ILX Religiosity and Spirituality and Agnosticity and Atheicity Poll

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.

ADDENDUM; tipsy's mom otmfm

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

This is right. We are immortal insofar as we are remembered. We patents become immortal through our children. We are immortal if we have friends and family.

I believe my immortality is secured by the memories of the people who will survive me. Plus the work I have done and the things I have made. My body is just a bunch of interestingly assembled groceries, and and I. I would not mind if they just put it out on the curb when 8t stops working.

Xp ENBB. Yeah that's a statement of belief though. Religion does anaesthetise a lot of the pain of this world for the believer, but it's cynical to say that's the reason people believe

Which like, if that's your belief that's fine, I've just never liked it being stated as I think it's bad manners! Why we assume people believe and behave how they do is often a fair cry from the actual reasons.

Posting this while peeing in the shower BTW so this is all coming from an insane person

;)

i want as much life as you got, right now

I'm onboard with this - give me the extra years now, not when I'm 88

patience, young grasshopper

I suppose it is. As I said hundreds of posts ago - I genuinely often wish I believed and I am sure there are many other reasons but as a non-believer it's just sometimes hard to imagine what they might be. (I am too stoned for this so am likely not making sense.)

when ppl tell me about believing in the literal truth of the bible, or the reality of the afterlife, it comes across to me like meeting an unbalanced star trek fan. i begged forgiveness to a really close lib evangelical friend before telling him that opinion, and he has forgiven afaict, and he is not a proselytizer, but he has said it left a mark.

I'm not an atheist but I realize now that I believe in symbols more than the actual deities they're supposed to represent. I saw something where a pagan priest in Iceland (they're now an official religion) said something to the effect of "We don't actually believe in the eight legged horse, we obviously recognize it's a metaphor." Likewise the little blue boy in the yogurt pot. I wish more people got this.

That's all fair ENBB

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.

Hey there

Why we assume people believe and behave how they do is often a fair cry from the actual reasons.

even (or especially) if the assumer = the behaver

i feel differently about

catholics

vs

people who believe in l ron hubbards mythos

vs

modern practitioners in the church of scientology

so its not like you dont accept context or anything tbf

but i guess i always default assume nobody practicing a religion actually believes believes the really obvious metaphorical parts (nb irish catholic background context here) and yknow ive been a lot wronger than righter so shrug.jpg

Good point, but if we're getting to that level of skepticism its gotta go both ways

xp to PBKR

Forget about metaphor, I like the straight up magic parts of Catholicism. Let's keep that (and the incense) and get rid of the rest. Transubstantiation in, everything else out.

YMP my post is about this life not any postulated afterlife fwiw

I read to us from Diary 4:16

"Cos life has no meaning
We were all born to die
So no screaming"

i get vibing to the ritual vs actual considered belief

the unconsidered belief idk that seems not discussed itt anyway which is fair

If there’s one thing I strongly believe it’s that no one really has a clue about any of this stuff.

My pastor read from John Berryman's "Eleven Addresses to the Lord" during our last Sunday service, including the bit that goes I have no idea whether we live again. It doesn't seem likely. My partner (raised in a church) thought that was an exceptionally brave thing to preach, but I (converted in my 30s, only after it became clear that my human doubts about God are welcome in this church) found it of a piece with the rest.

I wonder if near-death and other paranormal experiences played some historical role in the emergence of beliefs in the soul and afterlife.

I read up on NDEs recently, and while they haven't convincingly been explained in "reductionist" terms, I doubt they're genuinely proof of an afterlife either; there's very little consistency in what people see, even in accounts which supposedly support the same worldview. And the messages given to people who come back seem so familiar: unprovable metaphysical assertions and unfulfilled prophecies. Some of the more elaborate accounts can be fun to read, though.

If the afterlife does exist, I'm not really sure it relieves fear of death - after all, who knows it'll last forever?

I want an afterlife where I can drink Negronis.

more likely to get an afterlife where you become a negroni imo

so long as Jake Gyllenhaal chugs me

I wonder if near-death and other paranormal experiences played some historical role in the emergence of beliefs in the soul and afterlife.

