Why there is belief in an afterlife

If the Devil is real that doesn’t mean the bible is true. The Bible could have been invented to slander entities.

If Christianity is about love then why do they glorify the parts of the old testament where Jews go around slaughtering everybody?

Also, why do you believe this sadomasochistic fetish religion about some dude slaughtering himself on a cross, enforcing chastity and washing dude’s feet? Don’t answer, that’s a rhetorical question.

God is the ultimate manifestation of God. We all endure extreme suffering, that’s life and death, it ain’t pretty. Jesus obeyed God while in his human form, but he was less human than other souls, less bedazzled by human life. Jesus started out as an angel, not a soul made for a human such as our souls were. I doubt that many souls found here on Earth started out as angels, so Jesus had advantages, less vulnerable, to the affects of evil than man’s soul in an animal body.

What’s more, God spoke frankly to Jesus in other words the relationship between God and Jesus continued, there was no separation of Jesus from God when his soul transitioned to Earth and I imagine that Jesus remembered Heaven, his part of eternity with God, before being born in a human form. Human souls have a tougher journey than the souls of angelic beings, for one, human souls have no recall of time spent anywhere other than on the Earth plane of existence even if multiple lifetimes have transpired. Also, human souls retain only a spark of divinity in them to be nurtured while living, so it’s very troublesome for humans to establish a knowing of God, to establish an unwavering trust.

O wise one, can you explain to me if there are multiple souls, ie. souls birthing like some mad experiment, never to be crossed over or united with other information paths, other journeys, ie. no compassion for the enemy because no incarnation threats…ie. a big birthing of a cruel universe kind of deal? Or are we all just one large and ignorant soul?

Do you know what I’m talking about?
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR_8SDNQ0ks[/youtube]

Jesus was and is God’s helper. Jesus is of God, as are we all, but he is not God.

Trixie, Christianity is NOT sadomasochistic or anything like that. Christianity is about very beautiful love and devotion. When people kissed the hands or feet of Jesus, it was done out of endearing reverence, NOT out of sexual desire.

You should NOT make such blasphemous statements about Christianity.

I reject some things in the bible, like the accounts of slaughter. These things are NOT of Christ, nor God. The bible does contain the Truth of God in it and many things inspired by God, but people need to remember that the bible was written by men. Men are not perfect they can make mistakes. This, however, does NOT mean that the bible is unreliable. Just because there are some errors in it, that does NOT mean we should do away with it. It does contain the Truth of God in it and we should continue to read it and learn from it.

Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. And no man goes unto the Father but by him. He is the only way to God.

Seek to know him. There is nothing more beautiful than knowing God through Jesus.

Knowing God directly is better for me. God is not only about love…he is about all of the emotions for he created them all. Are you refuting the Old Testament Erik?

Fixed, I agree with your thesis here. I think belief in afterlife definitely serves this function you mention. It allows us to set a higher standard for ourselves, to project our thinking and valuing further than ourselves and the immediate world around us. But it can also distort that thinking and valuing, since we actually have no real or objective or certain, rational reason to believe in the afterlife which we believe in… so errors are introduced.

There are also those strange, weird experiences that we have and that seem to imply that there is ‘something more’ that we do not understand… the total sphere of these “paranormal” sort of experiences seems sufficiently large, at least presumably or potentially, to justify at least a rejection of the position that there is certainly no afterlife in any form whatsoever. But that sphere is not sufficiently large (at least for me) to swing to the affirmative position that there is certainly an afterlife in some form.

So basically we cannot rationally cohere a position on either extreme, and because of this we are left in a place where it becomes unjustified to accept or reject either extreme. This ambiguous position allows the beliefs in afterlives to come into being, and then they serve that purpose you mentioned.

Beliefs are symptoms.

The ideal, dream, desire, belief in an “afterlife” is the religious and spiritual concept of Redemption.

People are scared to death that you get “just one life”. So people become very scared of their mistakes, errors, fuck ups, or other things that cause a lot of damage, suffering, death, misery, etc. They want to flee from the responsibility of their “evils”. And so judeo-christians, long ago, formulated and injected the ideals of an “afterlife” (heaven and hell) into their theologies, as means to appeal to and appease the slave masses.

“You can be a slave all your life, but, if you are a good and dutiful slave, then you get to go to heaven when you die.”

That is the original source.

Yep, there’s that too.

There is that too, but evidently that is not an evolutionary benefit, so it is recent, from when humans began to cluster in civilizations that protected them from having to be courageous.
We know the Egyptian civilization of close to or more than ten thousand years old believed in reincarnation, and predominantly for the Faraoh.

So all that slavish crap Dante seems to have been commissioned to concoct, inferno, is just a modern side phenomenon.

Agreed on all counts.

I contend thus that beliefs in rewarding afterlives is the original source, because it provides for more power and determination, and that belief in hell as punishment is a sad side phenomenon that actually is the reverse of the evolutionary advantage, where it makes people unnecessarily afraid, and mostly of precisely the sort of things that made the original believers bold.

Namely exercising their will to power, going for their values, existing.

Kristjun afterlife is a blend of the two.
The crusaders were certainly brave, as were a lot of banding sects.
The city states guided sociological by the church are the ugliness of accumulated cowardice.

Another powerful culture of ancient lineage, but one that still holds sway and over increasingly many mind, is the old Into Aryan narrative of Karma. (I use the term Aryan here to clear up confusion - Aryans aren’t Germans. They are originally proto-Persians and people from the Indian peninsula.)

