The human mind often needs a hope of this world, seeks an illusion for there to be a chance after death. Particularly I do not want to know if there is life after death, I want to live very well in the only life I know I still have. And what I can leave for my future generation.

Hi

I try not to think about that and just focus on enjoying and living the life I have.

The same bush flowers many times over its duration. Don’t know about anything else but that is empirical and predictable. Using a little imagination the idea of cyclic existence can be extended to other forms of life; the life of a being the equivalent to a fruit on a tree. Simple and beautiful and humbling.

None!!!

Hindus are 100% believers in cow gawd reincarnation. ...you obviously have no clue what Atheism and Atheists are.....or is this some sort of parallel universe where the dead take over their clones "over there ?"

Zero. ....ask a charcoal that used to be a living tree nugget

Since no one has come back there are no odds. Its a question without an answer. So the real question is what is the value of the idea of a afterlife? I suppose only in its effects on your current life. If it helps you deal in a positive way great. If it is a fear based dogma then it is bad. Odds I would think need a base line of some kind of information. As far as I know there is none.

I think it's what people know about you, and what you created. For example, Adolf Hitler is in “hell” because people hate him. Einstein, Isaac Newton, Galileo and others still exist because we use their knowledge.

None as i nor has anyone else been able to prove it exists. It is something we would like to happen but sayiong so does not mean that it does happen.Wishful thinking as no one likes the thought of dieing.

!00%

Personally, I would love to be there in the anteroom to Heaven when some of my old friends from Texas are told they're about to be reunited with all their ex-wives.

Nothing in nature is eternal. Our personalities are no exception. If you believe our nuerology plays a role in making us us, and you reject the dogma of the soul, there is no reason to believe anything about who we are persists after we die.

I believe the default position should be that when the brain dies, the thinking mind stops. Any thoughts, senses, and awareness are all gone. Complete oblivion and we cease to exist. It may seem bleak but that's what I have to go with, unless evidence to the contrary comes along

The accumulated evidence compiled by Dr Jim B. Tucker of the University of Virginia suggests that at least some people get reincarnated.

I don't know what happens after death.....and nor does anybody else.

As for odds on an afterlife that's a tough one. Is it billions to one or 50/50 but either way if you had a flutter on there being one (an afterlife) and you won, how do you pick up your winnings?

It is hard for us humans to think cosmically but IMO the entire chain of organisms can be considered to be a single entity. Time is an illusion—even quantum gravity theory has it so. The concept of an afterlife makes no sense from a cosmic perspective. There’s just life and we are it—right now and forever more. To put it crudely, we are in heaven right now but lack the awareness to fully appreciate our station.

To yearn for immortality as a separate personality is a futile and foolish quest IMO. The sense of self as a particular body is just an illusion anyway. Some bodies are shared by multiple “selves”, all illusory.

Every second of conscious awareness is a heavenly miracle of staggering proportions!

As an atheist, I do not believe in any form of afterlife. However, wanted to share a couple of links here:

1. Just yesterday, I listened to an interesting conversation on the topic on NPR's 1-A broadcast. You can listen to it here: [the1a.org]

2. In another post on this forum, I shared a link about people of the Druze sect who believe in reincarnation. You can read it here: [agnostic.com]

PS: There's a reason we all are atheists. We lay very strong emphasis on reasoning and proof. We don't see any of that for the concept of God. In the same way, we don't see any for the concept of Afterlife. Therefore, there is no good reason why someone would believe in one and not the other. Both share the same human motivation -- a desire to explain the complexities of this world with something simple -- but no proof.

Why should there be an afterlife and not a before life?

I could put some stock in re-incarnation. That maybe it though. Sometimes people have deja-vu with others for no reason. Souls being re-cycled is believeable.

If you believe in an afterlife, you need to redefine yourself from pure atheist to something else. As an atheist, when you're dead, you're dead. Any other belief, you are something else.

I guess we'll find out when we get there.

Zero.....if you have seen as many dead people that I have seen you would feel the same way!

As far as we can know, there is no mechanism that will preserve your notion of self after some of the brain functions stop (some recreational drugs users can understand that the brain can work a lot without the self notion). So, from a gnostic POV the answer is NO, there is no evidence of an afterlife. But in the matters of belief or non verifiable supernatural you can say whathever you want, from some big religion world of the dead or that we will all live inside the dog's collar of your neighbor. And all those possibilities are in equal status as far as we know.

I’d say chances are pretty good there is some sort of afterlife, where some form of a transformed human consciousness goes to. NDE’s are a pretty strong indication of this, and even if they didn’t exist, I’d say nature is rarely wasteful and rate chances as high that it somehow recycles the components of the human psyche.

The other side of the equation is that dualism, the existence of a spiritual dimension that would be needed for such recycling, has not been proven. If i were to take a strict evidence based approach to thinking about this, I’d have to admit that dissolution of an emergent phenomenon is also a distinct possibility when talking about consciousness and the mind.

No categorical answer is possible, there is always some fallback on belief when talking about it.