I've also read that back in olden times people would stumble upon plants with psychedelic properties and eat them unknowingly, causing them to have very intense experiences which they could only interpret as religious events. In fact something like this happened to one of my friends' girlfriend - she came home from work, ate a brownie that was sitting in the fridge not knowing it was loaded with THC, and as someone who'd actually never partaken before she had no clue what was happening to her, and in fact thought she was dying. God how I wish I could've seen the look on my friend's face when he figured out what was going on.

Alfred posts very much in character

X-post

I recently came across a similar Buddy Miles story with a classic stoner attitude conclusion: “I sighed with relief, grateful that the hashish had not caused Buddy Miles to have a heart attack and die, that he had simply gotten too stoned and went paranoid. Good pot.”

I read up on NDEs recently, and while they haven't convincingly been explained in "reductionist" terms, I doubt they're genuinely proof of an afterlife either; there's very little consistency in what people see, even in accounts which supposedly support the same worldview. And the messages given to people who come back seem so familiar: unprovable metaphysical assertions and unfulfilled prophecies. Some of the more elaborate accounts can be fun to read, though.

it's kind of hard to reconcile either way - I suppose it's possible to devise some sort of scientific experiment which doesn't actually kill a bunch of people but we definitely do not have the tools for that now. and the lack of consistency makes it tempting to just throw it all out. but hearing the lengthy accounts does make me feel like it's *something* - one thing that seems to be consistent is this feeling that what they saw during the NDE is *actual* reality, as opposed to reality as we know it. some of these people do come off like crackpots but many of them do not. also there are dozens of accounts of "dead" people seeing or hearing things they could not have possibly observed while braindead, including knowledge of other patients dying before medical staff even knew. granted this could all be made up but some serious and smart people have studied these cases and just wound up shrugging their shoulders and going "yeah it's weird"

My impression is that many ancient religions had little if anything to say about the afterlife. They were more about appeasing the gods for benefits in this life. I think the emphasis on the afterlife was kind of an innovation of Christianity.

― o. nate

one of the things that i find most fascinating is the monotheism of akhenaten, which - i could be getting this wrong, but what i heard is that he said there _is_ an afterlife but only for _him_, he gets _eternal life_ because he's _god_ and everybody else gets bupkis. not really sure why that form of monotheism didn't take.

when i was young thinking about death was a source of _profound_ existential terror for me. it was kind of a dual terror - i was terrified of oblivion, of the prospect of my own nonexistence, and i was terrified of the immortality in Christian heaven... i saw it kind of in the way it's described in Talking Heads' "Heaven" or Van Der Graaf Generator's "Still Life". later on, a lot of times... i had compound trauma, i had suicidality, and i got into antinatalism, wishing i'd never been born at all. and now i feel like i _hadn't_ been born at all, not really, that i was living kind of a plato-in-the-cave shadow existence, some kind of liminal space between death and life, caught within this half-world.

i'm still _scared_ of death and i still crave death but it's not as intense, as overwhelming, as it was before. maybe i'm just more used to it. sometimes when i get suicidal it manifests as this sort of crepuscular feeling, this encroaching darkness, and i don't know if actual death will feel like that. it seems very close, something that could happen at any time, but not, at any time, _inevitable_ in the immediate sense.

but also, the longer i live the more ok i am with dying. i have this confidence that i've lived, my life mattered, i'll be remembered and remembered well, for some time. a lot of times i get this "dayenu" sense, in both the positive and negative sense. i've had lots of, i'll just say it, blessings, and i've had lots of pain, and i'm satisfied with the amount i've had of the former and sometimes feel like i can't take any more of the latter. when i get suicidal these days, it's very different from the way in which i felt suicidal when i was younger. if i were to kill myself, i think i would die satisfied and happy with the life i've had, even if the ending sucked.

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.

