I may be one of the few who won't fault you for saying that. I don't know that you're wrong. I just no longer believe without some evidence.

I've long believed that the reason people who are dying slowly accept death is that as the brain shuts down the awareness itself begins to dim. Have you ever been so sick that you didn't care if you lived or died? Or recieved a blow to the head that left you nearly senseless, aware but not caring? I thing a few synapses going off after the main shutdown isn't enough to leave us aware.

Of course there's that old Tales From The Crypt episode in which a dead doctor is still aware and feeling as his brother starts to cut his head open...

Personally I believe there is a God. Beyond that is pure speculation.

@Steve

I've taken lots of blows to the head and had a lot of concussions. Roughstock riding will do that to you, but it's odd you should mention that because it was an incident where I had a concussion that started me wondering about what I mentioned.

I fell off this horse and got a concussion from hitting the fence on the way down. I don't remember anything for hour after that, but everyone said I thought I was still on the horse, or just about to ride. It wasn't until I started feeling better and bent down to take off my spurs that everything suddenly came rushing back and for a brief moment, I was falling off that horse again. In reality, I was just falling on my face. Weird, huh?

I'm not sure I can agree with evolutionist/big bang types either. Kent Hovind has pretty much discredited them in my opinion. He brings up many good points - especially about how inaccurate carbon dating is.

I'm sticking with God and my faith that men and women didn't evolve from monkeys! I have to believe in an afterlife because it's too depressing to not do so. I mean really, who wants to die and just see nothing, hear nothing, be nothing? I guess you really wouldn't be able to say it's bad or good to be like that since you'd really be nothing at all. You just wouldn't exist anymore.

But while I'm here and able to think scary thoughts about things like this - it just depresses the hell out of me so I usually don't. Just have to have faith that there's going to be more after life ends. Plus, it's always nice to think about being reunited with lost family and friends.

I don't get involved with the arguments one way or the other. Any good scientist knows that today's pet theory may be tomorrow's joke. That said, I've never seen a conflict between the Bible and evolution, only with the people who insist that Bishop Ussher's timeline has to be taken literally. People who "prove" evolution wrong accept the 'Young Earth' idea without question, even though it has no scientific basis at all. Evolution scientists look a the facts and try to form a theory that best fits them. Intelligent Design believers start with an account they hold sacred and only accept facts that fit. Evolution may or may not be wrong, but I see no reason to put my faith in science that only looks at some of the evidence.

I don't fault you for that a bit. It's good to believe in something, and sometimes I wish I still did. My problem is that no matter how much I may want to, I see no evidence that would lead an impartial observer to conclude that there's a god, much less an after life. I'm not an atheist, as that would require me to actively believe there was no God, and I don't know that either.

I would love to have discussions with the great men of history, and see what they think now. Unfortunately I also believe that if the Christians are right, and putting your faith in Jesus is the only salvation, then two of the men I admire most - Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin - are quite likely burning in hell as we speak.

That's what depresses me.

Life after death? I will be perfectly honest... I am more terrified of people than I am of an empty nothingness after I die. I don't think there will be an empty nothingness, but if there is an afterlife I hope that I am strong enough to stick around and stand watch over the weak. I owe my angels that much.

In principle this is what our life is about for several decades, once we have ended our growth :O:

The clinical death criterion depends on what they call "brain death", that is a person is declared dead when there is no more brain activity that coluld be measured. While there are rare diseases/syndroms when people will give an appearance of being dead, only to find that in Edgar Allan Poe style they wake up inside a coffin, this is extremely rare. You may want to change your last will regarding being buried with a cellphone, always. :D

This is a bit OT, but anyway, my idea of heaven is: being God. Not in terms of having any power, or the ability to do anything in (or to) the world, but rather just being able to understand it and everything in it, including my former self! It would be awesome if after I died I became all-seeing (omniscient?) and understood everything.

@Steve
It's a bit of a bummer when that knowledge/belief sledgehammer hits you in the face, eh?

