Religion was never a large part of my life, although I used to be a staunch curch attendee. Over time I separated myself from the supernatural concepts of a God, an afterlife, and any brand of this belief. My foremost question to any religious believer in any form of an afterlife regards the human mind. To have a solid base for any belief in the supernatural you must believe there is more to a person than their brain and nervous system.

On this basis, we have to look at the central ideology of most religions… the afterlife. To say that after death people are punished for their actions, or rewarded, or in someway recycled through reincarnation, etc, says that a person must be replicated. However, should you observe a person who has suffered brain damage, or the readily available supply of drug addicts in society, you will realize the brain in the central object in behavior, thought, and every aspect of personality. There are all brands of brain impairment, and they come in many different forms.

Applying this to the belief-

Lets say a religious person was well revered within their sect. They did everything necessary to go to “heaven(etc)” and acted in the most admirable manner. Then they suffer an event which removes a large part of the frontal lobe of their brain, and they survive. Rendered in this condition, they proceed to murder/do other undesirable activities. When they die, what happens to them? If there was more to them than their brain, then it certainly had nothing to do with the changes incurred after the event. However, this addition will have left the physical body, and is now being judged on actions that were not it’s own. What makes more sense is that a person, the entirety of a person, is their brain. When the brain is damaged in some way, their entire lives change. They can become completely different people by personality, they can become mentally retarded there are countless cases of this happening. Shall they be judged on who they were before, after, or completely encompassing the incident?

Apologies for length, and weird ass wording.

I think they will objectively judge them selves completely encompassing the time before, during, and after the incident. They will stand apart and view all the thoughts, feeling, emotions, actions taken and view or know the results of these things, and will view what other possible thoughts, emotions, and actions that could have been taken at the time and the possible results if those thoughts, emotions, and actions had been taken. They will then, as I said, objectively judge themselves based upon all of this. And I say objectively because they will be seeing things from a higher perspective.(no pun intended)

You mentioned reincarnation once but seemed to leave it out of the rest of your post.

With reincarnation there is no judgement, just evolution of spirit.

How does this apply to the last part of your thread?

quote:Originally posted by Seriously:

I think they will objectively judge them selves completely encompassing the time before, during, and after the incident. They will stand apart and view all the thoughts, feeling, emotions, actions taken and view or know the results of these things, and will view what other possible thoughts, emotions, and actions that could have been taken at the time and the possible results if those thoughts, emotions, and actions had been taken. They will then, as I said, objectively judge themselves based upon all of this. And I say objectively because they will be seeing things from a higher perspective.(no pun intended)

Yeah this is one thing I think is possible. But the result will never be eternal damnation.

Agreed.

on the mental impairment, what about things which are morally acceptable in todays society but may not be in the future, or vice versa.

example 1- eating meat, is it acceptable to allow killing for your own pleasure, and will it be in the future? we're raised by society to believe that animals are there to be eaten, but an objective view that makes no distinction between man and animals would see eating meat as vulgar as eating children.

example 2- cybernetic and genetic modification is not acceptable in a lot of people's minds today, but in the future it may be percieved as reckless and cruel to not modify your offspring. for example it could be compared to refusing to let your children learn to read.

as I can think of these two examples, there will probably be many other examples in the future which we cannot yet imagine. in this respect, we're already mentally impaired by the societies we've been brought up in, and in light of this perhaps we're all 'born into sin' as the correct moral codes have not even been discovered yet.

I personally believe that awareness is all the same force split up into local entities like people and animals, we're citizens of the universe, and the only incarnation you'll ever be aware of is the one you're experiencing now. That's just my opinion though

Sorry if I left out any parts of my arguement in the post, I was pretty scatter-brained at the moment. Plus, I will probably do it again. I know the idea is a lot more complex than I think it is.

Regarding reincarnation, unless I am mistaken, it is the reproduction of a spirit. My point/proposal here is that a person is no more than their brain. There is no room for a spirit. Your brain is all you are, and all you have ever been. If you brain malfuctions, you malfuction. It is who you are. If this is true, then reincarnation can reproduce what part of a person? Whats left of you if your brain is what you feel, what you perceive, your emotions, thoughts, wants, needs, actions. Again, if this is true there is no room for any religion.

…thoughts?

Yeah, I agree with that. I'd also say that it's silly to expect some kind of enlightenment after death.

Every form of 'being' is about brain complexity, from your visual recognition systems, depth perception, hearing, ability to understand words, etc all comes from complexity. If your soul, 'self', or whatever you wanna call it returns to some kind of primal state after death it's pretty unlikely that you'll have any of the things provided by your brain during life, because there would need to be something more complex than the brain to produce it.

If you've not got the complex brain functions for spatial awareness, visual imagination and memory, you're gonna have a hard time imagining a circle, let alone higher reasoning needed for contemplating the meaning of the universe.

ah crap, here we go again...

http://www.totse.com/bbs/Forum31/HTML/004936.html

http://www.totse.com/bbs/Forum31/HTML/005025.html



I'll leave out all the no-self, reincarnation threads.