ILX Religiosity and Spirituality and Agnosticity and Atheicity Poll

been thinking a lot about this recently unfortunately because my son was, as i'm calling it, "touched by death" for the first time recently. he's 7 and another kids in his first grade class said he was going to bring a gun to school and shoot him. everything is fine (HAHAGAG!!) but he's been really obsessed with death. it's like a whole new dark hole opened up for him to venture down. when we lay in bed at night he gets upset, not about him dying, but about me or his mom. my wife and i are atheist but both grew up religious and my son went to a catholic daycare, so his first questions were about heaven and if we will be together again. so while i agree that "answers about the afterlife" is not the sole purpose of religion, it's definitely a strong element.

i personally think this all happens in our brain somewhere. didn't they locate some unique part of the brain that lights up when someone's having a "religious" experience? i've also been reading about how in the final moments before your brain shuts down, there's an abnormal amount of brain activity that has been observed. they think this is where most near death experiences come from. i love the idea of my brain going into a sort of learned shutdown mode where it comforts you as you go

To clarify my point, in my opinion, the origin of supernatural belief comes primarily from attempts to explain the unknowable, and death is significant because it is more than any other thought experiment completely inconceivable to actually imagine not existing from a first person perspective.

"What is death like?" interpreted as "what is that experience like?" makes no sense to answer if you in fact no longer exist. The cliche and accurate "it's like before you were born" is also something you didn't experience either so it doesn't really address the question, at least not in the way that the people asking the question are craving. Therefore most answers all default to having existing as a prerequisite, even the "it's just total blackness/silence", because you have to exist to perceive those sensations.

Since it is so difficult to NOT imagine a scenario where we continue to exist in some way or another, all of the "where do we go" "why do we go there" "what force manages this other plane of existence" "is the force intelligent like us" "what are the circumstances that dictate that existence" very quickly follow, answers are hypothesized and then the lore is extended to tie into explanations of the rest of our living existence, and this is how I believe all religions were and are formed.

In short, I never meant to say it was the "sole purpose" of religion, just a main part of the way in which religious belief is conjured.

xp my son got the same way for a while - he kept asking what happens after you die, and thought it unfathomable that I somehow did not know. I guessed that maybe you come back as someone else. He said if he comes back he hopes he gets the same mom and dad, so that's nice.

i personally think this all happens in our brain somewhere. didn't they locate some unique part of the brain that lights up when someone's having a "religious" experience? i've also been reading about how in the final moments before your brain shuts down, there's an abnormal amount of brain activity that has been observed. they think this is where most near death experiences come from. i love the idea of my brain going into a sort of learned shutdown mode where it comforts you as you go

I've read about this a lot too. I know a lot of skeptics point to this as evidence of NDEs not signifying anything but I'm not convinced yet. first of all, aren't there plenty of accounts of NDEs where the person saw or heard something that they shouldn't have while unconscious? secondly, how would such a mechanism even evolve in the first place? what evolutionary purpose does that serve?

evan

what if ppl thought it was really easy to imagine not existing

im not sure you should be making absolute claims from one perspective

i must say tbh i dont see any hardship in imagining it at all

It's interesting you're skepticism is directed at the implied "mechanism" that threatens the theory of an afterlife from a practicality standpoint rather than instead skeptical of notion of the afterlife itself which raises millions of practicality questions (about how or why we would be granted this magical gift of preservation divorced from our physical selves). I don't mean that as an attack, just an observation.

xp

evan

what if ppl thought it was really easy to imagine not existing

im not sure you should be making absolute claims from one perspective

i must say tbh i dont see any hardship in imagining it at all

― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac), Wednesday, February 14, 2024 12:34 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think we have to make sure we're talking about "imagining it" in the same way. First of all, I'm intellectually aware of existence before and after I have the ability to observe it. It's an abstract thought; not what I'm talking about. Also I can imagine a world that exists without me, but in doing that I'm still visualizing it; I'm observing it or perceiving it in some way.

What do you mean when you say you can imagine it?

I think the emphasis on the afterlife was kind of an innovation of Christianity.

It's impossible to determine the beliefs of groups and individuals from the deep past, but it is true that archaeologists have unearthed a lot of very ancient burials over the past 150 years and there's often plenty of surviving evidence of ritual practices connected to death. It does bother me how confidently these traces of forgotten rituals get described as evidence of a belief in an afterlife. I always feel like pushing back against that confidence which feels like it oversteps the confines of science and enters into pseudoscience.

