Their Worst punishment is just being themselves.

@Storm1752 Unless they LIKE being pedos and never get caught... then they don't suffer AT ALL. How the hell is that a form of punishment? Google "NAMBLA" Man, you really need to learn to think stuff through better...

@Kafirah I DID think it through. They feel guilty about it. OR they sneak around, live in fear of someone finding out, and eventually get caught. Terrible way to live. Maybe they actually skate right through and die with a smile on their face. I figure that'd be rare.

@Storm1752 oh yeah I definitely feel bad for the person that has to sneak around raping children.... are you seriously defending people who rape kids?

@Storm1752 There is an inherent assumption of guilt, but that is most certainly not the case in repeat offenders... Or at least it seems to be a complete lack of guilt.

@Kafirah Or an uncontrollable compulsion. A very disturbing topic. We're talking about something at least AKIN TO, if not QUITE as severe, as serial murder, a disease of the mind. That's why they increasingly throw away the key. They are usually beyond rehabilitation, reformation, hope.

@Storm1752 I get that, totally. What I'm saying is that if they feel no guilt and never get caught... there is no punishment other than having to feel like they should hide it from the world, which is just common sense and smart. Evil often hides itself, but that doesn't mean evil minds hiding itself. At best, that's an inconvenience, not a punishment.

@Kafirah How do you know there's no punishment? There might be. It seems atheists DOMINATE this site, and they are depressing. Not you, necessarily, but in general. Death is The End, etc. How do THEY know? They talk with such certainty about it you'd think they got their Intel from a burning Bush. It's UNKNOWN. That's what an agnostic knows. It's a MYSTERY. Pesos might get punished. Murderers. Thieves. Whomever. Maybe not. No way of telling. But to sit there and say it's meaningless. It's the pits. Uou Just Can't Say That. No basis for that kind of pessimism. None. I'm just so happy with it the way it is I don't have room in my head for all that doom and gloom. I'm free. It's okay if I never reached my potential, if I made mistakes, because in the end it doesn't matter. If there's reincarnation the slate is wiped clean and you start again. If not, you're done. Or something else is true. No matter what, your life is your own, so just relax and enjoy the ride. I don't think evil people are enjoying anything. Could be wrong. Doesn't matter, not to me.

@Storm1752 Because it makes sense scientifically. Here's what I wrote to another member in this thread: [Our energy] is transformed from bio-electricity into heat. It is lost to the room and dissipates as thermal units until room temperature is achieved. After that it is part of the overall thermal energy of the room. Some gets absorbed by the surface the body is laying on, some by the coverings that are on the body, and the rest to the ambient temperature of the air in the room. Think of it like turning off a lamp. When you turn off a lamp, the electricity that charged the tungsten filament, that previously transformed electricity into heat and photons is no longer being produced to charge the tungsten, so it produces no more heat or light. The light goes where it goes, being absorbed by everything it touches and reflected back to us in the form of visible (and invisible) color. But the lamp, if it is turned off and never turned back on again, is effectively "dead", as it is no longer able to produce heat or light. The same goes for us. If we can't be revived, we are dead, and therefore produce no more energy to be converted into heat. Most people don't realize that we eat to convert the stored energy in food into calories, which we convert into bio-electricity and heat. We measure how much food we need by counting calories. Calories are units of heat.That's why it is appropriate to say you are burning calories.

Unless you believe in souls, which have no basis in reality outside of religious contexts, and have no scientific data to back up such a theory, this is what happens when you die. You are your thoughts. If your brain can no longer produce thoughts due to lack of energy, you are effectively, and for all intents and purposes, no longer existent. You cease to be. Simple. Elegant. Q.E.D. I know the thought of an afterlife is comforting, but it is, as far as anyone will ever know, wishful thinking. Pure and simple. And there is no reason to believe otherwise. Literally zero reason to assume there might be an afterlife simply because we had a life at all. It's not doom and gloom. It's facing and accepting reality. Some cannot imagine that they will simply stop existing. I get that. It's scary at first. But no scarier than imagining what it was like before you were born.

@Kafirah I don"t believe in 'souls' in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim sense. Don't be ridiculous. But do we have finer, more etheric bodies on other 'planes' of existence? Other dimensions our five senses and our instruments cannot yet detect? I don't know. Do you? And what about the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics? Energy cannot be created or destroyed? If you can't rule it out, it might not be probable, or even have a fifty percent likelihood, but you can't dismiss it out of hand.
On the other hand...

