Happy Saturday, guys.
I would like atheists to answer a couple of questions about their vision of life and the afterlife.
Etymologically a-theism means to believe in the absence of a deity (or more deities).
It doesn't imply, philologically and theologically, that because a deity doesn't exist, neither does the afterlife.
I agree.
That is:
a) Do you believe, as atheists, that the afterlife is a consequence of the existence of a God?
No. I don't believe that either afterlives nor gods exist in any meaningful sense.
There are, of course, claims of divinely promised (or warranted) afterlives. Even in the abstract they are hard to take at all seriously.
b) Do you believe in an afterlife? And why not? And do you believe in a remote possibility that it might exist?
Thank you in advance.
No, not even as a remote possibility. Nor do I have any sympathy for the idea except perhaps as a fictional tool.
From a logical perspective, it is entirely speculative at the very best. It is quite literally the claim that something entirely undetectable exists anyway. In most or perhaps even all versions of the claim, afterlives are also rather implausible even by their own criteria, depicting curiously human-like attitudes and personalities in environments that logically can't sustain those.
I think that proponents of afterlives tend to neglect consideration of what makes people what they are. To a very large extent indeed we are, as Buddhism describes it, interdependently originated. In a very real sense we simply can't exist outside of our social environments, and it is not very far fetched to say that we die and are reborn in a slightly different way often, even in the scope of a single day.
Even if we take for granted that there is some sort of psychic residue that survives our deaths, it is just too much to expect that said residue could somehow reconstitute a reasonable facsimile of our whole personalities and go on living a semblance of our lives without the necessary support of a social environment very similar to those we are familiar with. It would make more sense to call that entirely hypothetical situation one of... immaterial offspring, I suppose?
From an aesthetical perspective, I just don't like the idea of afterlives. It cheapens and disrespects the sacrality of human existence by implying that it is some sort of rough draft that does not truly count as the real thing. I have seen up close how harmful that belief is for people's behavior and morality, and I am not encouraging it in any way.