scott’s spot

Seems like I’m always tinkering with my website, huh?

Well, I think for now I’m done.  Streamlined and stripped down, it’s now more or less the bare essentials.  Check it out.

In a recent forum discussion, the topic came up about whether or not the afterlife exists, and whether or you believe in it.  Something about that struck me, some I’m posting my response here.  Read and comment, or just read. But I’d love to here people’s thoughts on this.

“I gravitate toward some of the Taoist beliefs in the afterlife, which I won’t delve deep into on a spec-fic forum. But they are complex and difficult and beautiful.

I think, for myself at least, the concept of the afterlife is too difficult a question to be answered in a “do you or don’t you”.  When you die, you’re dead. It would seem that that is the end. But it’s only the end in terms of the mortal coil.  What happens beyond that is unknown and unknowable to the living because, to quote that great science fiction philosopher Mr. Spock, we lack a common point of reference.

And to a large extent, when you die, it won’t matter anymore, will it? Not to you, at least.  As Thomas Lynch put it in his book “The Undertaking”, the dead don’t care.

But perhaps the best argument I heard about the afterlife came from a philosophy student I worked with years ago when we were running the periodicals department at a local Borders. He had a master’s degree and was working toward a doctorate. He was raised Jewish but had long abandoned his faith, claiming that there was no Higher Authority, Intellect, Power (or whathaveyou).

At a time when I was (and in many ways I still am) struggling with my own faith, I looked at him and said “Kevin, it must nice to have all of your spiritual shit together.”

He looked at me and shrugged and said, “Well, yes and no.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He replied, “Well, I don’t believe, and that fine.  But I also have to prepare for the fact that I could be wrong.”

The afterlife, and faith itself, is a funny fickle little beasty.