Debate set up by Saucy. Is there life after death? I don't know, but I'm relying on Galor and Burnside to tell me. Galor, you need to tell me that there is no life after death and when we die, we disappear forever. Burnside needs to prove to me that there is something, anything beyond our current existance. Each of you have to start off with an introduction, followed by four body posts and end it with a rebuttal that sums up your argument. Good luck and have fun!

Opening Statement:
I shall prove the existence of a life after we depart from these lives. There is far to much evidence to suggest that we simply rott in the ground after death. I will use this evidence to support my theory that we all have much more to look forward to than the 70 or 80 years we inherit this earth as living beings. Some people believe there is a heaven and hell. Others believe we simply become spectres, and even more believe in something else. There has to be something after death, and i intend to prove it.

Intro

Humans. They simply want to live forever. And so they make up the theory of a life after death. But this is simply not true. Our bodies will rot away and we won't exist. No matter how much the human race wants a life after death, there simply isn't one, and I will now try my best to prove just that.

Body Post 1

Trying to disprove life after death with science is like trying to disprove the existence of god with science on the grounds that "i have not found god in my test tube therefore god does not exist' or like the first Soviet cosmonauts' "argument" that they had found no God in outer space. Ex hypothesi, if God exists He is not found in a test tube or in space.
Therefore you cannot disprove the existence of life after death by looking in a test tube, or at how the human body works and concluding that there is no evidence of life after death therefore it is an impossibility.
Goldfish cannot disprove the existence of their human owners by observing water currents in the bowl.

I'm going to start by talking about what we observe when a person dies. What we see is physical manifestations of the human conciousness (for example, speech and expression) comming to an end. We do not however see a persons spirit cease, because indeed we do not see the spirit at all. Yet we use terms like the human spirit and soul in everyday life. It is there, it is what gives us our feelings and thoughts.
When a persons body is completely paralysed, the mind is still working, although speech and expression, the minds pyshical manifestations, are unable to come out. Death may be complete paralysis where the spirit or soul coul be still quite active. Take a speaker standing infront of a large crowd. If you take his microphone away he can no longer be heard by the audience. BUT, he is still a speaker. The pysical body could be nothing more than the spirit and minds mirophone. Put it this way; the dependence of the spirit on a human body could be just like the dependence of a ship on a dry dock. Ships are never built in the open sea but on dry dock; once they leave the dry dock they do not sink and rott, they leave the dry dock behind and become free floating ships on the open water. The body may be the soul's dry-dock, or (an even better metaphor) the soul's womb, and its death may be the soul's emergence from its womb onto the open sea, leaving the dry dock behind and starting it's REAL life.

Body Post 2

Speech and Expression are indeed phsical manifestations of the mind. But when people die, their mind's oxygen supply is cut off and so forth dies, along with the body. This means that speech and expression can no longer be continued as, not only is the body dead, but the mind is as well.

I completely agree with your theories on the near death expirences and hallucinations close to death, Galor. However, they are just that, theories.

According to the medievals, who were of course the most logical philosphers, "the argument from authority is the weakest of arguments." Never the less, it is an arguement, and as such a piece of evidence. Put it this way. 4 million Frenchmen can be wrong, but it is less likely than four Frenchmen being wrong. The more people who say that there MUST be something after death that is unexplainable by science or theories, because they have WITNESSED IT, the more evidence we have to go on that there is an afterlife.
The first argument from authority for life after death is simply quantitative. Basically, "the democracy of the dead" votes for it. Almost every single culture in the world before ours has believed without question in an afterlife. They have even gone so far as to base their entire mortal lives around the fact that what we are doing on this earth at the moment is nothing more than preparing ourselves for what is after. And children, well they believe without a doubt, until they are conditioned by our new society to believe differently.

A second argument from authority is stronger because it is qualitative rather than quantitative. Fact: nearly every elder, or SAGE in earths existence has believed in an afterlife. We must not, of course, answer the challenge 'How do you know they were sages?' by saying 'Because they believed'; that would be begging the question pure and simple. But thinkers considered wise for other reasons have believed; why should this one belief of theirs be an exception to their wisdom? Why would we believe through and through everything Sages say, EXCEPT that there is an afterlife?

Finally, we have the supreme authority of the teachings of Jesus. Belief in life after death is central to His entire message, "the Kingdom of Heaven." Even if you do not believe He is the incarnate God, can you believe He is a naive fool?


(sorry it took so long to reply, i had NOTHING for awhile there!)

Sub-Post Answer

UNLIKELY, Burnside, UNLIKELY. But not impossible.

