RE: The Invention Of Lying Concept
Yesterday at 3:00 pm
(This post was last modified: Yesterday at 3:03 pm by Fake Messiah.)
Also, (Christian) beliefs in the afterlife are not frequently consoling, but contra productive because of hell. People near death can obsess much more with the eternal punishment than the awards. For example, I've heard a story of some old woman who was near death and was obsessed with some lie she said in the past that she was worried she was going to Hell because of it. They even called a priest to atone her, but it didn't help. Or like when you see old people going to church every day for the same reasons.
And to me it seems that heaven is more of a consolidation for the living than dying people. If someone lived for a few decades, he or she doesn't mind if there's nothing out there.
Plus, death comes to people in different forms. Some people pretend they're not going to die and some people are already out of their minds, so these questions of what I would do seem improbable.
All that said, being an atheist doesn't necessarily mean you don't believe in some sort of afterlife. I guess it would be a godless afterlife.
And to me it seems that heaven is more of a consolidation for the living than dying people. If someone lived for a few decades, he or she doesn't mind if there's nothing out there.
Plus, death comes to people in different forms. Some people pretend they're not going to die and some people are already out of their minds, so these questions of what I would do seem improbable.
All that said, being an atheist doesn't necessarily mean you don't believe in some sort of afterlife. I guess it would be a godless afterlife.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
