Afterlife

I've always been struck dumb by people's insistence of there being something after we die. I often wonder, "why does it matter what's there?" Truly, it doesn't. The only reason you'd "believe" in whatever may be correct after knowing it exists is for purely selfish reasons, reasons that would, if the Christian Judgment Day holds true, bar you from entering anyway.

I think the entire prospect of an afterlife is purely for coercion. After all, the idea of burning for all of eternity is not pleasant, is it? Masochists are, of course, exempt from the prior generalization. Pretty much all religions have a "good" place and a "bad" place to go when you die. Pretty much all religions also feel that if you don't believe in that particular pantheon, then you go to the "bad" place. What an incentive to believe! The possibility that you might go to a "bad" place when you die so you can completely delete your prior opinions of the world, both divine and mortal.

Chances are, if any kind of afterlife exists, you'll go there whether you believe in it or not. So what's the point? To "prove" to an omniscient being, who would know why exactly you "believe" in that afterlife, that you believe in it and that you feel it knows best on how you should spend eternity? Man, you can almost fool an omniscient being. But, of course, it is the thought that counts. It doesn't matter the reasons for it and the resulting things that come from it. Nope. Just the thought. Just convincing yourself that it is true is more than enough. Right? Right.

What is so hard for people about you just lying in the ground and rotting after you die? Why can't there be nothing? Does it make you feel like this life is pointless? If you live somewhere for eternity, that would make this life pointless, anyway. After all, 100 years is almost non-existent when compared with eternity. So who cares? Does the thought of an afterlife give you comfort because the idea of death and rotting in the ground scare you, that you can't handle your own mortality? Did the thought ever occur to you that, before you were born, you were scared to live? That you didn't want to live? Now you don't want to die? Maybe dying won't be so bad, since life sure doesn't seem to be so bad, on the whole.