― o. nate

like a basilisk? a lot of times in the past that's been my experience with trying to comprehend religion, that the more i try to understand it the more that i get frozen by looking at this _thing_. i've found a lot of the stuff i culturally appropriate from buddhism helps a lot with that, like... having to snap out of it

i was watching this video today that's gone viral, about why moths are attracted to artificial light. and it turns out it's the opposite from the pop cultural idea, and the pop cultural idea was one that i really felt described me. the idea was that of "drawn like a moth to a flame", that i had this desire within me to self-immolate. i've written a lot about it - the idea of transition as this urge towards self-destruction, to burn out rather than fade away. and it turns out that that belief is pretty much the exact opposite of what actually happens. what actually happens is that moths orient themselves by turning their backs to the light - not only are they not diving towards the light they're not even _facing_ it. they're trying to fly somewhere, get somewhere. they don't even know they're flying in circles. they're confused and disoriented and lost. or, like, tipsy, or something. and it kind of really disrupted my frame of reference, the way i thought of myself and this thing i did that is kind of important to me. that all my life i've been circling this _artificial_ light, this thing that seems like the sun but isn't, and all the time i've been trying to get away from it and the way moths get away from it... they can't do it naturally, because of how they're made. they need some outside force, like the wind, to get them to a place where they can see the light they can use to orient themselves. that's what, like, koans or whatever do for me. i can't imagine what it's like to not exist but i don't need to, i don't have to _imagine_ something for it to _be_.

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.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra)

oh absolutely otm, one of the things that kind of framed how i thought about the afterlife is... i'm not a materialist wholly, but at the same time, i don't go for, like, manichean dualism. i don't _know_ what consciousness is but based on the evidence, my corporeal body is a pretty essential part of what makes it happen. if i have some soul or consciousness or whatever that's separable from my body, that's cool and all, but it's not _me_. my body moulders to dust and becomes food for worms and becomes part of nature again, serves a purpose even after i'm dead. maybe it's the same way with "spirit" or "soul" or "consciousness" if there is such a thing at all, if it is separable from my mind. maybe it becomes part of some larger _thing_ that none of us can see or observer or quantify. i think that would be cool if it happened, but it's not really any of my business or concern. and if that doesn't happen... i mean i will live on for a while, my words and deeds and thoughts will carry on past my death. like even now people who know me are being changed by my existence. so something of my consciousness survives, something of my body survives. it's not "immortality" but i am part of something larger than myself. i will be remembered in ways that i don't even know.

one of the things i've been thinking about recently is this woman named karen who changed my life. i think that if she was alive and she were to meet me and hear me say how deeply and profoundly she affected me... i can't see how she could have imagined the effect she'd have. i never met her. she was an alcoholic, a "functional" alcoholic after a fashion. she would come to work smelling of alcohol. we worked at the same job, opposite shifts, and one day her boyfriend beat her to death. i was at her funeral. there were a lot of people at her funeral. the officiant remarked that she would be amazed at how many people cared about her, at how many people showed up to remember her. and i was there because of how she died, and it wasn't good, but her death affected me more than just going to her funeral. i looked at myself and i looked at her and what happened to her and what i concluded was that she had died because she couldn't change who he was. and that the best way to remember her, to honor her memory, was to do what she wasn't able to, to change. and i have changed. even if she doesn't know it, even if she couldn't have imagined it, she is alive in me, and by extension by everyone who knows me, everyone who's been inspired and affected by what i've done... some part of that comes from a dead-end alcoholic who was beaten to death by her boyfriend.

and that's not _good_ or _right_ or _just_, it doesn't _redeem_ what happened to her or make it ok. it's dialectical, something can be an atrocity, something that in a just world wouldn't have happened and at the same time, but at the same time that person's life still does have meaning and purpose and value, no matter how they were treated.

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

― Andy the Grasshopper

also kind of funny, i was talking with people who were complaining about their shoulders, how broad their shoulders were, and i said look it's fine i have broad shoulders myself, and they looked and said "oh yeah i can see why you don't pass" and that _very_ much had my back up because that wasn't why i was saying it, but anyway they moved on and started talking about how they'd make viking shield maidens, and someone shopped the picture i put up to make me a shield maiden, and i'm very flattered by that, i think it's really cool. i do indeed make a badass shield maiden. so if you wanna party with the valkyries, shit, maybe i'll be there.

