There is no afterlife.
So don’t waste your precious time sitting in a pew feeling bad about yourself.
I wouldn’t be so sure. There might be, for all we know. But I agree there’s no point acting like there is, relying on it, as there might not be. And even if there is, it might well not be pleasant. Or reincarnation might be true.
I am pretty damn sure. Your brain, everything that makes you you, is a biological computer (for lack of a better word) of which we have an extremely comprehensive understanding of how it functions and the processes, both biological and psychological, that form a personality. There is no magic sauce or spirit that leaks out into the void when you die. It is your biological circuits ceasing to function and decaying.
I say this as someone who believed in an afterlife well into my late 20’s. It is a belief we tell ourselves to cope with the reality of our own mortality. We will die and there will be nothing, so we tell ourselves that maybe there will be something because it makes the pain easier to handle.
Maybe we are not done yet with understanding how our biological computer works.
On topics like this, I like to think about bacteria:
Before microscopes, it was unimagible to have little organisms on us and everywhere around us. People have been labelled crazy for believing that there is a whole small universe of organisms everywhere.
Then came microscopes, and suddenly everyone could see it for themselves.
What if we just don’t have the right tools to make our magic sauce, spirit, soul, whatever visible to us yet?
That’s the physicalist perspective, but there are other perspectives, and the philosophical debate on physicalism vs dualism is far from settled.
Plus, our scientific understanding of consciousness is far from comprehensive. We still have no idea how our experience actually emerges from neurological activity.
