Afterlife?

@hightor,

hightor wrote:

my possessions will be carted of to the dump,

An estate sale would be a much better option -- especially if you have anything that is valuable.

If the mere preservation of valuable items doesn't interest you, think of it as a form of recycling to help protect the environment.

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@oralloy,

Quote:

Frank Apisa wrote:
That is unfortunate, because I dislike ignoring anyone, but some problems occurred in the past that made the move the best option.

oralloy said:
The "problems" in question are the mere fact that I do not hate Mr. Trump.

It IS amazing the effect that Trump had on some people. They hated him so much they actually thought that zombie was a better choice. Or maybe they figured 'cookie girl' would take the helm when the zombie got double tapped.

Not completely sure, but I think it was my pointing out Frank's glaring inconsistencies that got me ignored.

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@Mame,

Mame wrote:

....I've never understood why people cling to those negative and useless feelings.

Well, I'm personally frightened of being wiped out of existence, no matter what the circumstances. Certainly most people fear death. Most people fear death so much that they cling to a fairy tale about being taken to a magical land.

I strongly suspect that you fear death too and this stuff you're pitching is drivel.

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@oralloy,

oralloy wrote:

hightor wrote:
No, but it gives you a perspective which may enable you to come to terms with your fate and lessen your anxiety.

It is our fate to die.

The idea that it is our fate to cease to exist when we die is merely atheist religious belief.

No, it's not. The body looks like a machine. Certainly doctors treat it as though it were a machine, not with magic. When someone dies from age, or disease, or injury, his body stops working. It appears that the machine just broke. Because the body appears to be a machine, I believe it is one. Like any scientist, I will change my belief as soon as there is a repeatable test which contradicts it. That's not what religion does.

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I just got though reading a book called Miracles From Heaven. It's about a young girl who suffered from pseudo- obstruction motility disorder, a rare, painful, incurable, life threatening illness. Then something happened that put her life in jeopardy. During that time she said she went to heaven and sat on Jesus' lap. Jesus told her everything would be just fine. She wanted to stay there with Jesus, but He told her it wasn't her time yet and she had to go back. The fire dept. managed to rescue her and get her out of the trap she had fallen into . The incredible thing is from that moment on she started to be healed of the incurable disease that she'd had until she no longer suffered from it and was just fine.
My friend has a problem. Her body doesn't produce cortisone. She has to take medication. When they first learned of this she grew very ill and her parents rushed her to the hospital. At one point she told me she was floating above the room looking down on the medical team working fervently to save her life. She said during this time she saw her dead grandmother who told her she had to go back because it wasn't her time -and then she was back in her body.
Norman Vincent Peale tells the story of a person who was dying. Just before they died they opened their eyes wide and said Uncle what are you doing here? (I think it was an uncle, but don't remember exactly) It seems this relative had died about a few minutes earlier. There was no way they could have known that.
There are many unexplainable things that happen in this world. I suppose you could dismiss them as poppycock, but it's these things that I ponder when I think about something that might be beyond what we see and know.

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@hightor,

Bulmabrief isn’t worth the time of day. You're not going to impress anyone by sinking to their levels.

Gullible means easily fooled, credulous a dupe. You can fanny about with definitions as much as you like but there’s no getting around the fact that calling someone gullible implies they’re stupid.

You’ve not taken the position of someone who sees no evidence of the supernatural and therefore cannot believe in it, which I have no problem with by the way.

You have stated that those who do believe do so because they’re not as smart as you. That’s what you said when you called such people gullible.

I’m not talking about hate mongering bigots like bulmabriefs who try to use scripture to justify their bigotry, I’m talking about decent, intelligent people like Rev Richard Cole.

Your tone seems to have softened slightly but at the end of the day you’re dividing people into groups, instead of sheep and goats, it’s those who are as smart as you and everyone else.

It’s the same argument Reasoning Logic used.