It's possible that all these millions of people could be wrong. Our ancestors were the ones who first thought of an afterlife, and, yes, they did base most of their life around it. But there isn't an afterlife. This was just the human lust to live forever.

And the Sage's? Don't they follow our ancestors way? Which means they could easily be believing in our ancestors religions.

As for Jesus...

I'm a bit stumped

You've got some hard theories, but your going to need hard proof to win this debate.

I have long since given up on hard proof for this debate. The simple fact of the matter is there is no more proof of the afterlife than there is of god, angels, etc because they are in effect one and the same. If you can consider the existence of Angels, GHOSTS, God, Heaven and Hell and ineed, Jesus Christ himself, then you must consider the existence of the afterlife.
That being said, let's move on to Jesus. A mortal man supposedly dying, and coming back from the grave once more. There's your hard proof, indeed it is more than science can say to the contrary.

Moving on from spiritual beings, there is also ENERGY itself.
Think of this. We do not see the birth of Energy, neither do we see it's demise. Science has proven that energy does neither. It only transforms. The immortality of the soul seems to be the spiritual equivalent of the conservation of energy. If matter and energy are immortal, why not the human conciousness?

Body Post 3

Lot's of evidence? Post some them

And Jesus? Coming back from the dead? It's recorded that Jesus did exist, but there is absolutely NO RECORD that he was ever crucified and came back to life (except in the Bible.). The only religion that believes in this is Christianity. For goodness sake, even Muslims believe in Jesus but they don't believe he was crucified and rised from teh dead.

Your right. Energy isn't born or destroyed. It just metamorphs from one form to another. Yet saying about an immortal soul transforming could be possible but, like I mentioned earlier in this debate, you need to prove to me that soul and spirit are real manifestations and not just mental theories of the mind.

And back to Jesus. His 'Kingdom of Heaven' and 'Spirits' are all hankey-doodle but there is no proof of this.

You can't give up on hard proof. You need it to back up your theories or they won't seem real. I suggest using google to do research on your theories and finding some evidence to support them.

Ghost's could be counted as an afterlife, but they also couldn't. Anyways, they can be explained away quite easily.




PS:
I do believe in an afterlife. And I agree with Ka-Mai that there must be something after this life. But it is only belief with very little proof (well, at least that I've heard of).

hmmm.
I have yet to hear any solid evidence as to why not to believe in an afterlife. The most simple of simple arguments. What evidence is there not to believe in an afterlife?
What i am going to do right now is prove to the best of my ability and google skills the existence of a soul, and the reason why a soul cannot be destroyed by any means, therefore it goes on living after life.


The first argument is quite simple. It's a traditional Scholastic argument for an immortal soul, taken from the presence of two operations which are not operations of the body. Basically, the body does not do these things, so there must be something else, what we would call a 'soul' creating these operations;
Abstract thinking, as distinct from external sensing and internal imagining; and deliberate, rational willing, as distinct from instinctive desiring. My thought is not limited to sense images like pyramids; it can understand abstract universal principles like triangles. And my choices are not limited to my body's desires and instincts. I think, I feel, therefore I am.
Still another power of the soul which indicates that it is not a part or function of the body and therefore not subject to its laws and its mortality is the power to objectify its body. For example, I can know a stone only because I am more than a stone. I can remember my past. (My present is alive; my past is dead.) I can know and love my body only because I am more than my body. As the projecting machine must be more than the images projected, the knower must be more than the objects known. Therefore I am more than my body. I am a soul.
Another quite simple piece of evidence for the presence of an immaterial reality, or soul, in us which is not subject to the laws of matter and its death, is the daily experience of real magic: the power of mind over matter. Put it this way, every time I deliberately move my arm, I do magic. However, if there were no mind and will commanding the arm, only muscles; if there were muscles and a nervous system and even a brain but no conscious mind commanding them; then the arm could not rise unless it were lighter than air. When the body dies, its arms no longer move; the body reverts to obedience to merely material laws, like a sword dropped by a swordsman. Our body is the sword, our soul the swordsman.
Still another argument from the nature of soul is that it does not have quantifiable, countable parts as matter does. You can cut a body in half but not a soul; you can't have half a soul. It is not extended in space. You don't cut an inch off your soul when you get a haircut. Yes this can use used as evidence as to why we do not have a soul, but on the contrary. Since a soul has no parts, it cannot be decomposed as a body can. Whatever is composed of parts can be decomposed: a molecule into atoms, a cell into molecules, an organ into cells, a body into organs, a person into body and soul. But soul is not composed, therefore not decomposable. It could die only by being annihilated as a whole. But this would be contrary to a basic law of the universe: that nothing simply and absolutely vanishes, just as nothing simply pops into existence with no cause. But if the soul dies neither in parts nor as a whole by annihilation, then it does not die. Phew.

