If we want to be honest with ourselves about the situation we're in, we have to start with these points. They are either truths or the best positions that most of us can come to.
1 - I'm going to die
2 - Life choices might matter - If there is an afterlife, my choices in life might affect what happens to me then.
- a. If I'm wrong about that and there was nothing I could do about my afterlife, then I'll do no harm by spending time studying this. I will have just wasted a little time. No big deal.
- b. If I'm right and I do choose my eternity, nothing could be more important to me. Nothing good or bad that happens to me in my 80 years or so on earth could possibly compare to what happens to me for the eternity that follows that.
3 - Is there a god or not - Either there is a god or there is not a god. In other words, either a power beyond this world created us or we are a fortunate accident.
4 - Nothing matters if there is no god
5 - There can't be more than 1 god - The various religions with their different gods have core claims that are contradictory. Two religions that contradict each other on core truths can't both be true. You can't have two that contradict each other; so you certainly can't have the many of them that disagree.
6 - Each god has a different requirement - Every god offers a reward after death but each requires that you do something different to get it. So, you need to pick the correct god and respond to that god in the way that he requires to get his reward.
7 - Which god is real? - If there is a god, which god is the real god?
8 - What if you already have an answer? - If you believe you already have the right answer to this, then answer this question; Have you looked at the other choices? To do the best job you can do to pick the right answer, you have to both know why you believe your answer is correct AND know why you believe the other answers are wrong. If you haven't done that, then you need to ask yourself if you feel lucky. Did the family or country you were born into just happen to be the one that has the right answer so that you got lucky and studied it, felt confident in it, quit looking at alternatives, and followed it? If that's your situation, you are doing fine; but what if you have settled on the wrong answer and have never looked at the right answer. How would you even know, unless you choose to be open-minded enough to look around? We've all had experiences where something sounded really good. Then we heard something else that sounded better and realized that the first thing was wrong. Again, the way to be most certain is to know why our answer is right and to know the other positions as well to know what is wrong with them.
9 - Do you continue with this? - You're gambling with your eternity if you don't. You don't have to follow the suggestions of this website, but please consider investigating this question some way. Most people have a belief about what happens to them when they die, whether they have any evidence to support their position or not. You either have a Position or an Opinion on this.
A Position is when you've put serious work into studying this question and have gotten an answer you have confidence in. It is something you can explain to other people and is based on evidence and reason. This explanation doesn't have to persuade others to agree with it, but they should be able to understand your reasoning for believing it.
An Opinion is when you have an unsupported belief about your afterlife. Either you inherited it from your family, friends, or formed it from TV shows and newspaper headlines. Have you ever found yourself saying: It's just what I believe. If so, this is where you're at. I really don't want to offend or anger you if this sounds like your situation. I would like to worry you a bit though; but I also want to encourage you. This is where a lot of us, myself included, started out. In fact it is a typical place for many people until about the time they leave their parent's home. An important part of taking control of our own lives is turning the opinions we were given to grow up on into our own positions. Many times this never happens or doesn't until later in life.
Why don't people study to turn their opinion about the afterlife into a well justified position? One of the big reasons is that people don't realize that they can. With all the different claims out there, it can seem like there is no way to figure out what the truth is. All religions claim that they are the truth of why we are here and science claims that all of those religions are just fairytales. The situation is that there has never been as much easily accessible information about all of the major world views as there is today. There is more detail that is easily accessible and, importantly to us, there are a lot of good summaries available as well. We can benefit from the clear high-level summaries that other people have produced by spending years studying the details. Yet the details are available for you to check if you want to be more certain.
With good information available we can study this like we would a court case or any other serious matter.
- We gather up all the serious World Views.
- For each one we decide if we will keep it or throw it out.
- What is its claim/explanation
- What evidence does it have
- Does the evidence support the claim/explanation
- If we are already down to one, then we have an answer. If not, continue on.
- Do more in-depth study of the remaining views.
- Return to step #2 till the list has been reduced to one item, which is the answer.
Yes, this may take a lot of time and be a lot of work, but isn't your eternity worth it?
The bottom line is that there may be a god and therefore life after our earthly death. If there is no god then it doesn't matter what you do in life. But if there is a god, then your eternity will be in his hands. If that god isn't the one you acknowledged and followed in life, you should only expect eternal punishment. We probably won't be certain which answer is true until we die; but if we haven't studied this well, we don't even have a good reason to think we can take a good guess at it. I think my eternity is worth more than a guess. Isn't yours?
Go to the ALL CREATION EXPLANATIONS SOUND IMPOSSIBLE tab where we see that we don't know it all.
3/21/13