@Storm1752 First, I am not suggesting you believe in souls, that belief is ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as the belief in reincarnation, which is akin to recycling souls. Second, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics only applies to closed systems. Outside of closed systems (i.e. open systems) Entropy sets in (i.e. Heat Death/dissipation) The heat escapes into a room from a single source (i.e. a dead body) is not a closed system. Third, I never said it the energy was destroyed. I said it was converted to heat, as most energy eventually and inevitably is. When the batteries in your flashlight die, where did the energy go? It was converted to heat in the form of photons (i.e. radiation). When you eat a cheeseburger, where do the calories go? To fuel your body. Stop eating and your body dies because it no longer has the fuel to burn to produce bio-electricity to keep your organs functioning. The energy of a person is dependent on it's continuous refueling. If the supply stops, so too does the person. There is no evidence whatsoever that any sort of spiritual energy exists, and even if there were, how would it keep from dissipating or being converted to thermal units once the body is done converting it for its own uses? It wouldn't. It would dissipate into the room as heat. It's last conversion. But the energy needed to ambulate isn't you. as I said, you are the sum total of your thoughts and memories. Without bio-electricity to power your brain, you are no more. Like data trapped in a dead laptop dropped in a vat of acid, your brain will become corrupted by micro-organisms, and any chance of data recovery will be lost, and you along with it. Like Alzheimers, you don't get back what you've lost. Nor does the information go anywhere. It's gone because it can't be recovered. It's just gone, and to bullshit yourself into believing otherwise is, well, a bullshit thing to do, IMO.

You have no idea if there is some sort of God or afterlife or NOT! I personally don't believe in God, but there's always the possibility SOME sort of "god" exists. Similarly, there may be reincarnation; plenty if circumstantial evidence for that. You're just another type of idealist if you make absolutist claims like that.

Well, you can always go back to believing...what difference does it make? Or, believe there's an afterlife. Hey, there MAY be! There MAY be a God, for all you know! Prove there isn't! Quit sweating it! No big deal!

@Storm1752 It's possible that unicorns exist... they are just horses with a horn, after all... but I have seen zero evidence that they might exist. Same thing for gods. Zero evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, that can't be explained with more mundane, natural, and elegant means. You seem like you still WANT to believe and are trying to justify your want by moving the goalposts because you simply can't let go of religion. You said earlier that you are 100% convinced there is no hell. That same feeling is exactly how atheists feel about gods... and more than likely for the same reasons as those that led you to your feelings about hell. I find it incredible that you can't see the parallel connection in your own reasoning.

@Kafirah I can see the parallels. I'm anti-THEIST, but not anti-DEIST. I would change the definition of "God" to say something like, "That concept which includes those things of a scientifically-provable nature which would account for the existence of the physical universe, which we do not yet have the ability, the power, the right instrumentation, or sufficient knowledge, to at the present time detect, explain, account for, or comprehend."

@Storm52 Your argument "prove there ISN'T a God" is the most specious and intellectually vacant possible. It isn't up to me to prove your negative but it IS incumbent on believers to prove their positive assertion. To use your argument, prove that I'm wrong.

Lol, I did that too as a teenager. I once got pushed off a dock into the river for saying that to a devout Christian friend ?

@PennyBerry Some christian, some friend. Gotta love that whole "turn the other cheek" thing.
I never had anyone try to get physical with me, but I've definitely gotten into a few shouting matches.

Who cares? They're ignorant idiots!

Nihilism is like a porcupine. It can't be embraced. You don't know sh*t. You're agnostic.

@Storm1752 Aggressive much? I’m an atheist who believes there is no inherent purpose in life, therfore I create my own purpose.

@RandyMoose Sorry, I meant that to say, 'anything.' It's very possible life has no meaning; on the other hand maybe it does, we just don't know what it is. It sure feels like it has meaning. To us, individually.

@Storm1752 I think this topic is an issue for you somehow. I was reading this thread in interest and you're all over it - telling people they do not feel how they state they feel.

Perhaps you need to take these adults at their word?
Most of us know precisely what we do or don't believe about religion and any gods existence.

Remember everyone defines Agnostic and Atheist in their own fashion.

@RavenCT Right. Excellent point. I was up early and got on a roll. Sorry. I wasn't addressing your question; I was off on a different tangent, different "issue." I'll try to do better.

I suppose that would discomfit many, but for some reason I didn't mind it. I think on some level I never fully bought that the afterlife was more important than this life, and in any case I'd always lived this life like it was the one that mattered.

You can't really mourn the loss of something you never actually had. Plus, as I've aged, I came to see that mortality is a comforting certainty, a blessing to someone who has lost a lot in life ... to know that the bleeding stops at some point. I have taken similar comfort in the loss of loved ones, to know they are at least beyond the reach of their suffering. If I had to mourn them so they could be at peace finally, so be it.

I regard life like a movie. No matter how well produced and directed and written and acted it is, no matter how artistic the cinematography, no matter how compelling the whole thing is, you don't want a movie that never ends, or even one that's much longer than a couple of hours. At some point you just want to pee and go to bed. And if the movie forces you to see things you don't choose to see, and that you can't unsee, maybe you don't want it to last even that long.

I don’t know if you could make a statement that covered all atheist trump supporters? And, the same for atheist Libertarians, can they all be ‘out in left (right) field?’