Posted by Gremlin [12.253.230.83 - 12-253-230-83.client.attbi.com] on 25 July 2002 at 12.36.58 ZuluTime:

In Reply to: Re: Life After Death? posted by Andy on 25 July 2002 at 11.31.54 ZuluTime:

It's an example of a psychological assessment. People consider it unfair and scary to think that they can sit around for a century, learning things and getting used to being alive, only to lose it all when they die.
     The idea of an afterlife itself isn't particularly new. The Egyptians had that. Of course, the Egyptians didn't realise that the brain was a critical factor of life, and they removed it from their mummies. In hygenic terms, that was a pretty good idea; in afterlife terms, it was pretty dumb.
     The Egyptian idea that people existed somehow after death was plagiarised into judaism a couple thousand years later. And that was further plagiarised into christianity as early as AD100 or so.
     Of course, the idea of hell is a lot newer. The Norse had three sorts of afterlives: Valhalla, in which you awoke in death to find yourself with Odin and all the best of the best; Hel, in which you simply ceased to be anymore; and Nastrand, which was reserved for the truly evil.
     The Norse concept of a trinary afterlife was later molested into the catholic heaven, purgatory, and hell. And the various subspecies of christianity--the baptists and mormons and methodists and all--dropped the idea of Hel and Purgatory because it wasn't a big deal; the advertising potential was greater if you had only the choices of eternal happiness and eternal torture; to allow that an option--the most likely one--was that you simply failed to exist anymore didn't sell a lot of tickets.
     So that's the modern afterlife. A logistic mess in which everyone goes to hell for eternal torture, except for the 144,000 predestined souls from twelve countries--none of which are at all English. That bit should really be removed from the bible; you can't expect people to take the ubiquitous John3.16 seriously if it's preempted by the decree that this thousand gross are the only ones getting into heaven at all.

Realistically, there's no actual reason to assume that an afterlife occurs. There's no evidence that souls exist at all. Until fairly recently, it was assumed that the soul was a component of the heart; but bionics have shown that to be false: nearly everything can be replaced now, and people don't stop being people when they become cyborgs.
     That leaves the brain itself, which is where all conscience is. And the brain contains nothing like a soul. Life, it turns out, is a series of tiny bursts of thought, factored against years of stored data.
     Souls evidently don't exist. Afterlives evidently don't occur. Life evidently ends when the brain dies.
     As for the notorious tunnel with the light: that's a new thing. Fifty years ago, no one saw a tunnel in NearDeath Experiences. That's a symptom of the information revolution. Everyone 'knows' that there's a tunnel at the last instant now. Just like everyone 'knows' what grey aliens look like now. Before the information revolution, aliens and afterlives were individualistic and creative; these days, everyone conveniently sees what they've been told they'll see. But the evidence suggests that the visions in an NDE are nothing more than psychotic episodes: dreams resulting from the depletion of oxygen to the brain. Again: once the brain goes fully offline, those dreams evaporate. And then, there are no more thoughts.