• Welcome to Autism Forums, a friendly forum to discuss Aspergers Syndrome, Autism, High Functioning Autism and related conditions.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Private Member only forums for more serious discussions that you may wish to not have guests or search engines access to.
    • Your very own blog. Write about anything you like on your own individual blog.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon! Please also check us out @ https://www.twitter.com/aspiescentral

Before Life, After Death and Religion

That's one thing I was thinking about a while ago. If I could cope with being in an afterlife that never ended. I would say it would be great for the first xxxxx amount of years but then it might get repetitive and boring. I do want to live longer but just not sure if I could cope with living forever in an afterlife if such a thing was possible. Unless of course every day was different and there were plenty of different things to do.

Having said that though, I don't know how long would be a reasonable time for me to live. When could I say that I have achieved everything I wanted in life and that it was time for me to go for good? 100 years? 200 years? A thousand? Of course, in theory that once you finally "go" that you don't ever come back (if an infinite afterlife doesn't exist).

If you could choose how long you lived for, how long would you choose?
 
^When you are young, a decade seems almost like an eternity. Once you are middle aged, a decade can seem to pass in the blink of an eye. I have no idea how long I would like to live for - I'd like to hang around for a few centuries and experience as much as possible before making any decision on when I would choose to die. A lot would depend on your physical and mental facilities - are you going to spend a thousand years as a 20 year old, a 50 year old, or an 80 year old? Do you get to keep the body and mind of a 20 year old and also accumulate the wisdom of many lifetimes?

Vampire fiction covers this sort of thing regularly. I remember in Anne Rice's novels how she spoke of how vampires tended to go a little mad, tended to lose interest in living, once they reached a great enough age. In the 2nd series of "True Blood" on HBO, the ancient vampire Godric lost interest in life, chose to end his long life by staying outside as the morning sun rose.
 
Here's a question about afterlife.

About the Afterlife - does anybody else find the concept scary? Sometimes I imagine that I die but I am still conscious, and I will go on
and on
and on
and on
and it never ends, ever - it just really scares me! The human mind is not made to understand infinite things.

I can't decide whether I am more comforted by the idea of just ending at death, or of persisting indefinitely. Both are scary when I think about them.

While death is scary, being immortal in heaven is an even worse thought. I would not want to go on forever and ever and I think if you were going to give someone a curse I think the most effective curse would be infinite life, what if you got fed up? You can't go, you are stuck in a never ending life. Why religious people think this is a good thing is just confusing.
 
Why religious people think this is a good thing is just confusing.

I'm not sure why. I have a few ideas.
1) People don't want to think their lives are so meaningless that they die and are forgotten/useless. If they don't "die," then they can't be completely forgotten and useless.
2) People have miserable lives and want to think there's something neverendingly good at the end.
3) They don't think really hard about what an eternity would feel like.
4) They thought about it, but figured that it's actually good, they just can't understand it because they're human beings who have limited minds.

Oh, and how long would I live? For as long as I could keep on learning:).
 
Last edited:
I'm not sure why. I have a few ideas.
1) People don't want to think their lives are so meaningless that they die and are forgotten/useless. If they don't "die," then they can't be completely forgotten and useless.
2) People have miserable lives and want to think there's something neverendingly good at the end.
3) They don't think really hard about what an eternity would feel like.
4) They thought about it, but figured that it's actually good, they just can't understand it because they're human beings who have limited minds.

Oh, and how long would I live? For as long as I could keep on learning:).
I dunno why they think that, because not living after death doesn't make life meaningless. Because once you die you become part of the earth again and fertilise the grass and stuff, which is good enough for me. Also wouldn't heaven get a bit crowded after millions of years of deaths?
 
I was raised Catholic but gradually drifted into agnosticism where I am now (mildly atheistic). It's a long story, but certainly the bullying I went through because of my condition did play a huge role (but not the only one).

I do accept evolution as the best explanation of how things got to be the way they are; to me, it makes sense. I do not know if there is a designer behind it or even a goal. As far as the afterlife is concerned, I used to believe in it, but now I am questioning how a "soul" can exist without a body to provide sensory inputs. In other words, I believe that we are wedded to our bodies and when it dies, we die. There is nothing left to carry on.

