Always telling that the actions of the most zealous religious warriors indicate that they themselves don’t believe in a higher power nor a merit based afterlife.

Burn in hell, Bernie, you piece of shit.
For once I hope for an afterlife, because he deserves to burn and rot for eternity.

Madoff died today, *doublepromote

Before you follow great leader's suggestions, send us your socialist handout check. If you hold onto it, you'll be sent to the hypocritical-socialist afterlife.
https://videosift.com/video/Trumps-Covid-19-Plan-Get-Cancer-Then-Poison-Yourself

no control of destination and always reincarnated onto earth seems pretty lame afterlife

That's a horrible system to try to teach morality and it is completely indistinguishable from random chance.

As I understand you, you're saying....
Don't mock God or you'll be punished....maybe not now, maybe not later, maybe not until the hypothetical afterlife (unless you use your "I'm a friend of Jesus" free pass into heaven which erases any and all transgressions, so if you have one of those, mock away).

You see how that's a totally empty and circular threat, right?
It's kind of like saying "If you aren't vocal enough about how amazing the emperor's new clothes are, you won't ever get to wear them."

This will come as a shock to Patti Labelle.

RIP. If there is an afterlife, the house band in heaven just got way better.

Your video, Neil de Grasse Tyson on the afterlife. Very moving., has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

I'll echo the video again and say you only have to read the qur'an. If you think, for example, 'unbelievers deserve to be tortured forever in the afterlife' is a belief that could be held by a good person, then I just don't know how to find common ground.

People are deceived into defending muslims because they don't like the kind of people they see attacking them. Obviously we don't like Donald Trump, obviously we don't like bible-thumping pastors and their qur'an burning parties, and islam doesn't have to be a race for racists to hate muslims.

None of that bigotry goes any way whatsoever toward excusing actual islamic doctrine. If you examine it objectively and without apology you will find you despise it.

Fear isn't a reasonable reaction to individual muslims, at least not if you meet them in a non-islamic country, but hate certainly is. I don't typically say of people I hate that I'm interested in peaceful coexistence or protecting them from radicalisation.

Good demonstration of how religion and thoughts of an 'afterlife' are created from ignorance and shouldn't be held on to in this more enlightened age. I mean killing buffalo so that your dead relative has a sweet buffalo ghost mount? really?

Maybe I'm weird, but while all these people seem to struggle with old relationships and self-loathing, I simply struggle with the looming fact that I am ever so swiftly growing closer to the complete annihilation of self that is death.

They worry about who their Ex is seeing, I worry about my rational mind telling me that nothing exists (for me) after death so why bother with anything?

They try to salve their thoughts with the idea that they can improve if they work at it, while I try to desperately ignore all logical and scientific reasoning to try and have hope that there is some type of afterlife.

My 4 easy steps to losing weight:

1. Remove excess carbs
2. Drink lots of water
3. Exercise 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week
4. Realize that no matter what the fuck you do to lose weight, you are still going to die and, realistically, your weight doesn't matter as much as your overall health towards extending the date of your impending death sentence.

Schmawy was a friend I never met. He suggested it when I lived back east – said if we each drove a few hundred kilometres we could meet in the middle, somewhere in Vermont or like that. We never tried that expedition, probably because I didn't try hard enough, and eventually I moved west, and in emails we still sometimes mentioned the possibility of meeting. I thought we had decades in which to meet and that one day, very naturally, we would. No more.

As I wrote elsewhere, I didn't know that I would have a heavy heart over the loss of somebody I never saw in real life. Much as Dag said, I liked knowing the world had Schmawy in it. He was put there, it seemed to me, to balance out a great many who were indecent and unwise and dull – put there as if by a law of nature. You can see why I thought he'd be around for a long time.

I gather Schmawy wasn't much for talk of the afterlife, but he is one of the people I like to think I may see there. If I do, I'm sure we'll ride motorcycles, just as we would have done, could have done. Goodbye my friend. It's hard to believe you're gone.

First of all, those are two completely different questions. What happens (presumably you mean after death?) doesn't necessarily have anything to do with why we are here.

It could be that nothing happens after death, but there is still some grand purpose to existence. Or it could be that there's an afterlife, but the universe itself is meaningless.

As to what do I really know? The answer is, of course, nothing. No-one can really know anything about what happens outside of our existence and anyone who tells you they do is either lying or delusional.

However we can make an educated guess (and not even a "so called" one, a real one based on centuries learning about the universe we inhabit) Every time we make a new discovery, it has turned out to have a natural explanation. As we learn more, the "god of the gaps" has grown smaller and smaller, to the point where we know that even if there is some mystical force underlying the universe, it has no measurable effect on it.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Physicist-Sean-Carroll-refutes-supernatural-beliefs

If our consciousness really does continue after our physical bodies die, there has to be a mechanism for it, and there is zero evidence of any such mechanism.

It could be that we simply lack the tools or the understanding to detect this, but there isn't even anything leading us to ask the question (e.g. an unexplained phenomena that would prompt us to investigate a hypothesis that might lead to a theory).

As to why we are here? From a scientific point of view, there's no evidence to suggest there is a reason to anything. The universe just is. From a philosophical point of view, I've always liked Carl Sagan's idea that "we are a way for the cosmos to know itself".

TL;DR We really know nothing, but it's pretty unlikely that anything happens after death or that there is a reason we are here.

*quality

The single hardest aspect of accepting the reality of the world wasn't a lack of god, it was the realisation of my own impermanence.

When I was younger and things went bad, I would sometimes resign myself to the outcome and think that things would go better "in another life", be that an afterlife, reincarnation, whatever.

Letting go of that was hard, but it forced me to confront the issues in my life and realise that if things were bad, I needed to change them, and if I didn't I would waste the short time I have.