Saturday, September 27, 2025

No Afterlife Or A Terrible One

As tumultuous and horrid as this life can be, there is no guarantee that suffering will end with death.  A host of logically possible afterlives having nothing to do with true justice could loom ahead, worse than anything presented in even the most heretical, exaggerated distortions of the Biblical hell in fiction.  Alternatively, there might be no afterlife at all, and while this would provide the purest form of escape from the very capacity for pain itself since one's consciousness completely dies without any eventual resurrection, that would give current life an utter finality that also entails grimness.  A short or troubled life, and many lives are deeply troubled, would have its own tragic aspects even if they pale in comparison to endless torment of any kind.

In both cases, this life on Earth could be the best we will ever have, either because there will be no continuation of life once our consciousness expires with our body or because the eventual afterlife might be worse than anything earthly life could possibly force up on us, having nothing to do with morality (which automatically excludes eternal torture, which could only be unjust, meaning an amoral afterlife could feature this kind of torment).  These genuine logical possibilities are not true in actuality just because they are possible; all the same, only an irrationalistic person would think them either philosophically impossible or unworthy of an existential soberness that far exceeds whatever any lesser trials of this life could deserve.

Even if there is no afterlife so that death brings true, final release from the misery or potential misery of existence [1], the fact that there is neither everlasting fulfillment in the truth ahead nor default peace behind would be a brutal reality.  Soul oblivion is not a terrible fate in itself.  You no longer exist in order to worry or fear in the first place.  It is that not existing as a mind, embodied or unembodied, logically necessitates that one can no longer experience any sort of pleasure or relief or empowerment or excitement.  Compared to eternal bliss, nonexistence of the mind is outright awful [2].

As long as one perceives anything at all, one exists as a consciousness, and whatever one is immediately experiencing with regards to the external world is certain at least on the level of fallible perceptions.  There is not a single further moment of life that is proven to await us because of our present experience, though death may seem near or far at a given time.  In turn, there is nothing logically necessary about an afterlife, and if there is one, it would not necessarily be pleasant whatsoever for anybody.  Objective logical truth, concerning both necessity and possibility, is true no matter any being's subjective wishes or reaction if they are aware of it, but it would not be subjectivist to strive to cherish one's life in light of how there might be no afterlife or only something worse than this to come.



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