Opinions on the afterlife? TW//

Personally, I think that we are reborn. There are videos you can find about people discussing their past life or past life regressions. Some believe the numbers in your birthday can tell you how many past lives you had. Or your birthmarks can tell you how you died.

I'm skeptical of most of the narratives of what happens after death, or at least committing to one definitely. But mostly I think it shouldn't matter. We will or will not find out, but what matters can only be living now. There may or may not be an afterlife but the best thing to do would not be to cling or pine after it. I will mostly address the afterlife question in relation to the Western Christian tradition since I am more familiar with it, but my thoughts are not solely limited to it here. I also cover near death experiences and what they can and cannot tell us.

The truth of the matter to me is, we wouldn't want heaven. Not in any sense of the way that our minds, wants, and needs work. Part of life that creates our desires are our struggles and senses of anxieties and the dangers. As much as we think we want those to go away...consider getting to the top of a mountain... if we could just magic our way up there then we would not enjoy it the same. We wouldn't have the hike. Despite the horrible injuries of sports like American football, without the heavy contact and risk of injury for some sports or mostly the work to get there, the enjoyment diminishes. If your team never lost or was never near losing, the enjoyment diminishes. This might cast into question the idea or function of an afterlife free of all struggle and strife.

Part of the religious person's enjoyment is in not ever actually getting to God and not ever totally measuring up. To feel the positive fluffy feelings sometimes but also the push to read more scriptures, struggle to be free of sin, and the clinging after God in worship. Some people literally imagine heaven to be a giant worship session. Maybe that is part of the enjoyment of a religious life. But to have worship in this clinging after way there needs to be maintained a separation between us and God, even in heaven. The enjoyment of faith functions for people on earth with this separation, so it's not a surprise they imagine this same form of enjoyment in heaven. (Compare to the imagination of C. Austin Miles in the hymnal "In the Garden" in which God is more of a friend you walk with and talk to in the afterlife). Many people's faith life tends to function through never actually getting the desired thing but in maintaining the separation, in orbiting around it in a series of failures. Fail and repent. fail and repent....

Consider how we got here, in the world. In some stories there was a fall. Maybe the fall of humanity / garden of Eden. First from a paradise/Eden then back to a paradise/heaven. A lot goes unexplained or taken for granted there. If there was one fall why wouldn't there be another? People assume heaven is like a static unchanging stasis. What would keep it that way? The rule of God? We already know that can be broken logically from the first fall. And we need changes, disruptions, and movement.

If we were to give up on heaven, then what are we to do? What we can do is support the things about heaven that we usually relegate to after death. In this world we say, "there will always be poverty and war.. but that's what heaven is for... to get away from all of that". However, instead of resigning away possible futures here on earth, and hoping for their fulfilment in heaven we might confront them here. We can either face the music and cope or hope and act to make this world the best place we can live in or for future generations. That's not to say we could create heaven on earth...that would also be a wrongheaded and dangerous goal in overly zealous hands...

But what we can do is quit pining and clinging and searching for a sense of stasis and wholeness and completeness we are not going to get (whether through spirituality, material acquisition etc.)

We don't usually recognize that getting the thing we think we want is really a disaster and that sense of wholeness we are after is a not thing.

NDE section (and Hell/Karma):

The largest evidence of sorts for an afterlife are NDEs but not even NDE's tell a totally consistent story about the afterlife despite many commonalities between the experiences. Even verifiable NDE's are not a super reliable source for one narrative on what the afterlife is like do to the contradictions in NDE testimonies (perhaps the contradictions could be factored in as part and parcel of it) and do to fallible people's testimony of what they think they perceived.

NDE's while sometimes pretty convincing are far from definite proof of an afterlife or what it would be like (Even if it is not simply result of the brain tripping on release of certain chemicals, I remember reading a Discover Magazine article in which a scientific researcher seemed to claim that the space dimension people enter when they see these NDE's is short lived. In other words, you aren't in a forever afterlife. And even that was speculation according to their theory/ best knowledge.)

The complex thing about NDE's is what I hear about the brain basically shutting down yet these experiences being so vivid, or realer than real to people who have them. How are they experiencing all these sensations in the NDE when their brain is basically shut down? It's mind boggling and is the doubt I have that perhaps it is not a purely physical event but somehow supernatural in character. However, you might make sense out of the inconsistency in NDE testimonies by saying they are basically the brain tripping out / dreaming and what transpires happens out of the subconscious and unconscious mind. This could explain why people's NDE's usually more often than not, align with something they have going on prior. 

I also like the unconscious or subconscious explanation more than saying people literally go to the afterlife of the deity they follow. There are problems I see with the latter. Such as that even though people on the surface level follow the same deity or religion, on another level they do not. They may be following a radically different version depending on the sect, values etc.

gods are also not just the gods they are on paper sometimes but changing or developed over time from other gods or systems of gods. You cannot actually pinpoint them down. YHWY for example was in a system of Canaanite deities. Unless someone literally believes YHWY went rogue, and the culture followed... rather than us constructing our culture, than we should expect that afterlife to reflect the multiplicity of henotheism / polytheism. Most typical Christian NDE's do not since Christians tend to be monotheists today. This can be explained by us no longer living in that ancient world and so there being a resulting change in our unconscious and subconscious world.

You have on the one hand those who became Christian Evangelicals, feeling called in their NDE experience, like Mickey Robinson. Mickey was on the end of a plane crash he almost didn't survive. On the other hand, most NDE experiences don't lead people into changing their faith or being called to evangelize. Some people see reincarnation, some do not. Various deities might be perceived to have been seen or often beings of white light. The deity who is seen does not always correspond one to one to the person's religion. The most we can say is people don't tend to experience positive or negative NDE's solely on the basis of which religion, faith, or lack there-of. In fact, the majority of NDE's are positive experiences rather than hellish ones.

Hell was mostly invented in my estimation, because we needed a place to believe there is justice in the end. But it became part of a sectarian religious narrative that blocks people out of heaven based on personal religion rather than of character. Hell has become more than hell... or it's become more than correction of injustices on earth but has taken on the character of an injustice.

The first purpose of a teaching like hell was that all things are made right and there is an order. Other teachings like Karma show a desire for the same thing. And I understand that feeling of need to invent this sense of order. Like Hell, Karma also has its major problems. It's not a great alternative teaching to hell in its reinforcement of hierarchical orders. In this world people don't get what they deserve, and they sometimes receive much more.

On a related note, even when my perspective was more of a Gnostic, I was lightly skeptical of reincarnation. And Scott Smith covers the weaknesses in reincarnation arguments in his book supporting a Gnostic perspective called, "God Reconsidered: Searching for Truth in the Battle Between Atheism and Religion"

i don't really believe in an afterlife. i do believe in the life flashing before our eyes, but once you pass i think your time ends there and your soul just becomes part of the rest of them (i believe in a spirit **not a god** that connects us all, the earth itself and people) and the spirit that connects us. you don't experience the connection, though, and you aren't reborn as someone new.