(February 4, 2015 at 1:20 pm)Lek Wrote: Why do you not believe in an afterlife? How can you have any knowledge of the afterlife? It's a total unknown to you. You have absolutely no evidence to show that we don't exist in some form after this life. You should be just as open to the possibility of an afterlife as not. I think an atheist would view the afterlife as an unknown rather than a foregone conclusion that we simply don't exist after death.
Sam Harris explained it best.
Quote: There are very good reasons to think it’s not true and we know this from now 150 years of neurology where you damage areas of the brain and faculties are lost. It’s not that everyone with brain damage has their soul perfectly intact, they can’t get the words out. Everything about your mind can be damaged by damaging the brain. You can cease to recognize faces, you can cease to know the names of animals but you still know the names of tools. The fragmentation in the way in which our mind is parcellated at the level of the brain is not at all intuitive, and there’s a lot known about it.
And what we’re being asked to consider is that you damage one part of the brain and something about the mind and subjectivity is lost, you damage another and yet more is lost, and yet if you damage the whole thing at death we can rise off the brain with all our faculties intact, recognizing grandma and speaking English.
