What happens after death for an atheist?

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Are you so shallow as to think that just because we have just this one short life that life is meaningless and we shouldn't strive to better things and expand our knowledge? What a small minded person you are. How old are you? Are you just some ignorant kid or are you an adult of some years?

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In the context of a 16 billion year old universe, human life is meaningless. Why do you think that acknowledging a short life is meaningless, makes someone small minded. I think it makes them a realist if their own view of all of this is that it's a result of evolution and chance. What possible good are you thinking of making that is actually worth anything in context to an old universe that will eventually collapse in on itself and then start over. What difference will it make?That's kind of like me being at the beach and drawing lines in the sand to make a beautiful picture. Then critisizing everyone else who doesn't see the value of drawing in the sand. In an hour, the tide comes in and goes back out and my beautiful picture is gone.Tide goes in, tide goes out and the Earth is gone because the Sun went red giant.Tide goes in, tide goes out and our galaxy twists itself apart.Tide goes in, tide goes out and the universe collapses in on itself in the big crunch.So in a realistic cosmic perspective, all life is meaningless. Whatever actions that are undertaken by living beings will all be crunched into an infinitley small point of incrediblely intense ball of energy. Then it starts all over again and basically renders time itself as meaningless.Does it really matter how many times tide goes in, tide goes out? Are you aware of all of the good that was accomplished just before the last time the tide came back in?So if my sand drawing gets some play and another human comes up and adds to my drawing and "Leaves their mark on the beach" and "leaves their influence on sand art", so what. In an hour, tide goes in, tide goes out. At best, I'll have some fun and memories while I draw, but in a cosmic sense, you don't even get that. And even if I keep hold of the memories, if I loose my mind in my old age, then even the memories are worthless to me.

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Ah I see, you worship out of fear - You better hope you don't get there and Allah is waiting for you.....

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That's a good point. The Bible even addresses what proper worship is, and it's not out of a gratuitous fear. Fear is useful from the Biblical perspective but the Bible says that the Fear of the Lord is the "Beginning of Understanding", not the guarentee of a better afterlife.

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There should be a religous age of consent whereby children under a certain age should not be allowed to follow a religion.

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I like you line of thought.Perhaps the children of religious parents should be confiscated by the state until the child can rationally decide whether or not they want to be placed into an abbusive household that teaches religion. There could be courtesy visits by the biological parents but only under the direct supervision of an objective social worker.Maybe potential parents who profess a religion should be sterilized by the state to stem the flow of violence against objective newborns. These people might be forced to obtain a licience or permit by the state, allowing them to believe in a religion and if found a believer without a permit would levy heavy punishment.

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but as long as I'm alive and functional, a lot of things have meaning to me

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A lot of things have an affect on you, just as the rays of the sun have an affect on the surface rocks of Mars. But to infer that something has meaning to you requires it to have purpose. Since there is no purpose for the universe to be, except that it just is, means that there is no purpose for you or I or anything that we do.All of it is merely electro-chemical energy and reactions that are spin-offs of the original Big Bang. Nothing more. What your electro-chemical reaction sequence does in the boundries of time while it is "funtional" is no more meaningful then if a rock on a mountain on Mars rolls down the hill or stays in place.The feeling of purpose that your body is generating is a phenomena resulting from certain electrical activity in the brain. Any type of real purpose to your life would require that you would have had to have been created specifically to be you, by design. You would have had to have been formed/created for a purpose.Cosmically speaking, you were not created or designed. You are a result of specific types of amino acids coming in contact with each other under chance circumstances, following a repeated pattern of events in a chain sequence.This message has been edited by Lizard Breath, 02-07-2005 14:49 AM

Good points. You can see how crazy this can all get as people try right the wrongs of a religious society with the superiority of Aetheism.I'm not saying there there isn't any wrongs in religious society, heck that's real apperant to see. But having humans try to play God while denying that there is one is pure craziness to me.

Hoooowwwwws it goin 1.61803,I was posting from the grand cosmic perspective and not from an individual human one. The fact that we are dialoging means that everything that is said in here has meaning and purpose.

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So these words you are reading do they have any meaning to you?

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They have meaning because they have context. They have context because we have an agreed upon language. You could have typed the same letters but in a different order random and they would be meaningless.To say that a life has meaning would infer that there is an agreed upon context to life. This would require an infussion of intellegence. Since the universe has no guiding intellegence (cosmically speaking), then all of our lives are like jumbo-ed up letters random. No context and therefore no meaning. The letters themselves cannot create meaning.It's the context behind the letters that makes meaning in the life.

Well, I'm not done coorosponding with you yet, so you will stay here.

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Furthermore your responses are troll like and I have no further wish to correspond with you.

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Ok, Ok. What could I do so that my responses are not so "troll like" so you would want to continue on with this discussion? To be fair, I was trying to convey an honest perspective of how you derive a life of meaning out of a reality based on chaeos as science describes.

If if was so easy, one way or the other, I suppose this forum would degenerate to be just another dating chat room.

Ok, I see where you are coming from.You can enjoy the color purple (even though the universe has no purpose) just the same as if the color purple came from a Creator. And if what you want out of life is enjoyment, fame, popularity, money, carreer success and all of that, you certainly don't need a creator in your life to aquire that.But even all of that has no purpose or meaning when you talk about death. When you get up to the wall of death, no one ever says that they wished they'd have spent more time at the office, or more time going out partying or more time doing whatever else you do to attain the aformentioned entities. They all come back to the same square and wish they'd have more time with family or they start to wonder about God.It's the strangest thing when your in a live fire situation or just about to go into one. Dudes that never had a need for religion suddenly start to pray or they seek out the ones who do and ask them to pray. Crazy stuff. When your in a plane in Bahgdad International and mortars start going off around you, life's meaning becomes forefront.So I don't equate happiness or enjoyment in life with meaning in life. What I was getting at was in a cosmic perspective, there is no meaning, but I should have qualified it by saying that the phenomena of enjoyment doesn't depend on meaning's existance.