Poll: What do you think happens to you when you die?

I don't think an afterlife is impossible. I'm not SURE of anything, obviously. But I think it'll just be over when it's over.

Exactly.
Since I've never died that I recall, and I've never spoken to anyone who died... I have no way of knowing.

Part of me really wants to come back as a ghost so I can see people grieve. But that's the insecure yet egotistic part of me. :)

hee! yeah. i wanna go to my funeral and make sure everyone shows up and is properly sad. :D

or maybe have a cool funeral.

Like play songs that were your favorites. :)

Carey has orders to play the kazoo at my service. I'm not having a funeral because I'm not being buried. AFter I die I'm going to medical school.

Jeebus.
What medical school accepts students who are dead??

Is this, like, some zombie college?

I don't need to do that. People grieve when they see me alive :-)

Spock: "It would be impossible to discuss without a common frame of reference."
McCoy: "You mean I have to die to talk about your thoughts on death???"

From Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

-- Pauley

I don't think it is impossible but it is so improbable as to not make a difference. It is like saying what happens to the computer programs after the computer is destroyed?

They get absorbed by the MCP.

My mom swears that my grandfather appears in our house around the time of his birthday or his death.

His birthday was recently and the night before, her and my dad smelled cigar smoke. No one in the neighborhood smokes so it wasn't from outside and we never smelled it before in the house.

They both were a little freaked, but my grandfather was a known jokester. So anything is possible. :D

I do believe he's watching us from wherever he is. :) I just wish I knew him. he died 5 months before I was born. :(

"I wonder where we go when we die."
"pittsburgh?"
"you mean if we're good or if we're bad?"

Immortality, baby.

and yes, I actually do.
But, since that probably won't happen... I guess I'll deal with just enjoying the time I have.

I think immortality would be one of my worst nightmares.

.oO Who wants to live forever? Oo.

*raises hand*

Agreed... immortality is also one of my worst nightmares. I mean... what would your retirement age be if you lived forever?
And for those of you who respond, "If you lived forever, why would you retire?"... I suggest a career in retail to cure your desire for eternal life.

I dunno, and that's the way I like it. People who are sure about how the universe works give me the willies.

The universe is easy to understand. It's one big ass endothermic reaction. Simple!

well then life is quite the interruption in entropy, I'd say...

it's entropy, you see, that turns Vanessa to mess!

are you quoting mike, or mondegreening dave?

"The universe is easy to understand. It's one big ass endothermic reaction. Simple!"

WTH? How "simple" is that? If you pour salt on ice, does it spontaneously generate life, capable of evolving upward from protozoa all the way up to mammals? There's nothing "simple" about the way the universe, especially the earth, works. It all fits together too neatly and tightly to be accidental. There must be some higher power, some higher purpose.

I agree with the fact that it's not simple. It was quite a series of events and coincidences that lead up to mammals, and humans.

But still, that's hardly a basis to say that there must be a creator.

It might if you watched it for a few millenia. :-) Besides, don't "higher power" and "evolution" cancel each other out?

Okay, so you don't get humor. I thought that was pretty dang funny.

And why does there have to be a higher purpose, just because it's complex doesn't mean there's necessarily a higher power or purpose.

it's like in dogma. if you're bad, you're banished to milwaukee for all of eternity. :D

I'll be mellow when I'm dead,
I'll be mellow when I'm dead,
when are you...cosmic cowboys
gonna get it through yer head?
I'll be mellow when I'm dead,
I'll be mellow when I'm dead,
I'll be mellow when I'm dead

I think that when I die, my soul will have a period of rest. Then my soul will be given another life, to continue the journey of learning and loving. And when I've learned all there is to learn? Well, I don't know that one can ever learn all there is to learn. But it would still be fun to try.

I don't really know what will happen when I die. My fear is that there is nothing after death. No soul, no consciousness, nothing. If there is nothing, then what is the point of living at all? What is the point of life if it, as Shakespeare put it, signifies nothing? One of my early memories is of darkness...a nothingness with consciousness. I knew who I was, who my parents were, and all that; however, I saw blackness and felt nothing outside of the darkness. Of course, memory is a funny thing. After the darkness, I opened my eyes and found myself in the bathtub. When I got out, I remember running to my parents and telling them that I could see, and I couldn't remember seeing anything but the darkness before. They thought I was silly, because I had been able to see before. (I once thought this was my first memory ever, but then I remembered an even earlier event. So maybe I was just silly.)

I do believe in ghosts, though. Sometime after my dog Teddy died (and I was away from home), my mom told me she would hear the sound of his collar banging against the water/food dish, and the other two dogs were nowhere near the dish. When I was in high school, I, along with a group of friends, heard a ghost in the form of heavy footsteps on a set of stairs where no one else was. I was told there were ghosts at my college, but I never saw/heard them.

It's hard to make a choice on this poll because I believe in both an afterlife and in reincarnation. I mean, souls are not immediately reborn thus the afterlife. I've seen and felt too much *not* to believe in it.

I just plain refuse to die till i'm good and ready, when the grim reaper comes for me , i'm just gonna knock him right in the nose with a bat.there just too much to see and do in the world.

Great Woody Allen line

Some artists want to attain immortality through their work. I want to achieve mine by not dying.

The universe seems so planned, so organized, so much like a whole lotta work for there to be no point to it all. The question is, are we the point? I can see why people can be easily persuaded that we are, we don't live that long, the nothingness is never that far away. Even if I thought that we go on, the possibility that my consciousness might go on without all the sensory input that our body's provide seems like a kind of hell. But we will never know.

I have a hard time with living. sometimes I'd rather not be alive... but I am. so I trundle around, doing my thing. I used to be uber christian, I was going to be a missionary, then I had a break with reality and haven't gone back since. I went cold turkey. I'm too insane to talk to someone who isn't visable... I just don't have faith and so religon and afterlife and things that I don't know for fact are things I don't put time into. I'd rather thinkabout the safest way to ingest anthrax, the phenom of "dinasaur" weather, kicking vegans in the head, plotting the downfall of rod stewart and damning estell getty. dude. ;-)

Physically I will continue something like this: worms will eat their way through my body, their excrement will enrich the soil and help new life grow. One of those worms will be very special when it deposits its fertilizer in a place where some germ struggles desperately for survival in a marginal environment, helping it to become an apple tree. Then some dreamy loafer rests underneath it. Just when this loafer is about to conclude that the answer to the questions regarding the meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything is 42, she is hit by an apple and gets inspired to come up with the grand unifying theory that explains it all in one elegant statement, small enough to be printed in one bold line across a T shirt: Life is full of shit.

dude, this is why I love no one.

Actually, that wasn't the full story. Last week I dreamt that I sat in front of the Oracle of Delphi and asked: "What do you think happens to me when I die?" Maybe the oracle was full of shit, or my dream was. *Shrug.* Sometimes oracles are spectacularly misunderstood, as in: "a great empire will be destroyed." The question was: "What will happen if I go to war?" On the strength of the answer, the questioner went to war, and his great empire was destroyed.