Methodical Musings

Things to ponder about an afterlife / spiritual realm…

1: Reports from Lack of Experience

Every person who has ever described anything about an afterlife has never actually died themselves or their death is highly questionable (like Daniel Ekechukwu). This includes the apostle John, apostle Paul, Daniel, etc.

2: Greatest Possible Reports are Curiously Missing from History

Those who had the greatest chance to report on the afterlife never reported anything except supposedly through third-party individuals who had a reputation to gain or uphold by those alleged reports.

• Lazarus. Zero reports. No book? Not even a sentence describing the experience?
• All the other conveniently unnamed people Jesus rose from the dead. Zero reports on the afterlife. And what’s up with not naming an individual who supposedly rose from the dead? “And then Bob raised a dude from the dead.” Get real, with all the hoaxes out there, I want full names, locations, and ability to track down people who were there.
• All the conveniently unnamed people who supposedly rose from the grave in Matthew at Christ’s death. No reports. And this mass resurrection was reported in only one gospel in a few sentences! That’s it? A couple sentences in the entire historical record to recount a mass resurrection? Not a single soul wrote a book about one of those instances?
• Resurrection of widows’ sons via both Elisha and Elijah. The kids never wrote a book about the experience? Wasn’t anyone curious what the afterlife was like?
• Paul supposedly went to the third heaven, but then claims he could not talk about it. Convenient? Yet even in that case there is no verification that he actually died himself, so how did he know he was seeing the third heaven and not just having a temporal lobe seizure? We’re just supposed to take his word for it?
• The boy Paul rose from the dead after falling out the window. No reports from the boy. At all. Interesting, no?
• Everyone else…

3: Contradictory Reports

Two of the apostles directly contradict each other about the simplest item about heaven you can possibly imagine: whether a person who has been there can talk about it.

Paul: “Can’t talk about it.” (2 Corinthians 12:4)

John: “Let me write everything…” (Revelations)

Interesting.

4: Afterlife Explanations are Always Based on Physical Models

All reports of afterlife experiences are always explained in terms of items in this physical realm (golden streets, ability to speak, human-like bodies floating around, Christ seated on a throne, etc.) If there genuinely was a spiritual ‘soul’, there is no reason at all that it would be like our physical body except that the spiritual realm is a human invention modeled after our physical realm.

After all, what would we need a digestive track for in a world where we cannot grow, die, or reproduce? Why would we need legs if we supposedly can float through walls? What is the point of facial characteristics in heaven if we can recognize everyone? Why the need for the ability to speak in heaven if the spiritual realm right now can communicate through thoughts and over great distances?

If your explanation of the afterlife involves superimposed and / or fantastical physical characteristics, you have just revealed your spiritual realm is a mind trick. After all, what’s the point of a physical realm if the spiritual realm already contains those same properties?

If a person cannot describe a spiritual realm but in terms of the physical, then it is safe to say that we do not have spiritual properties. If we were intrinsically spiritual, we would not be limited to describing things only in terms of the physical.

5: Afterlife is aMental Illusion

For those who do believe in an afterlife, I have a mental exercise for you. See if you can pass:

1) Imagine absolutely nothing.

2) Now imagine the existence of a spiritual realm without any physical properties (like space, time, color, light, sound, etc.)

If you can not do this, you have proven you cannot possess a spiritual soul that can coexist independent of your physical body because you cannot comprehend anything without assuming the existence of the physical.

Conclusion

All the key explanations of a spiritual afterlife are always – curiously – a more pleasant or violent realm with physical characteristic.

Therefore, this reveals that our ideas of the afterlife are born of human desires for our present physical realm – not reality of a spiritual one.

- Josh