May I suggest we put all religions aside and try to determine if nirvana, meaning the soul of a person continues to exist beyond physical bodily death, or is there oblivion and that needs no explanation.
The next issue then with a belief that there is existence beyond death, who is the governing body.
May I suggest we begin with no religious arguments but look for evidence outside of religion.
There is a group that has done tremendous research on this subject, and there are many books written. The group that I have studied is the
www.neardeathesperiences.com, among others.
The research is based on experiences of people who have died, were resuscitated or came back to life on their own. One must look at the credentials of the people doing the study as well as those who have had these experiences.
If someone is truly interested, I would suggest a book by Melvin Morse, M.D. co authored with Paul Perry. There are many more but that is a very good start.
Evidence, we are looking at circumstantial evidence, however many legal cases are solved by overwhelming circumstantial evidence. I ask a friend that is a well know criminal attorney what constitutes a conviction on circumstantial evidence alone. His response was “When the evidence is so overwhelming that there are no other possible conclusions.”
I’m asking if atheist, agnostics, and theist will be willing to look at the research and attempt to put your presuppositions aside for the time being.
Yeah but tossing religions off to the side before having the conversation of is there life after physical death won’t even make sense to many Christians because their belief that Jesus physically died, and then came back from the death, is precisely the reason that they believe that there is life after physical death in the first place.
You disallowed the Christians to state their exact reason for why they believe in it in your opening sentence lol.
I’m not saying that it’s not cool to discuss life after physical death reasoning in addition to the resurrection, but I’m just saying not to be shocked if many Christians don’t chime in because Christianity IS their reason.
As for me, I have a hard time calling the end of the life cycle of my physical brain the same thing as the end of me because I don’t understand how all of my feelings, emotions, desires, sorrows, etc, can be the result of biochemical firings inside of a glob of mush, even though I realize that my coherence is intimately dependent on that glob of mush in some way. I have these disconnects between me and my physical brain that don’t make sense. I’m about to probably seriously insult myself here lol, but if my brain is more advanced than the most complex supercomputer on Earth why do ‘I’ represent about .0000001% of it’s intelligence? Where oh where is that super computing power in my life? Give me a math problem and I can’t help you without a pen & paper. Watch me forget things from yesterday. How am ‘I’ possibly the same thing as this computational super computer in my skull?
Then you hear these rare stories about people who have brain trauma and they come out of it as a super genius. Some of them talk about seeing numbers in color, they can do math like a calculator afterwards! But It’s still them, their favorite movie didn’t change, they didn’t all the sudden like opera instead of baseball, or wake up hating people they loved or loving people they hated. But why not?? Why not have complete personality alterations if they ARE their brain? That brain just got mentally transformed into a super genius due to an injury, so why didn’t the personhood change too? It’s as if a part of the super computing power of THEIR BRAIN leaked into THEM. You can argue about specific regions of the brain I suppose, but a problem is that they haven’t really found a personality region of the brain. Or at least not that I know of.
I can somewhat relate with some of my experiences of drinking alcohol, or caffeine, eating super healthy and getting incredible sleep vs eating like crap on 3 hours of sleep, etc. So I can somewhat imagine being in a freak accident where a fraction of this incredibly powerful supercomputer called my brain (that I have no access to beyond simple arithmetic, even though science will tell me that my brain IS me) leaks into ME and all the sudden my mental clarity is beyond my wildest dreams, but yet it’s still me.
On the other side of it you might want to say that people with concussion problems or mental disorders cease to be THEM judging by their new strange behavior, due to a compromised brain, so you might say that that situation would be an argument that a person IS their brain because their personalities have changed. But I don’t think it works the same way in reverse. A damaged product is simply a damaged product, it’s not up to the task of working properly. Be it a damaged car, TV, brain, etc, it’s NOT WORKING properly. It’s not the same thing as comparing a properly ok brain with a super charged excellent brain, because both of those brain are in proper working condition. I even personally had an episode before on a bad dose of medication and trust me I was MIA, even though an outside observer who didn’t know me might have mistaken me for just a very strange person. People I know who have had episodes as well said the same thing, that they were not all there!
I also find it interesting how Christianity talks about us needing to be physically linked up to new spiritual bodies after death. We won’t be bodiless spirits floating around. Almost like WE can not come into focus without a physical entity to attach to, whether it be a glob of mush called a brain, or be a spiritual body. Yet WE are not the equivalent of that physical glob of mush or that spiritual body.