After a discussion with the local neighbourhood Christian door-knockers I was kind of forced to reflect on what I actually believe in, particularly regarding hope in an afterlife.

My beliefs are solely based on my experience here on this earth because that's all I have and all I could ever hope to understand. There may or may not be more to this, but if there is it is beyond my control and comprehension, so I cannot be expected to factor it in. So this is how I see it...

Humans are the most advanced beings that we know of, but we are too intelligent to just leave it at that. Self awareness comes at a cost. We need Gods. We need to strive after the unattainable to keep us from collapsing under the harsh realities of the universe.

Humans are capable of great feats over nature and we conquer everything we come across. We are gods.

We are gods in our own right and we are so intelligent and self aware that we can acknowledge our limitations, and this is why seek and worship perfection. We know our limitations and we always want what we can never have (immortality etc).

What we do have is now. It's normal to want more than now.. nobody wants to admit to living a meaningless existence and fight through a life of intense experience for naught. The tragic reality of the human story is that it all boils down to what every other living organism does.. we live, consume, propagate, and die. We are the greatest, but in the big scheme of things we aren't really that great at all. All that we have is the reality we know and because I am smart enough to know I won't live forever in the reality I know, hope in anything is an investment that yields no returns.

Let's suppose there is an afterlife.. do you really want to live forever in some sort of perfect reality that religions promise you?

It sounds appealing now because of what we know. We know pain. We know toil. We know we will die. A life without pain and suffering? really? Would we even be able to appreciate the good if there was no bad?

The notion seems so far from the reality on which it depends upon. It just doesn't make sense.

Also, eternal damnation. It doesn't scare me. Why? Because it's detached from the reality I know.. I can't empathise with my own soul burning forever.It might as well be another person's soul for all I know or care. Same with heaven or paradise or whatever, it isn't actually me in heaven, it's just some soul I happened to be in possession of through no choice of my own having a good old time while everything I know and love in the here and now just rots away. The cost-benefit ratio of religion is not appealing to me at all considering the huge investment of time and resources.

There positive side to it though. Religion, hope etc. does have its benefits. Religion has the potential to enrich peoples lives in many ways. That is something I do admire, that through life's struggle of pointless existence and denial of fate people still have standards and expectations and discipline and all those genuinely godlike qualities that we humans are capable of and that we humans are noble enough to pursue them.

Belief is very powerful, whether it's true or not may actually be irrelevant, but it is important to believe in something. Anything! Otherwise we are no different to any other living organism.. living, breeding, dying. Yay!