Atheists?

[Ryan M.]

Originally Posted by Mike Ciance

• the common idea of an afterlife is that when we die our "spirit" move on to another life, but what is our "spirit"?
• if a spirit is supposed to be everything non-physical about us
  • how would our memory be transfered, since our memory is stored as physical information in our brain?
  • our personality is also the product of what is in our brain, would we lose that too?
  • since everything that makes us "us" is stored physically in our brain, would our "spirit" just be a blank slate consisting of nothing but our stream of consiousness?
  • if so,
    • how could the supposed "final judgement" be passed upon all of these theoretically identical entities?
    • would this even count as an afterlife, or is it just "recycling" the soul?
• if a spirit is supposed to be an imprint of our mind, rescued from our body before death
  • what happens to the brain-damaged? are they eternally cursed to a less enjoyable afterlife?
  • what about those who are braindead entirely? would they be able to experience their afterlife at all?
  • what about people who die because their brain is destroyed? are they lost too?

i personally think that people believe in an afterlife because they are afraid of ceasing to exist when they die. i don't think that is really something to be afraid of.

The problem with that argument is that your assuming that the spirit or soul or whatchamacallit is somehow seperate from you. Jonathan touched on this, but think about it this way.

Looking at it from an aethistic/no intelligent designer view point: say that, several billion years ago, a singularity decided to explode. (We won't go into why the heck it did that.) Everything from the moment that singularity started to expand to now has been governed by the laws of physics. That means that, through only physics, the Earth was formed, the first life was formed, that life somehow underwent billions of years of evolution, and eventually we ended up with you.

Everything that has happened to you and will happen to you is the result of physics. This thread's thoughtful, insightful posts are the result of how the neurons in your head fired. What you "perceive" as thought isn't thought; it's just physics.

Basically, I feel that your spirit/soul is actually "you." It governs what your body does, what you think, etc. Maybe the brain is a temporary storage vessel for your life's events, but your mind and your soul are connected, so a brain damaged person might lose brain functionality in this life, but in the next they'll get a new body (assuming the Christian perspective) and they won't have the same problems. I don't know if they'd remember (depending on the type of brain damage) what they went through while they lacked full brain functionality, but it wouldn't be a hinderance in the next life. The brain's information on your life events isn't "copied" at the end of your life. It's probably more similar to (going to the computer analogy) a RAID 1 setup, IE a full, running copy of your life experiences. I don't know how that information is "stored," but there are a lot of other things I don't know...

[Mike]

From what I understand from my couple years of CCD lessons, is although many people think heaven is a tangible place, it's really just a state of being closer to God. Therefore, if you pray, you are in heaven.