Why do so many people believe in an afterlife?

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Why do so many people believe in an afterlife?

We feel that we're not quite fully part of the world and therefore there's more than our existence on it. Easier when you have autism.

They want to. It helps people cope with life and the fear of death.

People fear oblivion, so they invent an alternative.

I heard consciousness best defined as an event that's aware of itself. Its a strange thing to try and come to grips with. On one hand if we were the machine there's either no reason for us to have consciousness or no reason for everything not to be conscious. If we're the energy running around the board that still comes and goes, bleeds in and bleeds out, and no permanence comes from it. Now, if we're motion itself - that seems to get us closer.

The other thing, too many people have had gateway moments of their subconscious opening up wide and seeing that there's something much bigger down deep, something that's overpowering in its sheer complexity if they try to compare it to the sophistication of their own thoughts, and things get trippier still when that something starts tying together other people's thoughts and bridging outward - almost even behaving halfway like a near death experience at times.

You then have top medical professionals saying things like this:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYkjZolRdS8[/youtube]

Not only are the academic signs showing up in research by people like Pim Van Lomel, Mario Beauregard, Sam Parnia, Penny Sartori, Dr. Long, the group out in Virginia who wrote Irreducible Mind which was written at the medical academia level.

Then add even stranger things still - radioactive random number generators which are supposed to do a coin flip every 100,000th of a second, charted to a graph, to see what happens and low and behold - events like 9/11 severely skewed it.

Then add the most basic but most weird thing we've come across that science has forced to cope with - the double slit experiment and quantum eraser. Essentially we're forced to realize that consciousness itself selects what it sees, even to the point of shaping the world around us by our very perceptions (not hallucinating but really - shaping - on the quantum level).

Now, of all the absurd things, you have scientists increasingly making the argument that we live in a holographic universe - ie. there's nothing real to matter, its as much a fiat currency as the US dollar. Stranger still when you ask someone like Michio Kaku what the 'stuff' is, the best way he can explain it... our reality is made of 'music'....on 'strings' of all the crack-pipe things a world class physicists could say....

I've had personal experience add to these things as well, both sober and otherwise. So, I'll leave it there.

I think that's the most common reason. The alternative is too scary/unpleasant for a lot of people.

On the here and now atheistic/theistic question though I had to ask myself this: if there are resources that are just as real now as they would be when I'm dead, why not attempt to make use of it? Why piss on perfectly good resources just because there isn't currently a full concensus on it yet? Its tough for me to come up with a good answer and vogue or running from resources just for the sake of patting myself on the back for not being tin-foil....that doesn't bring me enough.

Also, I'm an explorer and adventurer at heart. Hardly a thing that could add more meaning than chasing and exploring the world within.

People wish to continue on in a happier life than they are able to make on Earth so they hope they will find themselves in paradise after they die. You never know. It could happen.

I think a lot of people believe in the afterlife because they have had a difficult or unfulfilling life and/or they are intensely afraid of the unknown.

It's much easier of a burden to think that you will live after death and that life has a purpose then to realize that life is essentially meaningless and pointless and you will cease to exist once you die.

I think it's irrational for people to believe in an afterlife but it's not irrational to hope that there is an afterlife.

It may have more to do with being indoctrinated into believing from an early age.

Its really just fear of spiders. At least for me....

Simple as this.

Do you have any idea how stupid I think this is? I can't remember how long it's been since I was afraid of the idea of just ceasing to exist when I died, I know it hasn't really bothered me since I was a kid, to the point that I used to think "okay, what's the worst that can happen? I guess I could die, so what?" about all kinds of things. I mean, what is there to be afraid of? If your consciousness or soul or whatever no longer exists in any form, it's not like you're gonna be complaining about it. There's enough theories about the afterlife that aren't very frightening, but frankly, I'm way more comfortable with the idea of totally ceasing to exist, than I am with thinking my soul and/or consciousness will exist eternally in any afterlife at all, including just being reincarnated repeatedly. Forever is a long time.

FOR...EV...ER.... is scary to think about. But oblivion really does frighten people. I won't lie- it frightens me.

This is how I always thought about death. I see the time after my death as similar to the time before I was born.

On the bright side, if it were true time would cease to exist because all traces of your consciousness would cease to exist, hence forever would be irrelevant in that case (time's nothing more than a yard-stick). I could perhaps see people being afraid of some kind of last moment panic as if it might be akin to falling off a skyscraper but I doubt many people are that lucid or jacked on adrenaline if that moment comes from age and natural causes, it would probably be closer to going under anasthesia and staying there and you'd never notice the point at which it all shut down.