There is a TV programme over here called Room 101, based on Orwell’s 1984, celebrities are brought on to say what they would put in room 101, the worst place in the world.

Comedian Frankie Boyle, who is an atheist, put professional atheists in there, people who constantly mock and ridicule those who believe. Boyle pointed out the priests in South America who stood up to oppressive governments and many lost their lives as a result. Priests like Oscar Romero were murdered by right wing governments, and people like that do not deserve to be insulted by the likes of Ricky Gervais.

In the end it doesn’t matter what people believe unless they preach hate and division like bulmabriefs, and you have a choice, you can be another hate merchant like them or you can try to see what unites us instead.

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@bulmabriefs144,

Why Do People Die?
The Bible’s answer
It’s natural to wonder why people die, especially when we lose someone close to us. The Bible says: “The sting producing death is sin.”—1 Corinthians 15:56.

Why do all people sin and die?
The first humans, Adam and Eve, lost their lives because they sinned against God. (Genesis 3:17-19) Death was the only possible outcome of their rebellion against God, for with him is “the source of life.”—Psalm 36:9; Genesis 2:17.

Adam passed on the defect of sin to all his descendants. The Bible says: “Through one man sin entered into the world and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men because they had all sinned.” (Romans 5:12) All people die because they all sin.—Romans 3:23.

How death will be eliminated
God promises a time when “he will actually swallow up death forever.” (Isaiah 25:8) To remove death, he must eliminate its root cause, which is sin. God will do this through Jesus Christ, who “takes away the sin of the world.”—John 1:29; 1 John 1:7.

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@izzythepush,

izzythepush wrote:

Comedian Frankie Boyle, who is an atheist, put professional atheists in there, people who constantly mock and ridicule those who believe. Boyle pointed out the priests in South America who stood up to oppressive governments and many lost their lives as a result. Priests like Oscar Romero were murdered by right wing governments, and people like that do not deserve to be insulted by the likes of Ricky Gervais.

I agree with this, but...

izzythepush wrote:

In the end it doesn't matter what people believe unless they preach hate and division like bulmabriefs, and you have a choice, you can be another hate merchant like them or you can try to see what unites us instead.

How is Bulmabriefs preaching hate and division?

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@Brandon9000,

Brandon9000 wrote:

No, it's not.

All religious zealots insist that their faith is reality and everything else is inferior. Your atheism is no better than any other religion.

Brandon9000 wrote:

The body looks like a machine. Certainly doctors treat it as though it were a machine, not with magic. When someone dies from age, or disease, or injury, his body stops working. It appears that the machine just broke. Because the body appears to be a machine, I believe it is one. Like any scientist, I will change my belief as soon as there is a repeatable test which contradicts it. That's not what religion does.

Indeed it isn't what religion does, which is why treating the body like a machine does not address the question of whether or not there is an afterlife.

1 Reply

@Brandon9000,

Quote:

The body looks like a machine.

Good for you. Study it enough and you will be convinced it IS a machine.
Now decide whether you believe machines of that complexity design and assemble themselves.
I haven’t seen any evidence that they do.

1 Reply

@izzythepush,

Quote:

You're not going to impress anyone by sinking to their levels.

Does anyone think what they say here will "impress" people?

Quote:

You’ve not taken the position of someone who sees no evidence of the supernatural and therefore cannot believe in it, which I have no problem with by the way.

But that is my position. Laughing

Quote:

You have stated that those who do believe do so because they’re not as smart as you.

No, that's what you said. I've never considered gullibility a mark of stupidity; it actually denotes a measure of trust. That's how cons work, and intelligent people are conned all the time. (I explained my position earlier and I never insinuated that anyone was stupid.)

Quote:

In the end it doesn’t matter what people believe unless they preach hate and division like bulmabriefs, and you have a choice, you can be another hate merchant like them or you can try to see what unites us instead.

