UnknownUnknown,
Thanks for that.
I may have been referring to there being no point of discussing the different after lives if we can't ascertain that there is an afterlife of any sort.
I suppose the after life discussion is heavily related to the phenomena of ghosts etc. After all, if they are there they must be 'somewhere'.
Possibly they are a manifestation of what the believers would refer to as purgatory. Some kind of half way house.
Myself, no I can't imagine different kinds of afterlives for different kinds of people.
And religion depends upon these differences.
It offers three choices. Good guys go to heaven, bad ones go to hell. And then there is the possibility of oblivion.
Oblivion can have no value unless you can experience it. which is something of an oxymoron.
So if you were in a totally dark soundproofed room with no knowledge of where you were of when you would return to normality, that would be as near to oblivion as you could get. But it falls apart because you would still be reasoning in that situation. Not 'oblivious'.
INT21
I see. My post was bridging from the RIP thread, which was in danger of going off topic. Some posters there has begun discussing whether atheists believed in afterlife-based punishment. I don't believe in that, but thought the discussion was interesting and worth relocating here.
Has the link between belief in an afterlife, and ghosts etc, been raised here before? Strange if it hasn't.
Probably because I don't believe in an afterlife, I also don't believe that ghosts come from 'beyond the grave.' I believe that people do see ghosts, and that they are certainly
something, but lean more toward thinking that they are somehow generated by the living. Stone tape theory interests me I suppose at an allegorical level, but also more psychological-based interpretations. I do believe in psychokinesis, and in precognition etc, and I believe that the mind holds a lot more to explore than science currently understands.
Regarding religion offering three choices of afterlife - I don't know enough about
all religions to comment. This seems to be quite a monotheistic structure though? In which case it certainly doesn't apply to all religions, as not all religions operate under the same binary morality structure as the Abrahamic faiths. Not my specialist area though, as I say.