What Will The Afterlife Be Like?

J Randall Murphy

Trying To Stay Awake
Indeed I am :) What Great Truth of Life wasn't addressed in ToS ? Usually in the form of a snotty lecture from Capt.Kirk .....
Snotty lecture from Captain Kirk? The same guy who asked, "What does God need with a starship?" ( lol ). When was Kirk ever "Snotty"? I prefer his style to the self-righeous sanctimoniousness of Picard. As irritating as Q was, he at least put Picard in his place. What does any of this have to do with afterlives anyway? I think the closest that Trek ever got to afterlives was in DS9 with the wormhole entities.

 
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nivek

As Above So Below
Snotty lecture from Captain Kirk? The same guy who asked, "What does God need with a starship?" ( lol ). When was Kirk ever "Snotty"? I prefer his style to the self-righeous sanctimoniousness of Picard. As irritating as Q was, he at least put Picard in his place.
I prefer Captain Janeway's bold yet sometimes irrational approach, it got the Borg to compromise and even give up one of their own...

What does any of this have to do with afterlives anyway? I think the closest that Trek ever got to afterlives was in DS9 with the wormhole entities.
I beg to differ, Star Trek Voyager season 3 episode 15, Coda:

After her apparent death, Captain Janeway's journey to the afterlife, guided by her father, leaves her with suspicions.

This is a really good episode about the afterlife from a Star Trek show...

.
 

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
Mixing entertainment and Belief is nothing new ........... just ask Tom DeLonge. Seriously, entertainment is just a reflection and I find it unsurprising that our concerns are expressed that way.

Why here in an afterlife thread ? We all have some geekery in us as some level and this incredibly popular show with a multitude of spinoffs dealt with death and life in a way the vast majority don't. For example, I don't recall any episode of Friends as 'The one where Rachel is killed and then comes back to life ...' I thought the first few ToS movies had that great story arc ending with 'the one with the whales' and there is some fantastic dialogue in there between Bones and Spock that never fails to crack me up. That was when they could make a movie without the profligate use of automatic weapons or extreme martial arts and nobody could fly so they would never get made today.

While we're Trekking, Worf's reaction to various incarnations of Data - once that Scottish cartoon coffee cup guy explained it - is interesting. Seems neither Michael Dorn or Worf is keen on that idea and I have to admit he has a point but being revenant is a different topic. Personally, in real life the alive-again Spock would give me the Pet Sematary vibe.

I keep bringing this up but nobody is nibbling at the bait. What do you say to James Leininger? That his parents made it all up? That doesn't answer some sticky questions about the level of detail the kid had and how he could've said anything that convinced some elderly people that he had the memories of someone they all knew. Weird. You think his parents ever wondered exactly who they ere talking to?
 

J Randall Murphy

Trying To Stay Awake
I prefer Captain Janeway's bold yet sometimes irrational approach, it got the Borg to compromise and even give up one of their own...
I beg to differ, Star Trek Voyager season 3 episode 15, Coda:
This is a really good episode about the afterlife from a Star Trek show.
I forgot about that episode. A good call. Coincidentally ( otherwise ), I was just talking tonight with a spiritual lady who says she helps the departed do their crossing over into their version of a Heaven - Whatever that means.



 

nivek

As Above So Below
I was just talking tonight with a spiritual lady who says she helps the departed do their crossing over into their version of a Heaven - Whatever that means.

I take that to mean one of two things, either she is facilitating their fantasies in some way by assisting them in setting the conditions by which they can indulge in that delusion or she thinks she is making such efforts, thereby satisfying her own fantasies and gaining a satisfying dopamine fix from that delusion...

...
 

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
I don't have any idea what the Nice Lady is doing, probably not much. My problem with these sorts of things is that an entire industry has grown that preys upon the grieving. They would counter that they allow them to move forward or whatever - you can do that without charging mortgage payments for sittings.

Slippery slope there. Some don't believe at all. Some think they have the Answer and that others are deluded. I have friends and family with devout faith that would make different arguments. IMO nobody has it exactly 'right' for anyone other than themselves.

 

nivek

As Above So Below
I don't have any idea what the Nice Lady
Yeah same here, my previous comment was a bit harsh, who knows what she is really doing and to what end...Could be some good things, who knows...

...
 

