Since consciousness and any sort of mental activity is clearly tied to the brain (destroy a part of the brain and certain functions like speech will vanish aswell) I don't see how it can survive physical death.
Reincarnation and an afterlife are religious concepts for which there is not a single shred of conclusive, reliable evidence. Near death experiences do not imply that the subject actually died (if they actually died irrevocably they wouldn't have been able to return) and at the moment of death a cocktail of chemicals is released in the brain so obviously you're going to hallucinate all sorts of things. Might aswell believe whatever one sees under the influence of psychedelics is real.
Logically there are only two possibilities: either we survive death or we don't. If we don't there's no problem since we won't be able to experience anything at all including pain and any sort of discomfort. If we do survive death there are a myriad of possibilities but frankly the stories of heaven and hell are so obviously man-made I don't see why anyone should put any stock into it.
Personally I don't think I'm a bad person so why fear any judgement? When I die I'll see (or not see) whatever it will be. No need to fuss about it now.
I want to see you smoke some DMT and then we'll see how confident you are in your position.
The religious doctrines against suicide obviously serve political and social purposes. Suicide wasn't even considered a sin in the christian religion until Augustine decided to make it so since some christian sects were a little too eager to get into paradise early by doing themselves in. It's pretty difficult to exert political influence if the numbers of your religion keep dwindeling.
Yeah sounds about right.
I've read in Buddhism suicide is not allowed since it would lead to a negative rebirth. Yet there are three stories in the Pali canon of monks who killed themselves yet Buddha did not condemn them. They were considered arhants or perfect ones who realized awakening. If you believe in that sort of thing it makes sense to strive to become an arhant before CTB-ing.
In Jainism a meditational religion Sallekhana It is the religious practice of voluntarily fasting to death by gradually reducing the intake of food and liquids until one starves to death. This is typically done at the end of ones life. This is also done in Hinduism.
It's also believed in meditational religions that if one suffers a terrible painful death that they risk going to a hellish dimension. And that you can burn off a lot of your bad karma by fasting at the end of your life with Sallekhana as your wasting away. So that would be a benefit of waiting for death.
Atheists Read This
Atheisms biggest conundrums isn't so much religion anymore in westernized countries. People are moving away from organized religion. Atheisms biggest fight is now against psychedelics, near death experiences, ghostly experiences, astral projection, and even meditation because these things defy the materialistic paradigm. And yet many of these things don't prove god, except maybe some near death experiences. Like neurosurgeons Eben Alexanders book. Also none of these things are centralized. All of these can be had and found anywhere. Which is why Atheism won't win this fight against the spiritual.
Try convincing a child that saw a ghost that there is no spiritual. (Like me, when I was a child. Heck I even saw a ghost with my two brothers when I was an adult.)
Try telling a teenager that consciousness is all in the brain when he took DMT and went to anther world with consciousness increase that was beyond any anything chemical could create by itself.
Try telling someone that has astral projected their whole life that it's all in there head when they have seen shit that would blow your mind.
Try telling a young adult that meditation doesn't do anything other than relax you when they read about Buddhist monks achieving inner states of peaceful consciousness that is beyond imagination to us in the west.
Try telling someone that had a heart attack in the hospital and they came out of their body and saw the doctors working on them, then they are resuscitated that they are delusional.
Look don't get me wrong I think atheism has served it's goal to fight back against belief without reason. And for that I am grateful for atheism role in the west, but really I think this is a fight you will ultimately loose especially once the general public can smoke DMT. It was nice while it lasted, but don't think the general public will never quit believing in the spiritual. And yet I think we still need you to help fight religious extremism. In the meantime that is the thing that still unites us.
