Life after death?

[Whateverist]

Why do people always claim to have received great knowledge or spiritual wisdom from the dead? Does every janitor turn into Descartes when he dies? Where are all the ghosts that give shitty, stupid advice, the sorts of advice that might have led to them becoming ghosts in the first place? Sigh.

Must be the advice all the fundamentalists of every religion have been listening to. Quite a few of those around.

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Hello, newbie here.
Question.
If the claim of life after death is rejected because there is no evidence for it, shouldn't the claim of oblivion after death be rejected because there is no evidence for it?

What you say makes some sense but then isn't "oblivion" a word used specifically to describe a state of non-being?

: the state of being unconscious or unaware : the state of not knowing what is going on around you

: the state of being destroyed

Those who we know to be conscious and aware are invariably alive. Death certainly looks like destruction of all life functions, including consciousness.

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Why should they constitute some soul that exists forever? They are easily explicable in terms of monism. Why add extra unnecessary features/entities?

I didn't add anything.
When a friend says your name, I'd assume that they think about more than your organs. When you give to a charity, I wouldn't guess that you think about the electrical charges in the neural systems of the less fortunate.
I, and others, just take what makes one an intrinsically valuable person and give it a name.

So far so good. Got it. Soul as who I am is fine, but where do you get this soul that goes on after I am no more? If I'm no longer moving oxygen or blood, I doubt strongly that concerns, feelings or realizations will find any foothold in me either.

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But weren't you speaking of a soul that lasts forever? An actual entity rather than some concept? I don't have a problem with the casual use of the word "soul" to denote that we tend to see others as more than just objects.

I didn't think you would. That's why we're all people.
en·ti·ty noun \ˈen-tə-tē, ˈe-nə-\ something that has separate and distinct existence and objective or conceptual reality
Simply put, once you die, you go brain-dead and your body decomposes. But what gets your family members to cry about it (religions call it a 'soul'), can't really disappear because your existence is undoable. Even after you are long forgotten, the kind of person you were will still have an indelible mark on human history and the universe in a way distinct from any other lifeform.

You may be building up our significance just a little too much here. The big difference between us and other objects is that we are also subjects. That is special but I hardy think it sends shock waves through the galaxy. Every organism is a subject. What makes our subjective experience so special is that we know it from the inside and can use language to describe but also mystify it. So we say we are aware and self-aware and conscious and sapient and all the rest. Giving a thing a name can sometimes fool us into thinking we know something. But when the thing in question is the nature of our subjecthood we are reaching the limits of what language can do .. other than giving us false confidence.

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Well your existence is undoable in the sense that it did happen. But, it's mark on the universe may not have much to do with who you were.

Depends on what mark you're talking about. If you chop down a tree in the forest, that tree won't be there after you die because you used your muscles and some metal to knock it down. Nothing spiritual there.
Then there are the "bigger" things, like the people you helped while alive. That ultimately changes communities, societies, and the world at large for the better or the worse.

The world at large apparently begins and ends with the world of people. That strikes me as a little narrow.