As a baseline the "afterlife" as I'm referring to it means simply anything that counts as: consciousness-somehow-NOT-obliterated-upon-death

Not sure if that clears anything up, or if it even needed to be.

xp i mean everything stops

im not talking about the world's existence which i think you keep referencing in oblique ways

i mean when i die everything stops

the idea that i must have a more detailed description of that simple fact to match any other worldview of afterlife, i reject tbh

the idea that i have to have an idea of what "everything stops" "feels like" in order to believe it, i reject

its ok that you've thought a lot about how "everything stops" isnt as good as heaven or w/e, i dont mind. nobody has ever experienced either and there's no valid description of either but there they both are.

the idea that after "everything stops" someone gas to tell you what that feels like in order to prove they understand it enough to believe it, i mean

which tbh i am picking up from you repeatedly, rightly or wrongly

Relaxed atheist with a fascination for those who are capable of belief (the consciousness, the discipline, the humility) and a mild case of the ocean, man.

I was told stories as a kid that somehow amounted to religion and belief. Then a period of doubt and anger. I wanted to argue and explain the phenomenon away. Then a gradual rediscovery and acceptance of what it means to people to be spiritual, the profound if ambivalent role of the Church in history, and a vague wish to feel and assert something too.

I'm married to a believer (Christian, Pentecostal, very private about it). I feel closest to the mystics, not in the sense that I believe myself, but that it makes me emotional to witness the intensity and the intimacy of it. The best I can do is try to imagine where belief would fit if I hadn't built myself around other things. And now for the ocean. Since I can't see the creator, at least I can see the creation: nature is a temple, I love people, life amazes me, and I believe that this love needs to be cared and cultivated, and those may well look like religious values, or a preoccupation with the soul, even if it does not quite circle back to actual spirituality. Maybe that's Pascalian, I don't know, but there are a lot of things that seemed stupid that now seem like interesting experiments. And what are we here for, if not to try to know everything that can be known, entertain ideas that can be conceived, and embrace what can be.

Pretty sure the pagan ancestors of both myself and deems believed in an afterlife and they were burying them with their finest possessions to carry there at Newgrange and elsewhere three millennia before Christ existed.

In any case, this seems a little esoteric of a focus to me. I get that many people are very interested in the sense of the grandiose but to me it doesn’t feel like that. I’m pretty sure I didn’t believe in God a good portion of my life either.

i swear im not here to pick bones out of any description, i am enjoying them all and theres more to recognise than not in most peoples viewpoints as set out even where im immediately zooming in

but....(i am what i am lads, thomas and the prodigal sons younger brother shouldve told them to go fuck themselves)

nabozo, is belief a choice? i keep returning to how much that is a fundamental contradiction to me

and even if it is a choice (nb i like and i think have always agreed with the distinction between faith/belief which i think was aimless's above) then i still fail to see why it carries with it the positive aspects suggested in your opening lines.

its hard not to imagine that a lack of belief.... doesn't?

but any one belief can be a closed and hard and arrogant belief, just as any one lack of belief can have the same.

im interested!

i mean when i die everything stops

this is a very common belief. there's even a name for it. solipsism. it's a near cousin to the idea that when I leave my house it ceases to exist until I return.

ive worded that badly

the personal experience is that everything stops

everyone else carries on

ie the very opposite of solipsism

I don't believe in God because I don't believe in God. it's not something I spend much time wondering about tbh.

the idea that after "everything stops" someone gas to tell you what that feels like in order to prove they understand it enough to believe it, i mean

which tbh i am picking up from you repeatedly, rightly or wrongly

― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac), Wednesday, February 14, 2024 2:57 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

When I die everything stops. Yes that is easy to understand. Again it's an abstract thought I intellectually know.

But I don't experience it - in fact no deep layer of my subconscious will exist to ponder or in some way acknowledge "holy shit everything's stopped". I'd tried to be specific about it being impossible to imagine from a first person perspective, because that's the key to it. Of course not being able to imagine when you don't exist to imagine goes without saying, but your brain starts to cry when it tries to wrap itself around the concept of its own consciousness fully, absolutely stopping. More than just acknowledging it as a fact. I'll reiterate the point I made earlier a little differenrtly: try asking anyone that isn't particularly spiritual to describe it, often you hear "it's just total blackness" NO! It's not that either, because "you", your consciousness, has to exist to experience that too!

And all I'm saying is that this complete obliteration of any trace of the observing conscious mind is something a lot of people have a lot of trouble with, and my opinion is that this difficulty to stomach this truly mind melting concept is what leads to belief in spirits, the belief that someone "is at peace now" (for their own good rather than as a coping framework for their still-existing loved ones), or that someone is "resting", or insert any other spiritual concept. "Where do we GO when we die?" It's a slippery slope into some sort of spiritual theory, which is why I'm adamant that most religions were born from these questions more-so than most others.

Hope that helps? I'm only intent on being understood, I'm not really trying to persuade.

Pretty sure the pagan ancestors of both myself and deems believed in an afterlife and they were burying them with their finest possessions to carry there at Newgrange and elsewhere three millennia before Christ existed.

