Afterlife
I believe in life after death, just not for the deceased. I hope after I die, people and other things will continue to live. There is some limited immortality however. Our DNA maybe survives in our descendants, some of our achievements and failures may continue a while giving the world testament to our having been through it. Take this one step further. We are multifaceted, to simplify, I am a son, sibling, father, friend, teacher, lover and so forth. Many people know different facets of me, they have their understanding of me, each different from the others and different to my understanding of myself. They can each imagine what I am doing at some time based on their image/understanding of me, they can also speculate on how I may react to a certain set of circumstances. If I die, but they don’t know, I am still alive in their minds, they still think what I may be doing, how I will react and so forth. Go back a thousand years or so, Johnny marches off to the crusades. A week later his mother, friends, family wonder how he is doing, how far he has traveled.
Ten years later, his family and friends hope he is still alive, imagine him grown and defeating the Turk, being a hero of his God and Pope. Throughout this 10 years they will have thought of him often, imagined what he looks like, to them he remains very much alive. Until his friends arrive back from the crusades to say Johnny fell overboard in the first 3 months and has been dead for 10 years. He has been dead for 10 years while he was still alive to his family.
So, when I die, the people that knew me will still have memories and an understanding of me, that exist in their minds, no less real in their minds than the me of flesh and blood because it is only an image of sorts imprinted in their memory much as we record things digitally. Gone but not forgotten I guess. Now for those that I was kind to, and who remember me fondly, their memories and thoughts of me will mostly be pleasant, I will exist in their minds for a short time in a pleasant way. However, most people may not have very nice memories of me, they may think me horrible, vile, and continually wish nasty things to befall me. I consider these memories in people’s minds of me to be heaven and hell.
The reason for this pondering, is that my mother had a heart attack yesterday, we don’t get on great. Yet the world thinks her a saint and many will think only kind thoughts of her. My father has been dead almost 21 years, his friends never knew his family, didn’t know we existed yet my parents had not split up or anything, he just lived a fictitious existence outside the home. He was an insurance clerk, and yet had a huge military funeral on the army base, hundreds of people there.
So after 21 years, most of these people will have forgotten him, my brothers and I still remember him as a wife beating, child bashing drunk. To me he is still burning amongst terrible memories of what a horrible creature he was. My mother being the more pious than thou Christian goes on and on about forgive and forget. I try and tell people, remember and recover. Just a waffle from an atheist pondering life and its end.