i seem to think about this stuff in a totaly dif way, i believe things simply are; there is no "souls, spirits, other dimension..", everything just sort of happens, and for no particular purpose,
our consciousness is just something that coincidentally happened, the odds of awareness existing, even just life existing, were so small, but it was bound to happen, because life is the only thing that obeys time, everything else, molecules, atoms, just are, and eventually created us,
so when we die, we simply break down, the super-complex patterns of atoms that allow us awareness breakdown, nothing more, people made up the idea of afterlife because of what sharpestoner said, it would suck so bad to be nothing, something to hard to think about,
god is just an idea that gives us comfort, that atleast there is something that will right all wrongs in the end, most religious ideas are just made to help people cope