Finally, i quote Plato. It is put so perfectly in the Republic that I quote it in its original form, adding only numbers to distinguish the steps of the argument:

1) Evil is all that which destroys and corrupts. . .
2) Each thing has its evil . . . for instance, ophthalmia for the eye, and disease for the whole body, mildew for corn and for wood, rust for iron . . .
3) The natural evil of each thing . . . destroys it, and if this does not destroy it, nothing else can . . .
i) for I don't suppose good can ever destroy anything,
ii) nor can what is neither good nor evil,
iii) and it is certainly unreasonable . . . that the evil of something else would destroy anything when its own evil does not.
4) Then if we find something in existence which has its own evil but which can only do it harm yet cannot dissolve or destroy it, we shall know at once that there is no destruction for such a nature. . . .
5) The soul has something which makes it evil . . . injustice, intemperance, cowardice, ignorance. Now does any one of these dissolve and destroy it? . . .
6) Then, since it is not destroyed by any evil at all, neither its own evil nor foreign evil, it is clear that the soul must, of necessity, be . . . immortal.

Shall i go on?
Okay, one more point. Getting back to the ressurection of Christ, if i may. I'm not done with that one. I got thinking, hhat would be a convincing proof from experience? Alas, if we could only put our hands into the wounds of a dead man who had risen again, there would be our proof. The most certain assurance of life after death for the Christian is the historical, literal resurrection of Christ. The Christian believes in life after death not because of an argument, first of all, but because of a witness. The Church is that witness; 'apostolic succession' means first of all the chain of witnesses beginning with eyewitnesses:
"We have been eyewitnesses of His resurrection. . . and we testify (witness) to you."
This is the answer to the skeptic who asks: "What do you know for sure about life after death anyway? Have you ever been there? Have you come back to tell us?" The Christian reply is: "No, but I have a very good Friend who has. I believe Him, and I follow Him not only through life but also through death. Come along"


I can't wait to hear what you think. Let's hear your thoughts! Sorry this post is so damned long.

Body Post 4

lolz good post finally something with good proof and challenging theories

What you were saying about the arm moving when the souls there and the drooping when it isn't, like the sword with the swordsman etc etc... I think you are getting mixed up with the mind here. The mind creates a message that tell's the muscles to contract/relax to move the arm, and this is relayed through nerve synapses until it reaches the arm, goes into the muscle and into the actin, a kind of long barb inside the muscle. The actin processes this information and spikes out shoots which touch smaller barbs called myosin, which in turn move and contract/relax the muscle, moving the arm. Phew!

Like I said earlier, when the body is dead, there is nothing to support the mind, and so the mind dies. Thus there is nothing to create the message to tell the arm to move, so the arm doesn't move. Not because the soul is the conscius and has left the body bladah bladah bladah etcetera etcetara. Then again, what is the conscius?

Scientists and even Spiritualist's don't yet fully understand how the mind works. I guess this could be used as evidence eg "It must be the soul controlling the thoughts" and it very well could be. Even though you haven't proved the soul real yet I'm going to go along with the fact that it is otherwise the debate will just become an arguement about the existence of soul or spirit and not about life after death.

So, liek I said, let's go with the fact that the souls real. But when it exit's the body, Is It Seriously Alive Or Just A Piece Of Matter?. I mean, come on, does a soul do all of the seven life processes? I'll leave that for you to prove in your final rebuttal.

As for the Christ Church? Founded by eyewitnesses of the Rise of Christ?That's a hard one . Let me have a think about that and I'll try and prove it in my rebuttle.

Good luck in the final stage!

First off I apologise this took so long. Wow, over two weeks to resond! i'm sorry about that. Okay here goes.

The real challenge here is proving the existence of life after death without using religion, or using as little religion as possible. Of course, if it does not exist, then that would make the bible, and indeed all religion on earth redundant and false, considering religion is built entirely around the afterlife. We worship god so that he doesn't banish us to teh fires of hell, rather the warmth and love of heaven.
Could 4 billion people worldwide be blinded by fiction into believing in something that doesn't exist? Does more than half the population of the world simply want to believe, because they are afraid there will be nothing? It's an awful lot of people that would be wrong.