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

― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac)

idk i'm getting to that age where... not only do i feel my body, not only does it seem like my body for the first time, but at the same time i feel it breaking down. it hurts more, it's harder to deal with, but it's also... like i _listen_ to my body, i know that _not_ all things are possible, but i know what _is_ possible. i've had plenty of rage in my time and most of it has been against myself and when i stop fighting, when i give in, when i, i don't know, _submit_, then all of a sudden all kinds of things seem possible that weren't before. and that's, again, _not_ the same as submitting to christ, to this perfect savior who will fix everything and take away all our sorrows. but it's not submitting to nonexistence, either. it's finding the beauty in pain. like i got no idea what kind of shit bob flanagan went through but i kind of understand in theory why he did the things he did.

Which like, if that's your belief that's fine, I've just never liked it being stated as I think it's bad manners! Why we assume people believe and behave how they do is often a fair cry from the actual reasons.

― H.P

why? what's wrong with wanting a cure for pain? i mean i _don't_ think the only purpose for religion is as an opiate, i don't think that's the only reason people believe, but for a lot of people... like, my dad. my dad spent his whole life conspicuously _not_ being a christian, he was a buddhist for a lot of the time or he was an atheist, he was all kinds of things. and when he died, i found out that he'd died as a christian. he was old, he was towards the end of his days, and someone came to visit him at the VA home, she was kind to him and she cared about him and she was a Christian, she wanted to win his soul for Christ, and one can judge that and be disgusted at that and on some level i guess I am but at the same time i met her, she _genuinely cared for him_, she was there for him when nobody else was (by the way, i wasn't there for him because he didn't answer my fucking calls, he was too wracked with guilt over abandoning me to be a meaningful part of my life, and i know this because he told this friend of his about this, at length. it was fucking stupid.) and by christian reckoning, well, he died accepting christ as his lord and savior, i guess by their accounting he's in heaven now, christian heaven, and... i don't respect that belief. i'm glad that lady was there for him, i'm glad that he had that sense of peace in his last days, but he lived for 78 fucking years and that's not who he _was_. that's not how i remember him. he deserves better than the christian heaven. he deserves to live his truth. and if that's oblivion, that's oblivion. but i don't _blame_ christianity, i don't _blame_ that lady, i don't think it was bad or wrong, and i don't think it's _bad manners_ for me to say that he beliefed in christ because he was dying, he was in pain, and christianity soothed his pain in his final days.

"Cos life has no meaning
We were all born to die
So no screaming"

― CEO Greedwagon (Neanderthal)

mmm. i could quote to you here part of an extensive autobio piece i wrote in december, a part about screaming and its place in my life. i've done lots of screaming and been in lots of pain. out of scope.

My pastor read from John Berryman's "Eleven Addresses to the Lord" during our last Sunday service, including the bit that goes I have no idea whether we live again. It doesn't seem likely. My partner (raised in a church) thought that was an exceptionally brave thing to preach, but I (converted in my 30s, only after it became clear that my human doubts about God are welcome in this church) found it of a piece with the rest.

― The king of the demo (bernard snowy)

i'm with you, i was a unitarian universalist, i was an episcopalian, i think of that bit that john cale read on the soundtrack to "eat" about a theologian whose words disappeared as they were written they had been written without conviction. that's how i think of liberal religion. i think there's something self-annihilating about it, self-erasing. i think it makes sense that it's dying. and if what's left of christianity is hatred and cruelty, well, i can't even so much as regret that outcome.

xp to frogbs:
It's not as it we're playing some sort of shell game, trying to turn over the right set of ontological commitments and find the "real" reality underneath. Our experiences of skepticism and disappointed faith get folded into the same dough with our experiences of wonder and the uncanny, and we end up with a reality which is lumpy and hybrid and mediated and enfleshed, not some simple geometric solid whose outline can be grasped in a single flash of insight.

