Quote Originally Posted by Completely Stoned
well it feels great to know that he's there waiting for me. Waiting in fear for your life to just END, sucks a big fat weener. I could enevr stand that shit. I'm glad I was raised the way I was.
Once Mark Twain was asked if he feared death. He said that he did not, in view of the fact that he had been dead for billions and billions of years before he was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

I'm not afraid of death, because if there really is nothing to experience after death, which I strongly suspect (to me it just doesn't make any more sense to say consciousness can outlive the brain than it does to say that heartbeat can outlive the heart), then I will have no emotions and will not be able to care about the fact that I'm dead. If there really is something after death, and all the evidence that suggests consciousness is the product of our mortal brains is nothing but an illusion, then it seems we are not meant to know what it is during our lifetimes, and any speculations about other dimensions and new lives is unsubstantiated wishful thinking.

The Christian idea of Heaven and Hell seems completely ridiculous to me for a few reasons. First of all, the whole idea of Hell (eternal punishment) goes against the idea of forgiveness which Christians claim to embrace. It seems that forgiveness only lasts until you are dead, at which point your good deeds and bad deeds are tallied up in some cosmic computer or something which calculates whether you pass the goodness threshhold for admittance into Heaven. After that point forgiveness is a meaningless concept; in Hell everybody is branded as evil for their sins and they all suffer the exact same punishment of eternal burning, no matter whether they killed 6 million Jews or just said something bad about the Holy Ghost.

Meanwhile, in another invisible part of the universe nobody has ever been able to find with any telescope, other "souls" who happened to accept Jesus are all rewarded indiscriminately with eternal happiness (except for the eternal pain of knowing many of their loved ones are being tortured forever). According to Christian dogma, it doesn't matter if you're the Pope or you've been sinning your whole life but "found Jesus" just before you died, you get a ticket to eternal bliss (unless you said something bad about the Holy Ghost, in which case it's Hell no matter how many years you serve as Pope or how hard you try to find Jesus).