Afterlife

According to many religions a soul is the immortal essence of a living thing. Our bodies die, but the soul 'goes on' to 'heaven'. Personally, I don't believe in this, but let's say it does exist and we do have souls, is that really such a great thing?

I believe that people, afraid of death created the concept of an afterlife: you don't need to fear dying, because life doesn't simply end, you just 'move on' to a next, even better level. But is it really better? You would be going into the unknown, develop a new social presence, find new hobbies (since I guess they don't have the Internet up there). You don't need (or rather can't) eat or experience physical pleasures, because you'd go beyond that mundane simplicity of life. So... what do you do in the afterlife? Just sit on a cloud and hang out with Jesus? Learn all the secrets of the universe? What for? You can't change anything anyway - you can't touch stuff as you don't have a body!

This seems like a very miserable end to me. I think it is much more comforting to just have the idea of nothing, switching off the power plug, not having to thing, care or do anything, just not existing.

People like to magnify the changes of state like birth, death, love, loss, etc. but really, they are simple things, part of nature. I had a near-death experience once and I was scared out of my wits, but I remember very vividly the one thought I had just when I thought I was going to fall of that cliff: I remembered my first fail in math, which was my first fail in any subject ever, and I thought to myself "so this is it, if finally had to come, I finally had to fail, just like in math." That was it for the drama, no life memories running in front of my eyes, no sublime last thoughts. To me the most important part of it was the impulses I had after I realized I was going to live after all.

So maybe it is not such a good thing how death is glorified in the movies, maybe it would prepare people better for it if it was depicted as a normal thing, a clean cut to life, maybe unexpected, maybe unwanted, but how can you regret your death if you're already dead? You can't! and that's the beauty in it.