...Since I was raised Jehovah's Witness I was brought up knowing what happened when when someone dies.

NObody knows what happens when you die, although there are myriads of theories.  You pays your money and you takes your chances. 

Apr 23, 2012 -- 3:28PM, cherubino wrote:

Apr 23, 2012 -- 1:19PM, mrjordan wrote:

Since I was raised Jehovah's Witness I was brought up knowing what happened when when someone dies. Even when I left the Witnesses for awhile I still held on to that belief. The most thought I had about it is when I wanted to come back to the Witnesses. I asked do I want to ensure my death? Or do I want to try for something more? Well, it did not take much thought at all.

In other words, you accepted somebody else's ideas about what happens when we die. Doesn't the fact that none of them have ever been dead send up some sort of a yellow flag?

Since that "somebody else" are the words of the bible then yes I accept them. Those scriptures I posted are quite clear. Those scriptures pretty much tell me that death is like that of prebirth. You don't exsist. From dust we are and to dust we return. Do you remember any thoughts or feelings before you were born? Then you know what death is like.

Apr 23, 2012 -- 5:53PM, mrjordan wrote:

Since that "somebody else" are the words of the bible then yes I accept them. Those scriptures I posted are quite clear. Those scriptures pretty much tell me that death is like that of prebirth. You don't exsist. From dust we are and to dust we return. Do you remember any thoughts or feelings before you were born? Then you know what death is like.

And those authors of the Bible, how did they know what death was like? The answer, of course, is that they didn't have any more experience with being dead than you and I do, and to me this was a most unsatisfactory evasion of a question that can't be resolved with secondhand beliefs. One experience 19 years ago changed my mind about all this, and to make a short story long, here 'tis.

In the Fall of 1988 I was making six dollars an hour as a greenskeeper at a golf course, and winter was coming. I'd been evicted from four places to live in the previous two years. I wanted to stop drinking whenever I was dry-heaving, but twenty minutes later I was ready to start up again. By mid October I was living on unemployment and drinking around the clock. I couldn't stop and I wanted to die.

But at the same time I had become obsessed with the idea that if I died in that state of mind, I would only have to come right back and clean up the mess in another life. In other words, death wouldn't be the end of the show at all, but merely a postponement of some unfinished business. Prior to that, the whole notion of reincarnation was simply incomprehensible to me in any factual or doctrinal sense, and I can no longer re-evoke the terror that it held for me then. But in the face of imminent death, it was as real as jug of Scotch and I was terrified to a degree I've never known before or since. There was nothing warm, fuzzy or comforting about it. It was as if I could no more kill whatever "I" am than I could put the electric company out of business by turning off a lamp. The closest I can come to describing it in verbal terms is that it was some sort of wired-in genetic imperative that beckoned insistently without forcing or overwhelming, if that makes any sense.

Four and a half years later and sober, I was in an ICU with what turned out to be severe congestive heart failure. They had even pulled my bed up near the open door of my room so they could watch me during the night from the nurses' station. Strange to say, there really were no ideas of heaven, hell or any of the usual religious conundrums that occurred to me at all. Then a nurse came in and asked in a quavering voice if I wanted a clergyman. I gave her offer about five seconds of serious consideration and then, quite to my own surprise, I said, "No thanks. I'm OK." It was an incredibly liberating moment because I really felt as safe as a toddler in his mother's lap. For if I didn't need a theological system or any concretized salvation scenario then, then when else might I possibly need one?

So there was nothing a clergyman might have said or done to make my impending death any easier to get through. There was no longer the slightest thought of what might become of "me" in some future, post-mortem scenario. Instead and quite involuntarily, my mind quickly reviewed my past, and only two questions mattered at all. First, how did I stand with the people in my life, and second, had I at least tried to do the best with what I had to live up to my potential as a human being? Greatly relieved that there was no longer any serious unfinished business behind me, I promptly fell asleep.

I suppose those who've "been there" will get this with no further elaboration, while those who haven't won't, even after several weighty and duly referenced explanations. It wasn't that the "riddle" or problem of death and what comes after had been alleviated by adopting a better grade of hope for the hereafter, but merely that the boundary between life and death wasn't nearly as distinct or problematic as it had been before. It's hard to put into words, but I felt as if I was already talking to that nurse from the other side, and I literally pinched myself to make sure I was still "here."

I'm now convinced from many similar but less dramatic experiences since then that the human psyche is programmed, if that's a good analogy, to handle everything life hands us. All the spiritual resources we need to get through each rite of passage will be there the day we need them, and any presuppositions we have about them now are limited by our experiences up until now. But in both scenarios, the drunken terrors and then later the sober peace of heart, my mind didn't rivet on the future the way it normally does if I think about death. Instead it was the past that compelled my attention, and I found in the drunken episode an urgent sense of unfinished business, and in the sober sequel a sense of accomplishment and the satisfaction of a job well done.

Apr 23, 2012 -- 6:45PM, mrjordan wrote:

Ecclesiastes 3:20
"All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return"

Days after your death are likened to the days before you birth. Solid logic to me. I don't need to have secondhand knowledge to know what I understood and felt before I was born. I have firsthand knowledge that I didn't know or feel anything before my birth.

Precisely. There was no "me" before I was born and there will be no "me" after I die. And the prospect of being "me" forever in space & time holds no appeal at all. What a crashing bore that would be.

Apr 23, 2012 -- 7:16PM, mrjordan wrote:

The bible, you and myself are all in agreement on the conditions of death. Pretty simple, thus why I don't dwell on death. I'll save dwelling on death when I'm dead. LOL

Bullfeathers, mrjordan. If you're maintaining belief in any best-case, worst-case post mortem scenario, you're not just dwelling on it, you're dwelling in it.