Eduardo Porter is an Atheist.  He has his reasons for not believing in God, an afterlife or extra-human beings like Angels and the Devil.  He quotes Blaise Pascal a Christian of the “Enlightenment” which made believers deal with rational thought and caused a rift between was then known as Natural Philosophy or Science.

But as time passes and reaches limits imposed by the way one lives or uses time for positive or negative purposes, there is reason to think before about what might go on in an afterlife.  Before this goes on any further, I make the observation that no one (to my personal knowledge or what is reported in the Farmer’s Almanac) has ever died and come back from where death takes you to tell us about it.  Now, I know that there are many “magical” stories that tell about what is beyond the “Pale” and much speculation about what religion tells us about a life after life ceases to exist.  These are quite interesting but do not settle the question – is there really a life after our corporeal life ceases?  Is there a special place for souls?

I join Eduardo Porter in not believing what it says in the Bible or the Quran. The idea of going to paradise and finding 70 virgins sounds pretty good to a patriarchic society but there seems to be no similar place for the virgins as women when they pass on or, over.  That passage and going somewhere when you die seems to give a lot of people a lot of hope and comfort.  I am weighted by what life has exposed me to and think that when I die that that weight will lift and there will be nothing.  I cannot conceive of an afterlife and a heaven particularly when there are astronauts up there repairing a space station’s joints that move solar panels around.

Rational thinkers are rare.  We are more like stimulus and response robots.  We do our thinking in response to external stimuli and to what other people think and say rather than spend time on introspection and forming our own beliefs.

It takes a quite hardy soul to be an atheist.  Somewhere in all of us lurks the belief systems of our ancestors who told us about God and a host of angels who created the world for us and then gave us freedom to think for ourselves.  I think the two things are antithetical to each other.  Believing in supernatural beings is easy.  Believing in your own strengths and weaknesses makes you live a better life.  The easy way is to give authority over to a “GOD” and place your life in his or her hands.

I apologize for spending your time on before thoughts on an after life.