I fail to see why if I did not exist before I was born, why I would continue to exist after death. I am more than comfortable with the notion that there is nothing after death as, (unless you subscribe to reincarnation), there was nothing before birth.

Looking at the world and universe around me the fact that entropy can be physically proven is enough evidence for me to believe that my existence is subject to the law of entropy. Creation does not guarantee long or even endless existence, in fact endless existance would be abhorrent to me in the same way a Groundhog Day scenario would be.

As to heaven, I believe i am already there, I have a great life, great wife, great children and the ability to experience life's richness. In fact I think the traditionally held christian concept of heaven would also be abhorrent as the thing that makes life so interesting and worth living is the risks you must take in living it. Without that risk is existence worthwhile? Not in my opinion.

Does God exist? Yes. In as much as there is a belief that actually forms that existence. Is there a physical being that is god? Well that is yet to be proven.

The early Christians knew the idea of reincarnation, but I do not know how they understood the concept: as a superior essence lasting on, or an individual soul moving on from body to body. There are religion-scientists and historians who imply that maybe Jesus, before he reached the age at which the bible starts to tell tories of him, maybe was travelling to India and came into contact with Buddhist concepts. That may very well be possible, since it would explain why there are so many parallels between Buddhist and Jesus' ideas (and I mean Jesus, not what the church made of him, between the church and buddhist view of the world obviously there is no parallel at all).

Buddha denied the idea of an individual "soul" that survives the body and begins a new cycle once the former body has been destroyed. Man is not a host and soul is not a Goa'uld worm. :) However, buddha hinted at the existence of an existence that must be understood in a higher context, a true self that in basic is a One-ness, doesn't get born and thus cannot die, and of whose existence all forms are just a temporary reflections interacting with each other and giving birth to a dance of colours and shadows, each such "reflection" of the higher Oneness not so much being just a part of it but being "it" in completeness, though no reflection has any substance and existence in itself. These reflections, that we call the world, the living beings, the things, are empty in themselves, they show us a world that the way we perceive it is just a delusion - that delusion exist, we see it and we fall for it, but what it shows us in content, is not real, and has no substance. It's like a fata morgana.

In the end, if it is something like this, we all must not find any spiritual fullfillment or justification for our existence, for since we are already "there" (since we, the reflections that we are, are the One-ness anyway), we must not and cannot go anywhere anyway. We can just trouble the water by shaking the waves without need, believing in the false idea that we must "reach" something and must try to get into a "heaven" because we want to avoid a "hell". Heaven and hell are two states of human mind that man forms up - all by himself, and there is nobody and nothing promising him reward or threatening him penalty for doing so. We can trouble the water and add to the dance of reflections we call "the world", if we want. But we could as well let it be.

This is my understanding of "sin": to lose or to reject this knowledge about our already present, always existent "higher" origin, and to start making things comolicated and worse by trying to acchieve a solvation that we already are embedded in, and never had left: the salvation of understanding who, or better: what we are, and what we are not. Sin is - lacking insight, lacking knowledge, lacking own experience. We mess up things by your egos' narcissim, and our intellect running amok since we do not keep it under control. Our clever ideas and fantastic conceptions run an eons-long olympic competetion of who can run the fastest, jumps the widest, reaches the highest. Our egos claim medals for out acchievements in this championship, and it makes us believe that once we have enough medals, we will be saved and will be given access to a paradise, "paradise" understood materialistically or religiously. Not only relgions are prone to falling for this trap - scientists and social reformers can be that prone, too. The result can be unjutsified, uncritical optimism into materialistic ideas and concepts, from the hedonism of the capitalistic world to the uncritical implementation of possibly dangerous technologies that do not get crticially questioned because they are new, and "new" makes them attractive. Where all this happens at the cost of our exploration of whom and what we really are, then nothing good usually comes from it, that way we mess up the world we live in and harm ourselves in the best of intentions. It's just that these our intentions maybe are reaching too short.