The primary book of that culture, the Bhagavad Gita, starts on a battlefield, where a man is doubting his will to fight to the death people for whom he might have affection, but the God reprimands him and tells him in so many words that only dedication to standard based action matters. It is not about the result but about the intention. Because Earthly results are never attained directly. It can be seen as a trick of evolution to surpass human pettiness, the exaggerated self interest that our brain permits, and use us in a grander society-building scheme, where the norm is that strong men are willing to go to the death to protect what is sacred, which is always the survival of the women and children, the home, and if possible, the growth in power of that home.

In such vastly aspirational cultures, men are expandable. But in war, not in a cubicle.

yoga-age.com/gita/bg1.html

Yes and it’s interesting that at least in the Abrahamic tradition the notion of afterlife as eternal pain and punishment was not part of the original idea of afterlife. This fact supports your position here, that the belief in afterlife was originally developed to aid human courage and valuing.

Ill need to add this though: Its not Abrahamic but Hellenic.
Christianity is written in Greek. Hell was a Roman invention - only they were cruel and imaginative enough for such things. Dante came up with it.
Islam is a Hellenic, postChristian religion as well, it is a hodgepodge of Hellenic and Abrahamic and Arabic influences. It doesn’t relate to the hard self-shaping of that weird family of Abraham.

The original Abrahamic writing has no notion of afterlife. This is little known, people generally assume that “heaven” is a natural extension of “God”. But what heaven means in the Torah is only he sphere from which ones time can be seen as already finished.

The only afterlife a Jew has is his progeny. Thats why they’re so tough on them, they need them to survive and procreate, its all there is.

Thus I see the state of Israel as a literal afterlife - the attainment of many generations of people giving themselves to the future.

Thanks for the clarification, that does make sense.

On a different but related note, we are seeing the dividing of humanity into two species, as you already pointed out. This is the hidden truth behind trans gender and all that is associated to it, in particular with regard to how so many people refuse to even think about it and blindly defend transism as “why do you care what they do?” This is mind-death. So the split is occurring along the lines not of “elite vs everyone else” as might be tempting to conclude, but rather is occurring along the lines of “thinking vs unthinking reacting”.

“It’s hard to pick a fight with reality… you tend to lose”, as JP said. The two emerging human species are being defined along these lines, more or less exactly. I mean this is a precision historical fault line, and it is only coming more sharply into focus nowadays.

This fault line will bisect every strata of society from the top to the bottom. It will also lead to the destruction of most of the western world, but not so much a destruction as such and more like a reconfiguration; Orwell was only half right, he saw the bisecting and growing elitism but he didn’t see how as JP put it above, or as you put it with the comments on facing hard reality, that truth always wins in the end-- that is what reality means.

As the western world goes forward it will progressively schizophrenize and divide into these two camps I mentioned above, but one camp will naturally begin to rise higher than another when it comes to influence, success, wealth, power, industry. The group that rises will cross all socioeconomic and political strata and will be simply that of the two groups which values thinking over unthinking reacting. While it is technically possible that the lesser group will maintain enough cohesion with the upper group and keep enough upward lift to remain in contact with the upper dominant group, I count that as a very small possibility. And remember too that these groups are self-chosen allegiances, and this fact will depower the potentially limiting effects of the empathy of the higher group toward all those who insist on being left behind.

Fixed Cross, you amateur…

“Hell” comes from the Catholic catacombs, dungeons, and torture chambers, designed for criminals, punishment, and enemies of the Roman Papacy (The Holy Roman Emperor). The tortures and punishments were designed to deter and intimidate all that stood opposed to the Arch Diocese. Christianity then extended these physical realities with the “afterlife”. If you disobeyed the abrahamic god (The Græco-Roman Emperor), then you would be thrown into Hell for eternity. This is the inspiration of Dante’s Inferno.

This was the height, or the depth, of the European “Dark Ages”. It is called dark, referring to the height of intimidation, fear, and “evil” of the Roman Catholic order. It was even illegal for commoners and peasants to become literate, without approval from the centralized church. This eventually broke into Protestantism, when Northern European pagans educated themselves, and became literate, without the permission of the central church.

You all ought to know this. You’re amateurs.

^ how does that refute anything he said? I don’t see any serious contradictions between your two statements.

It’s not a refutation. It’s a clarification. Fixed Cross is neglecting you and others in this thread by not going in-depth.

Dante’s epic work did create new depths and notions into the Roman Catholic idea of hell and the devil. The modern “devil” is an artistic, poetic invention, in this regard. And Fixed already pointed out that “hell” was created by the Romans. You are saying it was created by Roman Catholics… are you aware that Rome became Christian? And that Christianity became… Roman? There is no disagreement in your two positions here.

Yes we know the dark ages were terribly ‘dark’. That doesn’t clarify what Fixed was saying, in any way.

Why don’t you pick out what you think Fixed said is inaccurate or significantly insufficient, and demonstrate what is missing? Because if your claim to this effect is basically “the dark ages sucked” and “Hell was invented by Catholics and used for the purposes of social control”, that doesn’t disjoint with anything Fixed was saying. He already basically said the exact same thing. But you are free to actually make your case, if you want. It would be preferable for you to make the case rather than just come in here, post a couple obvious supplementary things, and then say Fixed doesn’t know what he is talking about.

This, “Fixed Cross, you amateur…” is not supported by what you have written so far here.