Is there any evidence we dont live on in some way after death

[BethK]

Do you then pronounce them "resurrected?"

No, they just had a Near Death Experience...

I had one. And, I'm completely unconvinced that it had anything to do with "life after death". It had more to do with my brain being oxygen-deprived and in peril, interpreted through the veil of things of which I had knowledge.

In my case, it involved gods of Ancient Egypt - a pantheon which appears incredibly unlikely even if it could be shown (somehow) or believed that supernatural beings exist.

BTW, I believed in the divine when I had my Near Death Experience. Over the following 20 years, I gradually turned into an atheist. Yeah, it did a great job of convincing me of the "reality" of God, god's will, god's plan. It opened my mind and heart to the Truth of atheism where people explaining it with their reason and logic could not.

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The common theme I see here is "burden of proof" and "an afterlife has no evidence so dont believe in it." But why then firmly believe in no afterlife, if there is no evidence for it. You guys have it a little mixed up. The burden of proof lies on the one making a claim. If you claim there is no life after death, the burden of proof would be on YOU. Since it cannot be proven, there is no reason to believe it. This is why i cannot take a stand with insufficient evidence.

You've got it backwards. It goes like this:

There is no obvious, objective life after death. The dead do not just get up and run around. Once they are really dead - not just comatose or knocked out or something - they stay dead. Those rotting bodies just don't seem to bode well for them re-animating. The obvious thing to assume is that the dead are dead, and there is no life after death. Unless, of course, you define it in impersonal ways such as that your atoms or molecules may continue to exist and become part of another living organism. In such a way there is no death, since a living thing's atoms continue to live on in trees and birds and and earthworms and aerobic bacteria and coal and even (other) people and... From an individual's conscious point of view, that's a pretty useless definition, although it's ecologically sound.

Like anyone, I think it would be nice if my life went on, but I am also fully prepared for the possibility it will not.

As regards the energy. I have heard we lose 6 onces at the moment of death. Anyone know if this is true? And the point about maggots and apples and where to draw the line, I feel it would have to apply to everything or nothing, as I dont feel humans are special in any way.

Many people are not prepared to accept any possibility that life will not go on after death.

The "6 oz of weight loss" after death is in general "woo". It's based on the experiments of a Dr. Duncan MacDougall of Haverhill, Massachusetts in 1907. His experiments were far from conclusive, and had a wide variation among cases.

1. "[S]uddenly coincident with death . . . the loss was ascertained to be three-fourths of an ounce."

2. "The weight lost was found to be half an ounce. Then my colleague auscultated the heart and found it stopped. I tried again and the loss was one ounce and a half and fifty grains."

3. "My third case showed a weight of half an ounce lost, coincident with death, and an additional loss of one ounce a few minutes later."

4. "In the fourth case unfortunately our scales were not finely adjusted and there was a good deal of interference by people opposed to our work . . . I regard this test as of no value."

5. "My fifth case showed a distinct drop in the beam requiring about three-eighths of an ounce which could not be accounted for. This occurred exactly simultaneously with death but peculiarly on bringing the beam up again with weights and later removing them, the beam did not sink back to stay for fully fifteen minutes."

6. "My sixth and last case was not a fair test. The patient died almost within five minutes after being placed upon the bed and died while I was adjusting the beam."
"
See http://www.snopes.com/religion/soulweight.asp

This doesn't show much - except the weight was never nearly 6 ounces. He was unable to repeat the results of weight loss at time of death on experiments with dogs. (Ethical considerations and questions abound). Note that he did not have the precise tools that exist today to determine the exact moment of death under any criteria. The problem of criteria and definition exists across jurisdictions today. Is death defined as "Brain death" (ceasing function of the brain)? Heart stopping (Patient's hearts are stopped routinely with open heart surgery)? Lack of breath? Failing to request chocolate, alcohol, tobacco, or sex over a period of hours? Okay, the last one is a joke.

Dr. MacDougall included the weight of excrement in his calculations. One possible reason offered by physiologists involves the lack of cooling of the body by sweating shortly after death - and that partly explains the reason that dogs don't normally cool themselves by sweating, but by panting which stops at the time of death.