Re: An Afterlife?

That doesn't surprise me.

Re: An Afterlife?

Why doesn't that surprise you?

Re: An Afterlife?

Because a lot of people have problems with religion in childhood, religion has to be brought into families gently leaving it up to the child what they decide to follow not imposed on them as some families do.

Re: An Afterlife?

That is what my husband and I did. We let our children decide for themselves. Our three daughters are Christians, the eldest is a Vicar. Fortunately they are good people, moderate in their beliefs and don't force it down the throats of others.

Re: An Afterlife?

Yes we have done the same, two moderate Muslim men, and our late niece was a uniform wearing Sally Army member.

They found what they were looking for themselves with support to do so.

Re: An Afterlife?

I have no problem with people following a faith if it does it for them. I do have a BIG problem with those who seek to convert others to their belief system with threats of being tortured in hell if they don't convert. My sadistic paternal grandmother took great pleasure in threatening me with the tortures of hell from the age of two!

Re: An Afterlife?

Indeed not very Christian doing that to a child either

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Exactly! That ghastly woman beat religion into her own six kids, they were scared of the b*tch until the day she kicked the bucket, at 96. A great pity she didn't do us all a favour and die years earlier.

Re: An Afterlife?

Just caught back up with this thread. I see I missed the post from EOAP regarding re-incarnation.

We need to put aside the stories written in books and look around us at reality. Even if you continue to believe the stories, they tell you to judge by the ACTIONS not by the WORDS.

The world around you is sick, twisted, in chaos. People are dying every second, people are suffering every second. Children are sick, being tortured, being worked in mines and sweat shops, women are being addicted to drugs and put into the sex trade, unwillingly, but helpless to do anything.
These are NOT the actions of any God or benevolent deity. No such being would, in good conscience, stand by whilst they had the power to end such suffering.

The stories don't add up because they were never meant to. They were a control mechanism that has since spun wildly out of control and been seized by corrupt powers.

Nature surrounds us and even "she" is in chaos. Yes, Nature brings forth a dazzling multitude of different life forms and creates total beauty, but she has a fundamental problem.

Nothing she creates lasts. She can create, but only for a moment in time. The earth and water, air and sunshine are already here. What has Nature created from them that lasts? Perhaps the only thing you could say is a mountain, but even that slowly erodes with the forces of rain, and wind and snow and ice. What "life" is it to be a mountain? Stuck in one place, never moving, never hearing, never speaking, just sitting there years on years?

What else can Nature produce that has longevity?

For all her wondrous creations, every insect, animal, flora, fauna, fruit, vegetable, man or woman, nothing, but nothing is she capable of producing that can persist, that can endure, that can retain its form indefinitely.

Perhaps I have missed something, perhaps I am ill-informed.
I truly hope so.

At this point all I see is a bubbling cauldron of life-matter that everything and everyone is caught in. We appear not to be able to escape it. While ever we remain in that cauldron we are trapped in a prison. It will reduce us back to ashes, and reform us into something else. Perhaps a blade of grass, a plant or tree, or a caterpillar, or may fly that lives again but one single day. We are trapped.

Nature for all her power, can not sustain us, nor anything else, in any one single form. As powerful as we think Nature is, she is actually quite fickle. Like a child playing with a lego set. An infinite number of forms can come forth, yet not one of them can persist, they all return to individual bricks, to the first matter, and are then rebuild into another form.

We have a chaos, not an order and we are trapped in that chaos. Talking about an "afterlife" is folly. Look around you, see Nature for what it is, see how it operates, and know that you are a part of that Nature. Your fate is utterly inevitable because you are trapped in that cauldron.

Whether there is a way out, a way to step from the cauldron and its constant recycling, and retain some kind of form on a permanent basis, I am not sure. To do so would effectively mean to become immortal. There are however lots of documents and scripts and works, including the Bible that hint of this possibility. They speak of a way to separate the matter from any given thing, into the 3 core components of all things, a liquid, a salt and a sulphur, and then suggest the way to put them back again permanently. This is the creation of the universal quintessence, what they call the Philosopher's Stone, Elixir Of Life. That is where we should be focussing our studies and efforts.

While ever we keep submitting ourselves to the man-made stories of religion, the clock is ticking and Nature is getting ever more ready to recycle you once again. It could be eons before you reach this point again. Eons before you become a human again and have a chance at understanding the "way out" of the prison.

Personally I would rather spend my faculties (while they remain) looking for this answer than frittering the short time away with passing fancies, the pursuit of worthless money and spending my short life working and toiling for someone else's whims. This might be the only time you have to find that holy grail for a very very very long time.

Re: An Afterlife?

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics http://www.christiananswers.net/q-ed...odynamics.html