Religion general

@Minshi Woods  
Dunno.

Let’s see…my throne room would have fountains that always sprayed soda instead of water.

@Minshi Woods
 
Decide for yourself. I don’t think much of the idea that you have to be especially good or especially bad in life just to get something in the afterlife. After all, other things count. In the truest sense of the word, an act alone can decide or change everything. I am not a friend of such arbitrariness, but I am guided by what my heart tells me. And it tells me that as long as I fulfil my duty to myself and to those to whom I feel attached, I have nothing to fear after death. Maybe nothing will happen. So I have nothing to regret. But I don’t have to pretend to be a saint if I’m not or don’t want to be one. Nothing I hate more than hypocrisy. ;-)

My body would be ultra-buff in the afterlife, instead of soft and pudgy as I am now.

@DarkObsidian  
To be honest, I don’t know what I would want in an afterlife.
 
Eternal life (before or after death) would likely become boring. I would not want to serve anybody after death. I do not like the thought of having my identity erased, whether I am reincarnated or not.
 
I do not see what is good with any concept of an afterlife, or a lack of one. I cannot see any way of winning.

@Starry Mind  
You’re not exactly losing either. It’s just poof and you’re gone. Most people never even notice it.
 
Death is like watching an apple fall from a tree. It happens, there’s an impact but other than that, nothing. It’s such a natural part of life that you can just blink and you’d forget it ever happened. So normal it is, that you just can’t imagine what life would be like without it.

@Scrabbleman  
If our prediction is correct, then that means that death is the absolute end. I believe that it is just as you described, but it makes me feel disturbed. Everything that I ever was will be gone when I die.
 
It’s sad.

@Starry Mind  
I like to think of it as normal.
 
Don’t weep about the end. You’ll be crying all day if that were to happen.

@Starry Mind
 
The thought of an endless life after death also seems rather illogical to me. That’s why there is Ragnarök, but it’s true, I think most of the thought constructs about your human afterlife come from the fear of dying, or the unwillingness to accept the inevitable. Both options are fine with me. I live as I personally think is right, accept the consequences and am not afraid of the end.
 
I’m not a friend of death, though. It seems to me partly quite irrational, arbitrary, even though it is also the ultimate justice, because it really takes everyone. Still, I’ll always try to save life instead of wiping it out. Life (also that of other people) is too precious to me for that. I don’t hate death. I respect him in a way, too. I just don’t like him very much. ;-)

Humans questing for meaning in their lives ironically deprive themselves of meaning. By digging into the meaning of ones actions, one strips away the agency of those actions, and by extension the actor. This outside meaning deprives you of the essence of your work, for you are no longer the one doing it. Now, it is about the state/corp/church/etc that is doing its work through you.
 
If you start looking for the strings that control your life, regardless of if they are real, you will find yourself tangled in them.
 
Some musings I’ve had recently.

@Zincy
 
I wouldn’t say unimportant nonsense, but Mr. Peanutbutter has the right idea.
 
There is no inherent meaning to the universe. The only meaning it has is what YOU put into it.

While I, personally, believe in God, this comic spoke to me in very deep way.
 

@YetAnotherBrony  
I like this comic. Despite it being simple and funny, it has a profound sense of reason behind it. That our existence isn’t determined by some higher being, but by our own choices and decisions.

I like Norse mythology and all.  
But why is it that a lot of modern media mix them with Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian themes?

@Lord Seraph  
To make them more approachable. Not a lot of people know that well about Norse mythology.

I think a lot of spiritual disunity could have been averted if Martin Luther’s dad just hugged him a bit more.

@pixel  
Eh, talk to a Lutheran, they might tell you otherwise.

nvm

@pixel
 
Well, you have to take the historical context and the zeitgeist into account in order to weaken this statement a little. Luther’s views on the Christian religion were particularly influenced by his experiences in Rome, which shocked him deeply. At that time the Catholic Church was so corrupt, power-hungry and decadent that a Christian believer would certainly have been blushed with shame if the exact circumstances had been well known.
 
Luther’s real achievement was to bring people closer to their Holy book with his translation of the Bible, in order to better protect them from the manipulations of the priests. Because these preached quite purely in their own interest. And since the majority of people could not read or write, let alone Latin, the church had a monopoly of faith. Luther changed people’s view of their religion. In that role, I appreciate him as a reformer. A circumstance that other religions would also need.
 
But I am also not a follower of any religion, although for reasons of tradition I am close to the Germanic-Nordic gods. By and large, I’m still an optimistic nihilist. ;-D

My bother’s … “It’s complicated” got baptized today.

I was looking for a thread like this.
 
I wonder how many people have embraced the big unknown. Few have the slightest idea of how we got here, and none of us know what’s next.
 
No one can say what death feels like, no one knows what might exists out there, but I feel like I have the delusion of knowing how other states of conscious feel. Where the brain uses high complexity, macroscopic electrical movement, dead matter still feels flow and resistance, and these two things make up our complex emotions.
 
Fight or flight, flow and resistance. This would mean computers, and stars, and rocks would feel too, on different frequencies.
 
I think pain is the highest frequency and death is the lowest, and I also think I can drop incredibly low into the death frequency. death just meaning that big parts breaking down into small parts, so when drugs slow down neural communication the cells start acting more like matter than a person.

@DarkObsidian Pound it, for optimistic nihilist.
 

 
Things don’t have to exists or matter, so lets make reality our own

@Ninji
 
Eeyup. ;-)

Paganism, especially European Paganism, is have a massive revival movement. Several forms of Paganism are now some of the fastest growing religions in the world.
 
Also, this hilariously doom and gloom filled article by the largest Catholic news site was amusing to read
 
I love spooking the Catholics.