As for the soul. Well, when it exits the body, does it need to do the seven life processes to be a life? The processes we do everyday to stay alive (drink, eat, breath etc etc) are merely there to keep the body alive and well. But as we have already discussed, the body is nothing more than a tool of the soul or spirit, that is discarded after life like a snake sheding it's skin. The real question is, does the soul have a concience? Could the life after death that we are debating, BE life as we know it, or something else? A collective of spirits maybe, waiting until it's their turn to once again be plucked from the void into a new living host to start life anew.
Ooooooo.

My final rebuttal is simple. There are many, MANY compelling reason to believe in the afterlife, from the spirit or soul that you may see, as they say, in someones eyes when they look at you, to the heaven and hell that the bible and indeed all religion preaches, to the vikings beliving that when you die you sit in a great all and drink for eternity singing songs of victory. There are life after death expirences, sightings of ghosts and angels, the resurection of christ, and much more. All the evidence that is compiled HAS to point to something. Or is it all just coincidence?
In conclusion, there really is only one way to find out the answer to the riddles. Death would be a great adventure, indeed the greatest adventure any man would have to face, and we all have to face it sooner or later.

See you on the otherside. Thanks for the debate!! It was alot of fun. Again, sorry it took so long to reply.

~BurnSide

Final Rebuttle

sorry I havent been on for so long saucy said not to worry cos soemthing big was going to ahppen to teh debate baord.

but since it hasn't....

I'll do the rebuttle now.

If you look at it, we've inherited most of our beliefs about the afterlife, and like I said, it's the natural yearning to live forever. If you think about it, humans could quite of easily made it up to satisfy there fears and to answer some puzzling questiosn eg "How were humans amde" " How was the universe created".

Heres soemthing for you to ponder about. Ask yourself "Is the reality we live in real at all?" Think about it real hard. The universe we live might just be a computer simulation being run by some advanced race. We could all just be one big computer program. I mean, the universe couldn't just of exploded out of nowhere, could it? It might of been teh program made by the advanced civilisation startinga nd executing all the procedures needed to create the universe we live in today. And we could just be a byte in thsi vast program. Maybe the earth is a kilobyte, and our galaxy a megabyte. Maybe our quadrant of the universe is a gigabyte. Maybe the universe can hold 6 gigabytes, and when thats all used up teh program would turn off. And since the universe is expanding, that could well happen.

Its a theory, none the less, but one with compelling evidence.

If this theory is true, then we we die we wouldn't 'ascend into heaven' or 'float about as a spirit'. We would just be deleted, like we delete things on our computer every so often.

And ghosts and angels etc etc could be bytejunk (by taht I mean teh left over bits of bytes when your computer deletes it.

Thats a stupid theory, but it could be possible.

Now heres myrebuttle. Ghosts, angels etc etc could eitehr be made up or some manifestation. it doesn't exactly mean it has to be an afterlife. It could just be a reminiscence (liek an after image )or a work of the human mind.

And lots of people believing in an after life? Like I said, this was passed down through generations and inherited from our ancestors, who didn't know much of what teh world was today eg the earth was formed from stardust , humans evolved from monkeys etc etc, so they made up religions to fill in the answers to these.[/U]

This could all be coswallop, or be true after all.

Good fun debating with you.

Galor

(ps sorry if ive made spelling mistakes iw as rushing)

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And the debate is concluded! I'll get Saruman to rate us. Very good debate Galor!! I'd like to open this discussion up and see what other people thing of the ideas that we have talked about here.

One thing, you said that you really do believe in life after death, correct? Well then can you share with us why? Did i hit the reason as to why you believe?
I, afterall, don't actually believe in life after death, for reasons you did indeed touch in your posts. But it is interesting to look at it from a different perspective for once.
Thank you again for the debate. It was alot of fun!!

Thanks to both of you for taking part, I will try to have the results for you as soon as possible.

Cheers!

Debater 1: BurnSide
Relevancy: 6
Countering: 7
Style: 6
Persuasiveness: 6
TOTAL: 25


Debater 2: Galor
Relevancy: 8
Countering: 8
Style: 7
Persuasiveness: 7
TOTAL: 30



Here are your scores from me.... Good job, both of you!!!



Reese

Here are my results;

Debater 1: BurnSide
Relavancy: 10
Countering: 7
Style: 8
Persuasiveness: 6
Total: 30

Debater 2: Galor
Relavancy: 8
Countering: 8
Style: 10
Persuasiveness: 9
Total: 35

Great job with a difficult topic, you two!

Well unfortunately i'm going to have to close this debate down before the judges have finished marking it, Burnside has been disqualified for copying large amounts of text word for word from another web site and using it in his debate without any credit to where it came from.

Galor wins by default.