Spirituality in my understanding is trying to understand the nature and reason of our existence by introspection, by observing how our minds call the world that we believe to perceive into existence, and how "mind" manifestates itself. This is the path of experiencing ourselves. Science tries to make conclusions on the nature of reality and things existing by describing them empirically, checking for patterns that may reveal to us why and how things are, where they come from, and where they go. Spirituality is about going into the thing itself, science is about describing the thing from the outside as best as is possible, and from the outer appearance make conclusions on the inner reason. Objectivity and a lack of sentimentalities are virtues in both approaches.

Religion is neither the one, nor the other, it is hallucinating and fantasy. It obstructs the path of introspection and own experience by raising a dogma that should neither be examined nor questioned, but simply should be believed and taken for granted although there is no objective justification for doing so, it just promises to be a shortcut of greater comfort and easiness, to bypass the more difficult path of spirituality and/or science. You are spiritual for your own well-being and by changing yourself becoming of benefit for others as well. But you are being talked into being religious not for your own well-being, but the interest of others for gaining control and power over people, inclduing yourself. Spirituality and (institutional) religion (dogmas) are antagonists, seen that way.

We all are dreams within one dream. Dust and shadows, winds in the leaves, the waves on the ocean's surface. Stick to the things in life as if they are substantial and real, and you will become a prisoner and miss the meaning of it all, being blind and fall to despair over the existential questions of life. Let it all go (even your desire to let things go ;) ), and become free. We shall deal with the things of life as if we do not own them, not craving for either poverty nor wealth, neither desiring them nor refusing them, but taking things for what they are: having no substance in themselves, being mere reflections of what lies behind, sometimes, rarely, shining through between the lines of reality, although it is always there.

A later teacher of mine, running a taoistic-buddhist centre in Germany, once wrote in a book this (tranlsated from the German):

The letting go of all ideas of God and all religious thoughts one is fond of, is an absolute prerequisite for true mystical experience. […] But experience has shown that the letting go of personal idols and religious symbols is espe-cially difficult for those, whose personality structure shows the strongest egocentricity and focussing on themselves. They are afraid to lose everything, and therefore they cling to their small, mortal self with all their might. When one is looking closer to it, one will recognize that most people are not about a living experience of the divine essence, but are more about a maintaining of their personal ideas of the god they are fond of, and about wallowing religious feelings. But true mystic has nothing to do with emotional rapture and inappropriate holiness, these belong to the realm of mysticism, which only is a distortion of true and pure mystic. […] Man in general tends to fooling himself and looking for a short-cut, a religion of superficial consolation, an ideal world without problems and challenges, where everything falls into its’ correct place… […] The clinging to superficial forms and religious practices is one of the greatest dangers on the spiritual way. They are shackles which bind us to signs and symbols which actually should only show us the way inwards. Therefore every symbol shows towards something that is beyond itself and that cannot be named or displayed. To go beyond religious signs and symbols therefore does not mean to refuse these symbols, but to strive for what they are pointing at.

Interesting, however what if there really is no meaning to existence? A first question, (to which I d not pretend to have an inkling of an answer), is why does there have to be a meaning to existence?

Why cannot it just be?

Does the entire universe exist for a reason other than the fact that something happened to create it? That something may have simply been an explosion, caused by what and to what purpose?

These are the questions that man has puzzled over to millenia and yet noone is any closer to have a clue about it than when these questions were first asked.

I cannot pretend to have any of the answers, however I am also comfortable in knowing that I may never know the answers and that when I die I will cease to exist. Just as everything else in the universe does.

Indeed. You will find in Taoism, Buddhism and christian mysticism the idea that "it" simply is, and that this "being there" already is sufficient meaning in itself. the one spirit/mind/God/ultimate-ground always was, is and will be, it is no object of space and time, it simply "is", and thus it cannot die since it never got born.

Of course this paragraph is just a deformation of the reality behind it again, a product of my intellect distorting the "real-ness" behind it by trying to press it into words in an attempt to express it. But words are just a finger pointing at the moon, not the moon itself.

