THE OTHER SIDE. I hear these words so much and I'm sick of it. They are greatly misused. Out of context BS if you ask me. My lifelong religious friend who died a couple of months ago was always saying we will know all the great mysteries "when we die and get to the other side."
Is life a coin that gets flipped. What other side are we talking about? I understand a swimming pool and swimming to the other side. Maybe a vehicle where someone sits on the other side. In taking a picture you can be on the other side of something or stand on the other side.There's the other side of the street. If crossing a lake or the ocean you can get to the other side. Fixing hash browns you might flip them and brown them a bit on the other side. In religion I do not get this at all.
In First Corinthians 13:12 that old St. Paul has everybody thinking we see everything darkly now but once we die we see everything clearly. Does this mean we know everything then? Many believers think so. Many of them know everything right now. We die and get a greater knowledge but we still do not know how to get back from the other side. Everyone is too busy singing god's praises forever and ever. Help! Help! Oh, help me please.
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14 comments
Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.My favorite meme about wondering about life after death is by scientist/philosopher Richard Dawkins. He wrote a great book "A sense of wonder" which I read often.
He's still alive; and I'm wearing a shirt with a famous saying of his;
Science. It works. Bitches.
Priced here for just $10...
Robecology
Level 9
Sep 13, 2022
1
The expression I hate is "He/She is in a better place now".
MyTVC15
Level 7
Sep 11, 2022
3
I hate that one too. "In a better place now" and maybe they just lowered the poor bastard into the hole in the ground. Then some wise person wanting to comfort declares "they are in heaven now." All of this out of the same magic book which also said that the dead know nothing. Certainly the brain washed living know nothing.
The fear of death is so powerful that religions lie to soothe and entrap their followers.
Where were you before you were born? The same place as when you are dead. Death is not even nothingness. Death does not exist; Only life. The absence of light has nothing to do with light.
It's actually worse. Our existence is entirely illusory, our brains and sensory organs reacting to a world out there, but the whole is a confabulation of these signals into a fantasy, though that fantasy at least resembles the real world, most of the time.
racocn8
Level 9
Sep 11, 2022
4
We don't know if there is another side when we die.
xenoview
Level 8
Sep 11, 2022
0
There is another side for a record but for a CD, no. 
So you take the agnostic POV...which is fine!
@Robecology I'm an agnostic atheist. We don't know what happens when we die.
What will it be like after I die? Same as it was before I was born. Nothingness.
WilliamCharles
Level 8
Sep 11, 2022
4
That's exactly what my late father said, after being a believing Catholic his whole adult life, when he cardiac arrested for a couple minutes the day after open heart surgery. He saw nothing but blackness during that temporary death. He continued to still attend Mass for a while, but he admitted that he no longer believed there was anything after death. Blackness, nothingness, same thing, there is nothing before and nothing after...
No one knows exactly what happens when someone dies. Lots of conceptions and beliefs have developed in difference places and at various times. My mother's death was my first accute experience of someone dying. It felt at first as if she had gone away similar to when my parents went on a vacation or when I lived in a different city. I can understand how someone with different perspectives or different views of reality might decide this means the dead individual is still present somewhere. I have also experience "hearing" my parents voices in my head after they had died. I interpreted it as my internalized experiences from my past and the natural processes all humans (and possibly other animals) experience in learning, but another could interpret this as the dead person actually speaking to them and perhaps protecting (or torturing) them from somewhere beyond the other side of death. It is a matter of perception, interpretation, instruction, and belief. No one knows what happens when someone dies. Plenty people pretend to know, but it is belief only. Death is the end of life. During life, we experience the end of phases of our lives followed in its continuity with a new phase. To apply this experience to death, we might expect that something comes after the end of life.
RussRAB
Level 8
Sep 11, 2022
1
"We might expect"...if we're religious.
If we have a sense of science - if we're strongly agnostic/atheist... then we won't "expect" anything.
See Dawkins' Scale. You sound more like a weak theist than an agnostic.
I'm hearing Dana Carvey as the church lady saying 'how convenient." I would like to have a religious freak as loan officer so I can tell him that I will pay the loan in full the same day I die because I made a huge bet about the existence of heaven or hell, and you know I will win!
Mofo1953
Level 9
Sep 11, 2022
1
I'm so sick of people saying the term, " passed" instead of died or dead. Why the avoidance of the more accurate term and instead using the milder euphanism?
TomMcGiverin
Level 8
Sep 11, 2022
2
Passed is like a kidney stone or taking a crap. I might start reminding people of that when I hear that Charlie has passed.
puff:
Does this mean I'm passable? 
I used to feel much tne same way about saying "passed" insteaded of "died", and then my wife of 42 years died. In certain situations or at certain times when I feel particularly sensitive about her loss, I came to allow myself to describe her death as passing away. It feels less harsh and easier to say sometimes. Anybody listening knows what the term means.
We use plenty of terms that mean the same thing. The conventions of language and traditions within societies have selected preferred terms under various circumstances. We may say making love rather than fucking. There may be nuances associated with the terms but they both mean essentially the same thing. I think the same applies to the terms for death and I have softened my view when someone refers to the death of another as passing away.
@RussRAB Suit yourself. I've been widowed for five years, and for several years before that I watched my wife lose who she was to dementia, and then finally watched her body die. So I've more than earned the right to use whatever term I wish to for referring to someone's death.
@TomMcGiverin - I wasn't aware that my comments denied you your right to use whatever term for death you choose. All I was doing was asserting my right to use whatever term I choose - without having to be shamed for using someone's disapproved of term. Our experiences arent all that different with perhaps the exception of the timeline. My condolences on your loss. I do have some understanding.
@RussRAB You do you and I'll do me. We will each use different terms. I did not feel you were denying me anything and I militantly refuse to let anybody deny my right of expressing myself whatever way I choose. Your condolence is noted and accepted as genuine.
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