(April 10, 2015 at 2:24 am)robvalue Wrote: There's no evidence for any kind of afterlife. But let's assume for a second that there is one.
There's no reason to think that what we think about this afterlife, or anything we do during this life has any bearing on whether or not we will receive this afterlife or what it will be like. The idea that Bronze Age fairy stories have some sort of wisdom on this matter, and that we better believe in them just in case, is pure fantasy.
Pretending to believe in the most impressive or scary sounding story, just in case by some cosmic coincidence it isn't the pile of shit it looks like from every angle, is about the biggest waste of time I could imagine.
Consider this: I can come up with a religion any time I want. And I can make it more impressive and scary than those available. Of course, I would claim God came to see me, and so on. Would anyone jump ship to this new "best bet" do you think?
Would you?
My wife is a spiritualist and firmly believes in an afterlife which is not at all like the Christian afterlife.
Buddhists and Hindus believe in reincarnation, another form of afterlife. I could probably make up another couple of ideas on the theme and my off the cuff ideas would have exactly the same amount of evidence for them as the Abrahamic ideas i.e. none.
Ideas without evidence are destined to remain just ideas forever.
You can fix ignorance, you can't fix stupid.
Tinkety Tonk and down with the Nazis.