J Randall Murphy

Trying To Stay Awake
I take that to mean one of two things, either she is facilitating their fantasies in some way by assisting them in setting the conditions by which they can indulge in that delusion or she thinks she is making such efforts, thereby satisfying her own fantasies and gaining a satisfying dopamine fix from that delusion...

...
Those are two possibilities — stated rather irreverently ( but possibilities nevertheless ).
The possibility that I find most interesting is that the phenomena accompanying these experiences sometimes seems to have an objectively real cause.
For example, people experience what they believe to be a haunting of some kind, so they call-in one of these crossing-over specialists to help the departed cross over to their next realm — and then the haunting stops.
In my efforts to gather info on hauntings, I've come to believe that such phenomena exist. However, I also believe that the cause must be something other than the recently departed.
What that cause is I cannot say with any certainty for all cases. I can only say that for some of them, something strange is going on that has no rational mundane explanation.
 
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pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
Last night we went and saw The Theresa Caputo Experience

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Mentioning it here for a reason. What can a medium possibly have to offer someone, either a nationally recognized one or a home grown spirit guide ? Entertainment, distraction, a chance to vent emotion. Under the right circumstances its an act of empathy and compassion that seems harmless. When you are grieving this is someone who will most often tell you little white lies, that everything's OK and most often the people hearing that are already more than half convinced or they wouldn't be talking to a medium in the first place.

And then you have something like this. This woman is good - she really is an entertainer that knows how to work an audience and I found myself having fun. Quite the spectacle. To be absolutely clear: do I for on single instant think there was any Afterlife communication going on? Hell no, this was pure showmanship. But, thing is, you'd have to believe at least some of those she interacted with were not plants and the apparently genuine emotion I witnessed made me wonder if I had wandered into some sort of religious revival, not the Long Island Medium. This wasn't belief, this was Faith I was witnessing. In other forms we see the same sort of dogged devotion in the ufological circles.

I see all this as harmless fun, at my most snarkiest I'd call it a tax on stupidity. Call me stupid I had fun.

Why did I go? Well, I'm usually game for an experience. It's one thing to sit on the sidelines and call a show like that silly, it's another to be immersed in a literal ocean of menopausal women who lap this stuff up. I think what gets lost on TV is the feeling, the palpable breath-holding of the entire audience. I have never watched a single episode of her show but know what it is. I'm also familiar with that Long Island schtick and to be honest, my wife is a Queens girl and has an accent about as thick. Water, butter, coffee - three words guaranteed to crack up my Midwest family.

And there's the root of it, silly or not my wife likes the show and you don't have to whack me in the head with a tire tool - if my wife likes that then so do I, whatever it may be.
 

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
Belief in an Afterlife of some sort has been ingrained into us across every society that has yet existed, it is a human condition not necessarily a societal one. If we have it it's there for a reason, or was anyway like the appendix. My layman's take on this is it probably served to allow us to function together and thrive in groups. Lacking that we may have gone the way of the Neandertal. Its also part of a well documented natural grief process.

Whether it has any factual basis remains to be seen but certainly there have been untold thousands of accounts that suggest bodily death may not be the end of our existence. I prefer the term consciousness but what the hell is that exactly ? Isn't that a more poignant question lately with the rise of highly sophisticated machines that mimic being self aware? If we can't define that je ne sais quoi for them we can't for ourselves and by extension can't really say what is and is not possible in that regard.

Don't forget, many things have been deemed impossible by mainstream thinking in the past that have become reality. I am not into physics but try beaming back a generation or two in your time machine and start talking about quantum entanglement and I bet you'll get the same reaction from many.

Ufology is largely a collection of anecdotal reports and the existence of inconclusive evidence is rumor, not fact. It is a conglomeration of many different ideas and agendas and opinions just like this topic. I have no trouble believing in extraterrestrial visitation and don't need to come up with theories about how they get here, what their agenda is - I have no way of knowing. What I do know for certain is that much of it is nonsense, just like belief in the afterlife and a lot of other things so I can understand blowing off much of it - if not the majority - until I have good enough reason to change my mind.

In some instances I will say 'no, absolutely not' and there is no room for equivocation. Flat Earth - no, I think we can safely dismiss that one because we have the tools and the language to quantify the topic very thoroughly. In this arena though, What Happens Next, we lack that yet and its so very tangled up in the root of our development that I am unwilling to make clear distinctions at this point. Doing so would make me no different than religious zealots who will tell you in great detail about life after death. Hence the playing card, the horse elevator.
 
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