Do you really think I'm a hate-mongerer because I disagree with a few people about the likelihood of an afterlife on an obscure thread on a message board? So differences of opinion automatically mean that hatred is involved? Do you really think that global peace and harmony will in any way be affected when I break down and tearfully admit that there is indeed a good basis to believe in life after death? I don't know how many people are getting killed because they believe in life after death but if I can reign in these alleged bands of killer atheists by recanting my tentative conclusions on the topic I'll give it some thought.

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@Leadfoot,

Quote:

There are occasions when a hallucinogenic can temporarily free you from the insidious mental rut that this society demands.

Now that's one things I feel every person does deserve — at least one good psychedelic experience.

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@hightor,

No, I have pointed out that you are using the same tactics as hate mongers by dismissing those whose beliefs don’t match your own.

You don’t call them evil or undeserving, you heavily imply that they only believe that because they’re not smart enough to see the “truth.”

1 Reply

@Frank Apisa,

Quote:

A "tentative conclusion" is a belief. Nothing more; nothing less.

Wrong.

Quote:

Tentative:
adj. Not fully worked out, concluded, or agreed on; provisional.
adj. Indicating a lack of confidence or certainty; hesitant.
Based on or consisting in trial or experiment; experimental; empirical.

Quote:

Belief:
1. The mental act, condition, or habit of placing trust or confidence in another: My belief in you is as strong as ever.
2. Mental acceptance of and conviction in the truth, actuality, or validity of something: His explanation of what happened defies belief.
3. Something believed or accepted as true, especially a particular tenet or a body of tenets accepted by a group of persons.

1 Reply

@hightor,

If you type gullible into word hippo looking for synonyms one that comes up is foolish or stupid.

Those are the connotations the word has regardless of what you intended when you used it.

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@izzythepush,

Quote:

No, I have pointed out that you are using the same tactics as hate mongers by dismissing those whose beliefs don’t match your own.

There's nothing wrong with having differing beliefs and discussing them. Trying to smooth off all the sharp edges and pretend everyone agrees about everything is not the secret to global peace and social justice. I can remember you being pretty dismissive when people attacked the NHS.

Quote:

You don’t call them evil or undeserving, you heavily imply that they only believe that because they’re not smart enough to see the “truth.”

No, I only imply that they either don't ask the same questions as I do or that if they do, they arrive at different conclusions. It has nothing to do with being smart or not being smart. It has nothing to do with hate-mongering.

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@izzythepush,

Quote:

If you type gullible into word hippo looking for synonyms one that comes up is foolish or stupid.

Synonyms don't define a word. And intelligent people are still conned, all the time.

Cambridge says

Quote:

easily deceived or tricked, and too willing to believe everything that other people say

So okay, I used the wrong word at should have said that the captain of the airliner was "likely to be accepting of what he'd been taught and had a tendency to believe what other people say".

1 Reply

@hightor,

You didn’t say that though, and what you said betrays how you feel.

And you are a bit sneering of people of Faith.

We have a completely different view of the crashing pilot. You see him as an airline captain, presumably with a load of passengers. I see a lone spitfire pilot going down during the Battle of Britain. That’s probably because I grew up where most of it happened. WW2, particularly the Battle of Britain, still loomed pretty big in Kent back then.

1 Reply

@oralloy,

I believe that the body is a machine because it appears to be one. Organs function by electro-chemical processes which are capable of being understood and interacted with. At some point it breaks. Believing something because it appears to be true isn't zealotry.

Scientists function by gathering evidence, uniting it in a theory which explains it, then performing tests to see if it behaves as it would if the theory were true. Scientists do not believe things for which there is no evidence. Give me one single piece of evidence that there's an afterlife.

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@Leadfoot,

Leadfoot wrote:

Quote:
The body looks like a machine.

Good for you. Study it enough and you will be convinced it IS a machine.
Now decide whether you believe machines of that complexity design and assemble themselves.
I haven’t seen any evidence that they do.

I presume you've never heard of the Theory of Evolution. That provides an adequate explanation.

1 Reply

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