FUNNY post!

None

As an agnostic I'll answer in a religious manner (lol)....By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.

That ash, that dust for the most part is oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus. If you want to think it in a spiritual manner or an "reincarnation" manner, how I look at it is that when I'm gone, that dust will provide for the next tree, the blade of grass, the worms....whatever because it's just a constant circle. What you're made of is not destroyed, it's re-used. The Carbon in you at that atomic level could of been part of a T-Rex many many MANY years ago.

The odds of some form of afterlife are much much greater than the odds that a being that created a universe of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars 13,500,000,000 years ago decided to make a teenage Jewish girl pregnant 2000 years ago.

We all will find out someday! Nobody knows for sure with evidence. I say I don't know.

Surely atheists and agnostics believe only in a material world or a world that conforms to material reality. Reincarnation is based on a moral view that one needs to do good to avoid coming back as something undesirable. As such, it's a religious view. A spiritual world is also a religious view unless you mean it has a material reality.

The older I get, and the more I’ve seen of life and death, the more utterly idiotic that concept sounds…

>>I’m pure atheist however I do think there may be some form of a afterlife.<<

You're not a "pure atheist." You still have a great deal of religion/mysticism in your head.

The odds of there being an "afterlife" are zero. There are no such things as souls because there is no way to imprint human intelligence and personality onto a volume of air, any more than you could imprint it on a pile of leaves, or a section of concrete wall.

One of the widespread failings among atheists is that we timidly back away from certainty. But when you're considering the possibilities of the mystical, there are two sorts of arguments -- I refer to them as arguments in the Domain of Diamonds and arguments in the Domain of Fluff.

ONLY an argument advanced in the Domain of Diamonds -- the rock-solid domain of science and reason -- requires an answer in the Domain of Diamonds. Arguments advanced in the Domain of Fluff, the domain of imagination and artsy-metaphorical fantasy, can be answered in the Domain of Fluff.

The two domains even have their own linguistic set, and modes of thought. If someone says "Life is a river," he's speaking metaphorically -- using Domain of Fluff language -- because life is obviously not a river. Knowing that, I can switch into artsy-metaphorical mental mode and begin trying to imagine how life is LIKE a river, in the speaker's view.

ALL religious arguments are Domain of Fluff arguments. "God is the foundation of our lives!" is no more a literal argument than Pooh is a real bear. It's pure fluff.

The thing is, NOTHING can be proven in the Domain of Fluff, it can only be endlessly argued, as a succession of battling artsy-metaphorical viewpoints.

But in the Domain of Diamonds, things CAN be proven. Things can be shown to exist, assertions can be shown to be true, or false. None of the Domain of Diamonds is a matter of viewpoint. If someone says "Kryptonite is an element on the Periodic Table," I can PROVE he's wrong. I can also suggest where he went wrong, confusing fictional kryptonite with real krypton gas.

The mistake we atheists make when godders make assertions as to the existence of supernatural superbeings is to back away from Domain of Diamonds certainty on our side AS IF THEY HAVE MADE A DOMAIN OF DIAMONDS ARGUMENT on their side. We demand of ourselves that element of scientific doubt, saying "You can't prove a negative. You have to allow the possibility that their god exists."

But you don't. If they make a sloppy, fluffy claim on their side -- "God exists!" -- we have every right to make a sloppy, fluffy claim back: "No he doesn't."

When they make a factual claim, one subject to rock-hard real-world Domain of Diamonds verification -- "Evolution is a religion and doesn't work!" -- we can reply in the same mental mode with the certainty backed by masses of evidence from a dozen different fields of real science: "Evolution is not a religion, and yes it does work. It's so simple even children can understand it, so profound it links all of biology into an amazing whole."

We don't have to hold back, saying "Well, MAYBE they're right."

In the Domain of Fluff, you can be an unabashed Level 7 atheist, stoutly asserting that gods do not exist. In the Domain of Diamonds, you can demand THEY prove the contrary, and refuse to allow their silly fantasies into your mind until they do.

Both ways, you can be 100 percent certain gods do not exist, and defensibly so.

Zero. You might live on in the fond memories of your loved ones, or anyone remembering you what you lived for, stood for, left behind as a legacy, etc. That's it, so do your best in this life, because it is your one shot.

Once your dead, your dead! Sic Transit Gloria Mundi! no amount of wishful thinking will make an iota of difference.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

!00%

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.

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.

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.

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

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 ?"