Sorry if my previous post was a bit gnomic. I didn’t mean to suggest that Christianity invented the concept of the afterlife. That concept clearly is extremely old. I was just saying that based on my reading of ancient religions, especially in the Western world, religious practice was not primarily about securing a better afterlife for one’s self. There was a concept of offerings to the dead, but the point of that was to please the dead souls so they would help you in this life.

Nah not replying to you, I am very tired tbf & maybe should have been more specific and just saw this mention of the afterlife being Christian, which I was replying to

I've read about this a lot too. I know a lot of skeptics point to this as evidence of NDEs not signifying anything but I'm not convinced yet. first of all, aren't there plenty of accounts of NDEs where the person saw or heard something that they shouldn't have while unconscious? secondly, how would such a mechanism even evolve in the first place? what evolutionary purpose does that serve?

There was this essay by John Jerimiah Sullivan about when his brother experienced an NDE. since he had been reading a bunch of greek mythology, he had this whole experience of being at the river styx. it makes a lot of sense to me as a way of the brain creating a story about what is happening to you, but yeah, i guess why does it have to do that at all. could be a similar mechanism as your body going into shock after a major injury. just a way of coping.

evan

it's just blackness

chill

its not like its just weird dreams or whatever - people in NDE-like states report themselves as being 'hyper conscious', or saying what they were experiencing was 'more real than real', which idk seems a bit different than what happens to your other muscles/organs when they go into shock

guess people who have had heavy psychedelic experiences have reported the same thing. the people I know who are least afraid of death are the ones who have taken heroic doses of shrooms and have shook the hand of god or whatever.

nabozo, is belief a choice? i keep returning to how much that is a fundamental contradiction to me
― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac), Wednesday, February 14, 2024 9:11 PM (fifty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes, I would say it absolutely is. A belief that is not a choice is no belief at all.

whelp, I tried

xxp

it makes a lot of sense to me as a way of the brain creating a story about what is happening to you

Imagination is a very odd but powerful tool for survival that is highly developed in humans. It's one of the hallmarks of our species. It typically happens outside our conscious control, just like most of what happens in our minds. The more I have come to grasp this over time the more I have become inclined to accept that this hidden aspect of my mind is a fundamental part of my humanity and not something to struggle with. Learning the limits of and proper sphere for applying my will has been a never ending lesson, but also a great boon.

what if ppl thought it was really easy to imagine not existing

I wonder if you can

can't hammer my point home any better than I did, which is actually good because ADD is a pain in the ass and I have work to do dammit

all good man i appreciate the sincere effort

If it’s any consolation Evan, I kind of feel the same way you do. When I try to imagine what it will be like to not exist my brain gets caught up in the paradox.

The "it's all darkness" leads me to a little "apres mois, le deluge", but that's the fight, right?

People who can imagine what it will be like to not exist are as baffling to me as people who can entertain the possibility that consciousness isn’t real. But I’ve learned to accept that people have deeply different intuitions about these matters.

back to my personal longing for death that is complete wrt my consciousness (in which i believe personally, because “evidence” offered against that position is rubbish): i should be most surprised to consciously find myself at “oh shit here i am— again”, but I do intend that my efforts theretofore, in the here and now, leave me in a defensible space.

but i still long for that place, to be complete in my labors. and also in my play. all of it.

My 77-yr-old mom spends a whole lot of time thinking and talking about death, and one of the things I've heard from her about 50 times is, "I have no conception or idea that when I die, my sense of self continues. My energy goes somewhere, but it's not as ME." Granted, she has no more insight than anyone else just by virtue of her relative proximity to the event, but fwiw I think Mom is otm.

for one thing, "consciousness" is not a _thing_. it is a series of parallel and overlapping processes--many of which are preconscious. if you begin to remove parts of a person's brain, their consciousness and bodily functioning will begin to change. if you remove enough parts, one can easily imagine that the "self" begins to break apart and eventually disappear.

second, our brain is ever-chaning--cells die, cells are born, synapses emerge and disappear. there is no "one" consciousness that we are granted at birth and that stays with us until death. the idea of an unchanging or at least integral self is one of the products of consciousness. see first note.

there is no such thing as a platonic -- that is, ideal, unperturbed and unchanging -- self or consciousness that will be restored to us when we die.

to imagine the survival of human personality after death in some form is to imagine another plane of existence in which some version of our consciousness (from when? the moment of death? several years before that? at birth?) is recreated in some other plane.

the only way i can even imagine this is if you take an awesome (and rather silly IMO) leap of faith and imagine that existence as we know it--including all of our findings about evolution, the human mind and body etc.--is some kind of fantasy projection, and that our "real selves," which bear some relation to our "selves" as we experience them in this plane of existence, are intact in some other plane. and that upon death we make some sort of quantum leap to this other plane with little interruption.

if you want to believe that, i guess i have little interest in preventing you. but it has no relationship to anything we experience or know in this world and, as evan as pointed out, it's a rather human-centric conception that mostly--to my mind--reveals our own vanity.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Wednesday, July 11, 2012 9:20 PM

The "it's all darkness" leads me to a little "apres mois, le deluge", but that's the fight, right?

