Living your Afterlife Today

To continue a theme from previous posts, their stance on death is one thing that particularly troubles me about major religions. Many of them preach morals and rules that you need to abide by to ensure happiness in the AFTERlife. (Cue: Record scratch sound effect!) What!? I should inhibit myself during my entire existence, holding back all my desires, spend hours and hours to save up for a nice retirement when my life is over, wasting time while my life is actually going on? What sense is there in that?

Death is not the beginning. It is THE end. This does not make it your enemy. It is merely the end of your life. But after all what is a good story without an ending. Any good tale has to have an ending. The ending is what gives the story value. The fact that death is lying at the end of the Road Taken should not make you afraid. Instead it should help you in your navigation on the Infinite Freeway, choosing your route more carefully because you will eventually run out of fuel making every mile you drive all the more important. In that sense, death is what gives life meaning, what gives it purpose. There can be no light without darkness and thus there can be no life without death. Like Tyler Durden says; “you have to realize that one day you will die, until you know this you are useless."

Death gives meaning to life. It shouldn’t make you afraid to live. Lying at the end of your path, it should rather propel you forward to achieve as much as possible during your time here and make your own micro-universe as pleasant and rich as possible. That responsibility is yours and yours alone, you are the master of your own micro-universe, no one else. Not some celestial being who is going to reward you after you are dead. 

Unfortunately, religion is very well thought out. The popes of the Middle Ages made fortunes selling prime seats to heaven after you die because they knew nobody ever came back for a refund. Why? Because when you are dead, you are dead. There is no afterlife, at least not in any form preached by religions. How do I know? Being a transcender or not, like them I try to maintain the humility to not think I have the ultimate answer to any question. But I still have the sense to only base my decisions on the evidence and knowledge available to me in my given lifetime. 

So answer me this: How many do you know who have been to Heaven or Hell? Experience, people. Let your rationale answer the question. Nobody has ever been there, because it does not exist. But this is the typical trait of religions, it is based solely on the preachings of certain individuals who told people what they wanted to hear, and even if these prophets themselves believed it to be true, they did not have a shred of evidence. This lack of evidence is what really set believers apart from transcenders. Religion works only on faith, it requires no proof of anything, rather it dares transcenders and scientists to DISprove all their claims.

Dawkins touched upon this in The God Delusion. Of course, no one can disprove that God exists somewhere, but at the same time no one can disprove that ghosts, werewolves, Santa Claus, Odin, the Loch Ness Monster, Extra Terrestrials, the Tooth Fairy, or as Dawkins lists; the Spaghetti Monster, exist. The point is that it is very easy to make up stories and then ask someone to disprove it. Transcenders never deal in absolutes. But at the same time they look at the information available and make the soundest judgment based on this cold, hard evidence. This is as close to truth as we can get. And sometimes the truth is harsh, but that does not make it any less true.

Based on the evidence available, here is what I think happens after death. Nothing. When you die, you simply cease to exist, your actions in life will only matter while you are alive. After you are gone they will have no consequences for your micro-universe, because it will no longer be. It begins and ends with you, because it only exists in your brain. Once your brain is dead, so is your micro-universe. Transcenders and pretenders are very aware of this. That is why they can accomplish so much more than thedancers on the Dancefloor, working unrestricted and more time-efficient not wasting time praying or attending this and that religious gathering because so-and-so told me to. Religions are sending the completely opposite message that they should be. They are basically telling people to die in order to be happy. This makes the believers more docile and easier to control. The false prophets of yesteryear did their job well. Religion really is, like Marx called it, “opium des volkes”, the keystone in the Trinity of Control, it lulls people into apathy and gives all initiative to the false prophets or pretenders ready to prey on the sedated masses in order to promote their own agenda. It takes initiative away from their believers and turns them into mindless slaves easy to bend in any direction. Of course there was a time when such control was beneficial to unify and thus evolve our species, but as history has shown, it has time and time again also been misused to perpetuate selfish agendas just like some fanatics are doing today, so I remain wondering whether or not it has much benefit in the 21^st century. Certainly not as a system of control. We ought to be smarter than that today.