All of which inclines me to hear NDEs as another possible flavor of human experience, rarer and intenser than many others, and perhaps harder to put into words, but not intrinsically closer to the "heart of the matter."

that's a lovely post

Just to be clear on my view regarding NDEs, I do not believe it’s a sign of the afterlife but an amazing thing our brain does. I’m totally fascinated in how are brains function in this conversation. To me it’s basically the center of everything that I call “me.” Generations of desires and fears passed along in there. One day it will shutdown and then nothing which is cool with me

Also I panic about dying at least 5 times a day now that I have kids. Losing a parent at a young age is heartbreaking peace to anyone that experienced that

smart people have studied these cases and just wound up shrugging their shoulders and going "yeah it's weird"

arguably you could say the same about ghosts, ufos, fortune telling / predictions. given any paranormal phenomena there's probably a minute percentage of cases that seem to genuinely defy rational explanation(*). but... that way madness lies imo.

(*) other than we're living in a simulation and they're fucking with us.

It's not as it we're playing some sort of shell game, trying to turn over the right set of ontological commitments and find the "real" reality underneath. Our experiences of skepticism and disappointed faith get folded into the same dough with our experiences of wonder and the uncanny, and we end up with a reality which is lumpy and hybrid and mediated and enfleshed, not some simple geometric solid whose outline can be grasped in a single flash of insight.

All of which inclines me to hear NDEs as another possible flavor of human experience, rarer and intenser than many others, and perhaps harder to put into words, but not intrinsically closer to the "heart of the matter."

well one thing I am certain of is the "heart of the matter" is something that the human brain could not possibly comprehend, similar to how a bird's brain will never have any concept of what a window is. so our human insight may poke and prod around it but ultimately it's likely not something humans will ever "get right". that's what a lot of people who have NDEs say too - "there's no way I could possibly explain what this is like, there are no words for it". one example is our perception of time - people who take heroic doses of shrooms will talk about living entire lives in there, trips that feel like they last 30 years even when in reality they're only 8 hours. surely that says something about how time "actually" works.

arguably you could say the same about ghosts, ufos, fortune telling / predictions. given any paranormal phenomena there's probably a minute percentage of cases that seem to genuinely defy rational explanation(*). but... that way madness lies imo.

well yeah, I've witnessed something like this happening myself. I think I told the story in another thread but I really do think there's a chance that my wife's aunt visited our newborn baby in spirit form. trust me, I know how crazy it sounds when I type that. we still talk about it from time to time but what do you say? just "do you really think that's possible? what other explanations are there?"

re NDEs being experiences "rarer and intenser than many others"-- i concede as to the former but cannot imagine why as to the other, and admit that makes not much sense to me. and i had a ND and got no NDE out of it. a bit of disappointment now though def not then. (fwiw fractured skull, significant bleed at impact and countercoup and DAIs around the place, coma, blah blah. it's been quite awful really. i sometimes wished to have died just make life easier for everyone including me. and despite having a pretty "easy" active and decent life, i am very selfish i'm told).

otoh re brain circuitry, i v rarely recalled ever dreaming prior injury, and now i dream all night and almost always remember them, at least for a while. they are weird in the way they distort reality and yet within them ("dream cognition"? is that thing?) i'm just, "yeah this is normal."

this to say i'm rather dubious of NDEs as a supernormal distinct experience, but the brain is full of shit and connections and can go haywire.

Heez, my maternal grandfather went through an entire world war (in the Navy) then died in a completely random stupid car accident in 1953.

My mother was 10 at the time and is now 80. Every time she gets in a car and there's anything sudden, she flinches and covers her eyes. I feel for her.

Her mother was pregnant at the time, so I have an uncle who never knew his father. My own personal father left when I was 4; most of my sisters' husbands just kinda ghosted.

As a result, a lot of what I do as a parent is to just stick around and keep showing up and try to not die.