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR), Wednesday, 14 February 2024 21:42 (twenty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i dont believe that ive said anything that suggests "the world ends after i go" but ive had to clarify it twice now

even if we take the above as nihilism to state "nothing matters after i go" id content that is absolutely not implicit in anything

but it is interesting because - not to misrepresent anyone myself i hope- it suggests that ppl still tend to atheism as suggesting amorality, nihilism, a vacuum of concern, despite many statements itt otherwise?

maybe i am projecting but i guss ill go again

i can believe when i die that i blink out like the last line of light turning to a point then gone on a monitor, no me left and no me left to know it, but nothing in that belief means i feel any less invested in my version of a good world existing and continuing after my existence than if i were the pope himself and had as close to 100% belief as one can that id be skipping the queue and getting slapped on the back through the pearly gates to review how it was going and watch with interest for eternity

my atheism is neither a rejection of any one traditional morality or societal belonging nor is it a subscription to any other.

its just a lack of belief in any gods.

idk am i talking too much here but for as long as the above line seema to mean more to people who respond than that ill keep gently tapping the sign i reckon, seems the right thread for it

I've also needed to keep clarifying myself so understand the struggle, also I agree with everything you're saying. Were we just talking past each other earlier or what? I think we're on the same page here.

Fwiw this is exactly how I feel/what I believe too:

i can believe when i die that i blink out like the last line of light turning to a point then gone on a monitor, no me left and no me left to know it, but nothing in that belief means i feel any less invested in my version of a good world existing and continuing after my existence than if i were the pope himself and had as close to 100% belief as one can that id be skipping the queue and getting slapped on the back through the pearly gates to review how it was going and watch with interest for eternity

my atheism is neither a rejection of any one traditional morality or societal belonging nor is it a subscription to any other.

its just a lack of belief in any gods.

i like the amateurist post you dug up there evan

when I die, I fear I'll still be reading this thread

saying "otm" and "notm" from Hell

at worst purgatory

Found a lot to agree with in your posts above Nabozo.

I didn't sign up for religion for the afterlife stuff, but I've got to say, it is a nice perk

In all seriousness, an afterlife is something I choose to believe in not something I am reasonably convinced about. I do like that Christianity's version gives you a bit of everything. My creedal affirmation is in "the resurrection of the dead." In this, death isn't robbed of its kinda obvious nature. When people die, they're dead. Bodies in the ground, no consciousness, just nothingness. But there is a promise of reembodiment. Whether that reembodiment is with a sense of self as we know it in this life, or whether it contains a unity with the divine so intense that a sense of self is impossible... I'm not sure. My belief in the afterlife is hopeful, it's expectant of a future turn around of the whole order rather than a confident judgement that right now everyone who has ever lived still exists but in a different spiritual form. It might be a small or irrelevant distinction to some, but the respect it pays to the nature of death makes it a pill small enough for me to swallow.

Because life mostly sucks

― Sane clown posse (Ye Mad Puffin)

fwiw this doctrine is against my religion and that’s a big reason I’m religious, as a ward against believing this too much of the time

Ok silby. Me, I find this life sufficiently unpleasant that I can't imagine wanting more of it. Certainly not another one. Definitely not eternal life.

Rest, repose, peace, oblivion? Yes please.

I wanna party with the Valkyries, drinking mead and feasting for all time

I can also see how all that just sounds like bonkers picking and choosing what you want to believe. It's an extrapolation for me of who I think Jesus of Nazareth was, and the Easter story sort of strong arms me into this particular belief: death is shockingly real, but no longer necessarily the final word. If I had no belief in Christ, I would be a "death is final: no consciousness" guy. The afterlife stuff is just a necessary extrapolation of my key religious belief.

Sorry if any of that codes as crypto-evangelising, it's really not to meant to be. Just wanted to respond to the idea that religion is acquiesced to as an anaesthetic to the fear of death. For my case, and 99% of Christian people who I know, it was merely a part of the package deal they now have to play along with.

i want as much life as you got, right now

by the time the knees, sinuses, bladder and other bits are really making each day a grind ill feel very differently i figure

the question of which endlessly generating iterating version of you snaps into focus on the moment of impact (or whether it aint that at all but something very different as hp posits above) is one ive only had cause to consider when i try to think about which of my fuckin windows backups id actually turn to if i had a catastrophe

what religion addresses that metaphor eh

I think it's acquiesced to as an anesthetic to life just as much as it is to death.