You're missing my point, Bee-dubya-ell. :) Are you saying you KNOW for a FACT that there is no afterlife, no continuing consciousness of any kind after the death of the body? If so..............


.......


How do you know that?



How could you know it? How could any of us presently alive be certain about that? We have no basis for such an assumption of certainty, because we are not conscious of anything beyond our present bodily circumstances...just as a bug locked inside a steel box isn't conscious of anything that lies outside that steel box. That does not mean that nothing exists outside of that steel box, does it? What if the bug is entirely mistaken in its very limited (and temporary) assumptions about "reality", based on its being locked inside the box?

In my analogy, the "steel box" is your usual way of looking at things through your 5 senses and your standard set of mental assumptions which you have become fond of.

You have alluded to a patently ridiculous cultural version of the afterlife, something akin to an old cultural fairy tale from a specific tradition, and you're reacting just to that, but there are a vast number of other possibilities of a "life after death experience" that lie way beyond that fairy tale, so why waste time reacting to it as if it or "nothing at all" are the ONLY 2 possibilities out there? To do that is akin to reducing the works of Dostoevsky and Shakespeare to a "Dick and Jane" book from a first grade English class.