Something...? ;)

I personally never liked the big Bang theory, it opens more questions than it answers. To me it just is the best idea science currently can show up with on the basis of what it has collected in info so far. But in principle it just is a mental and intellectual trap, leading us into a dead-end of our old conceptual thinking we are so fond of.

there were some about whom we tend to say that they got closer to the reasons - by own experience of it. Buddha's enlightenment. Jesus being understood to be the son of a god, a description that links him to a higher reason again. Maybe these are just symbols. however, other states of mind can be experienced, sometimes they struck a person out of the blue, sometimes they seem to come as the causal result of a long, disciplined meditation practice. However, such experiences have the potential to impress and influence persons significantly, and change all their life afterwards, and their state of mind and mental attitude and the way they approach things.

Yes. Maybe you just ask too many questions. Isn't it enough that you just can sit and feel your body taking in the next breathing? Let your ego be, for a while, and tame your intellect a bit like you just tone down the volume of the radio. Realise how it feels to simply be. If you realise that, you embrace all universe in that very moment when you do. Space is just a conception like clay is a tool for the child to play with and form figures from it which then become it's whole playing universe and only reality for a while. Linear time - is a delusion human mind creates all by itself. We calculate the path of the balls in billiard, because that helps to win the match. But when the match is over, we stop calculating billiard balls, for the world and our life is no billard table. So it is with concepts of time and space as well. They are crooks used by our intellect.

Joseph Campbell used to say that people often talk about searching for "the meaning of life" when what they are really looking for is the experience of being fully alive.

Only humans (as far as we know) seem inclined to ascribe a pre-ordained meaning to their existence, as if there needed to be some grand eternal supernatural point to it all. Life just is: there is no point, beyond being alive, other than the aims and purposes that we adopt or create for ourselves. Which ideally should arise from and add to that experience of being alive as the unique individual that each one of us is.

In one of the gospels that didn't make it into the church-approved canon - the gospel of Thomas - when Jesus is asked about when the Kingdom of Heaven will come, he is reported to have given a much different answer than the one the Powers That Be allowed into the official version.

He said, "It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, 'Look, here!' or 'Look, there!' Rather, the Father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don't see it."

When is eternity? Where is "heaven"? It's here, it's now, if you can see it already immanent in the world as well as transcendent of it. So is hell - if that's what you see, if that's the world that you make for yourself.

There is a Zen saying that when one person becomes enlightened, the entirety of existence becomes enlightened. What has changed about the entirety of existence? Nothing, except that the entirety of existence for that individual is what s/he perceives it to be, nothing more and nothing less. When that perception is enlightened, so is the world - for that individual. The kingdom of heaven is spread out upon the earth - and s/he can see it.

Kent Hovind has had all of his stuff debunked, check out Thunderf00t on YT.

:salute: Couldn't have said it any better. And Campbell, he was a really great mind, really.

Here are two more quotes that I like very much. the first is by Eugen Drewermann, a former theologican and psychotherapeut who came into massive conflicts with the church and was kind of banned therefore. In one book he wrotes this sentence that I never forgot again since I stumbled over it:

"Denn dieses vermögen wir Menschen gerade im Angesicht des Todes: uns auszuspannen bis zum Horizont, weit zu werden bis an die Enden der Welt, und also den Tod zu besiegen indem wir begreifen wer wir selber eigentlich sind." - "Because this we humans are able to achieve right in the face of death: to expand ourselves up to the horizon, to become wide until the edge of the world, and so to defeat death by realising who we really are." - E. Drewermann: "Mut zu Leben. in: Seelsorge im 20 Jahrhundert"

the other is from one of my absolute most favourite movise of all times, Terence Malick's "A thin red line". There, the narration voice from the off says this:

"One man looks at a dying bird, and thinks there is nothing but unanswered pain. But death's got the final word. It's laughing at him. Another man sees the same bird, feels the glory. Feels something smiling through him."

And in the same movie, the final scene at the end of the film ends like this, after all the horror and all the beauty that just had been seen:

"Oh my soul, let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes! Look out at all the things you made! All things shining!"

A fantastic, brutal, fragile, horryfying, beautiful, humane, spiritual movie. If you don't know it, go watching it. Stuff like this you see in the movies only every ten or twenty years or so.