Should we fear the afterlife believers?

When life becomes a burden,

death takes longer than imagined.

Infinity : 1 :: 1 : Infinity

Belief is a fact, beliefs are not.

Your opinion is neither knowledge

Or the lack there of

It is just your opinion.

Is

Ego Sum Qui Sum

If I want to feel safe when I’m with someone I don’t know, there are things I need to find out about them, such as; 1. Do they believe; in a soul, an afterlife and a time of judgment that terminates in their soul either ascending to the light or descending into darkness?  And 2. What will they have to do to ascend?  Without this information I have no way of even attempting to figure out what they are capable of.  And I am sure that if I get in the way of their ascension they will get rid of me rather than choosing to descend into eternal darkness.

Those of us who do not believe in an afterlife may fear death and the total loss of conscious self, so long as we have something to live for.  When we have lived a long and fulfilling life and come to the time when; our organs are barely functioning, our mind no longer fully comprehends our surroundings, we find ourselves lost either literally or figuratively, and the future holds no prospect for getting better, death can be welcomed as a viable and sought after opportunity.

A young, healthy person, and those who love them, ‘should’ fear that they may die young.  But belief in a soul that will live on in an afterlife, removes the normal fear of their premature demise.  This belief encourages martyr wannabes, as well as other zealots, to fulfill the terror they imagine and are encouraged to carry out.  Their belief in a soul and its path to a better life to come, devalues my life.

Although I am considered old by some I do not want to die today or any time soon.  I try to live safely and I worry about accidents and serious illnesses that have the potential to leave me crippled or even end my life before I become incompetent and or infirmed by the normal decline in wellbeing that I expect with the passage of time.  What I fear more than then these natural events are the intentional actions of the religious that believe they will be granted a better life in the hereafter by harming others. They are delusional and think that the violent, belief based actions they commit here on earth will gain them a greater reward.  I fear what these people are capable of doing because of their beliefs.  I do not trust them to treat their life or mine as precious.  I do not think the way they do and have no reason to believe that I can protect myself from their violent acts by stopping them before they succeed.

I don’t mind looking forward to a future filled with, what others perceive as, tragedies; no life after death, no god, no ultimate justice.  Living with these assumed, and what are for them negative, possibilities is not frightening to me but enduring the actual tragedies that the religious thrust upon the world every day is.  They force others to live by their dogma and punish people who violate the beliefs they do not share.  The religious feel that they can even take the life of someone that they see as; possessed, controlled by evil powers, believing in the wrong religion, believing in an untrue religion, or believing in a false almighty or no god at all.  If you do something that is contrary to their dogma they believe they have the right, or it may even be their duty, to take your life.

Religion is for the delusional, week and lazy, who cannot be moral without something looking over their shoulder, judging them and readying their place in an imagined afterlife, and for the fearful who are scared of a world where there is no ultimate power to make sure everything comes out OK, to make sure they receive their just reward.  These people will not make the effort and do not have the strength to generate their own moral doctrine or make their own moral choices or take responsibility for their actions.  As a guide for moral action they merely use views they find in a book or hear from a trusted source.  They don’t even take the time to compare religions!  For these people, choosing a religion has nothing to do with facts or research.  The best predictor of their religious choice is geography and the second best predictor is the religion of their parents.

Every afterlife believer has their own religion.  No two afterlife believers worship in exactly the same way, believe in exactly the same morality, or the exactly the same dogma.  Even the closest of; friends, family members, parishioners, argue about the ‘true’ interpretation of what they say is their shared, holy, unassailable text.  They take what is written for everyone and make up their own interpretation of it even though they say their religion cannot be questioned, is the word of an unerring almighty and cannot be revised.  If religion were unassailable there would be one Supreme Being and there would be one dogma.

 To gain support afterlife believers will argue their personal belief passionately; on a street corner, on your front porch or from behind pulpits until someone gives in and says they agree with them. 

Religion is an attempt to use an ancient belief system to explain what they cannot understand (and that which is or was at one time unexplainable); “Where did we come from?”, “Where will we go?”, “Why are we here?”, “What can and can’t I do?”, without taking the time to make the changes necessary to adjust for what science and social evolution have taught us about the answers to some of these questions.

If there is just a single external power that ‘created’; what is now, what existed before change began and what will be when change ceases, there should be only one Supreme Being for all humans to believe in.  Just like the single, correct answers to questions about the fields of physics, chemistry, and biology, there can be only one correct answer to the god/creation/afterlife question, if there is only one Supreme Being who created everything.  But the basis for religion is belief, not fact, and belief cannot be proved or tested so their belief based claims cannot be proven or disproved.

Religious groups around the world have come up with a host of belief systems that do no more than describe cultural and personal fears and the ancient, fanciful stories that were made up by delusional or persuasive or insightful individuals for the purpose of calming their own fears and the fears of the uneducated masses they lead.

If from the very beginning one of the fundamental aspects of all religions had been that they could not be written down they would all be gone by now or at least relegated to the fringes of society and culture.  If religion had been forced to be an oral tradition it would have changed, almost imperceptibly, day by day, as people learned the answers to the previously unanswered and unanswerable.  But because religious beliefs are written down in unassailable texts, religion has not adjusted to advances in social evolution and scientific knowledge that have provided us with solutions to some old problems, like the spoilage of food and illness from disease and its remedies.  So far we have been unable to marginalize religion, because religious dogma has been cast in stone and is regarded as the indisputable word of an infallible being.  And unfortunately, religion will continue to plague the world with its fear, hate, violence and misinformation until it is forced to conform to the world as it is, today.