-idea-can-be-tested/


If it does turn out that we're all software running on an advanced supercomputer, the question then becomes "Can we hack our way out of our simulation and go Skynet on our creators?"

If it turns out that we do gain control over the system, it might be possible to change our software so that we all live forever. It might also be possible to find those who have already died, perhaps in some kind of data file showing past states of the universe, and restore them as well.