As far as the scandals in the Catholic church are concerned, I have said this many, many times and will continue to say it: What has happened is a slap in the face to all the Catholics who have stayed faithful to the Church's difficult teachings concerning sex, even when it caused them hardship. I was brought up to believe that sex outside of marriage was wrong. I went through a lot of bullying and harassment from both men and women because I would not compromise on this belief. It is one of the reasons I never married. When I see men who took PUBLIC vows of chastity (I took no vows!) violate those vows in such a despicable manner and then to have their superiors look the other way, then as far as I am concerned the Catholic Church has no right whatsoever to tell the rest of us how to live sexually. What the Church needs to do to put the matter straight is to have the priests who were guilty of such acts (and the superiors that sheltered them) come forward publicly at Mass and tell their congregations not only what they did but WHY they did it, then maybe then the Church will have something to say.
 
I am a Christian and proud to be one. I was raised in a Christian family, but never really believed. That was when the problems of AS were manifesting in me then (mainly a lot of anger issues; now it doesn't affect me) and I was fighting it. I tried hard to solve it, but didn't manage to. Of course, life at that time had no purpose; I was just aimlessly wandering around fighting with people and getting into trouble all the time.

It was sometime around the equivalent of high school that I joined a church, and found a community of people that really cared, and this got me interested. How is it that people actually care here? From there through following God's doctrines I really improved (i.e. got rid of the anger issues) and now I have little or no problems socializing, even in an Asian country where life is much harder for people with AS. As it is, there are so many attributes to God that we can see, but essentially God is a friend that we can trust at all times.

Gandhi said, "I like your Christ. I don't like your Christians." By right, we're all supposed to try to follow Jesus' example, but then and again not all who are interested manage to. And some are corrupted and abuse the system for their own gain. If you read through the history of almost every major religion there are some things which were implemented because of vested human interests or corrupted interpretations of religious texts, and the unfortunately the Church isn't any different. Jesus never mentioned anything on contraception, and the Bible clearly speaks out against rituals, which indulgences falls under. On celibacy, which some of you have mentioned the Bible's stand is "well if you can then go ahead and be celibate, but if you can't then go get married" and for lobbying it isn't exactly clear, because Jesus Himself never mentioned anything about it.

Are there Christians who were evil? Yes. However, just like there are bad Christians / Catholics, there are also bad (insert whatever religion you have here). Let's start with atheists: People like Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler are the most obvious.

Bottom line: whether you want to be a good person is up to you. It is possible to go through the motions and act the part anyway. That said, I can't comment on other religion, but Christianity is a RELATIONSHIP not a religion. With a God that is all powerful and yet willing to come down and bother about us (instead of just vaporising us straightaway).

I'm no biologist (I'm in physics), but even if I wasn't a Christian, I still wouldn't believe in evolution for a few simple things:

- The tendency in nature is for things to go from orderly to disorderly - the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics states it clearly. If you don't believe, just leave your house for a year and try cleaning up the dust. How is it possible for random molecules to randomly form organic substances without reason? And lest you think it is easy, the chances of it happening is infinitesimal. Just ask the chemists on the forum, they can tell you better.

Even if you think of this a parallel to getting 1000 monkeys randomly banging keyboards in the hope that one of them gets Shakespeare, the odds that it happens is way too small to occur. There are too many events that "just happened to be there" for it to happen by chance.

- Even if organic substances somehow managed to be formed, it still doesn't account for the existence of life.
- A little bit of Google shows this: you can get an animal, lets say a cat to adapt and you can call it evolution. But in nature, nobody has ever managed to get a cat in nature to give birth to say, a dog. Would a fish breed a giraffe? Highly unlikely.

All these are pretty clear evidence of Intelligent Design.
 
I've just checked your profile. Are you really 20? That's what I love so much about so many people on the spectrum, we're ageless :-) I'm referring to intelligence. My views are pretty much similar to yours. At least that's how it looks on the surface.
I might write some more on the subject later but at this point I'd like to share lyrics from a song of mine. I'm not Shakespeare so don't judge too harsh :-) I wrote it a few years ago,but it still represents my views pretty well.

I believe you when you say
This life could be the best we have
No one knows what's the next
Heaven or hell
Tomorrow we'll all be there
No matter who's the best
Until that time
I'll just suppose
I'm doing pretty well.

I believe you when you say
There's a magic in this world
No one cares if it's true
It makes us feel ok
So many views so many thoughts
That contradict themselves
And all the leaders think they found
The best possible way.

***Your religion is not for me
I couldn't find another
But doesn't matter
Your decision
How life should be
Don't satisfy but probably
It couldn't be better

All I'm trying to say is that
There's no truth there's no lie
Everything seems to be living
under a hidden law
And those who say
They're absolutely sure that they know
Maybe they know, maybe they don't
This all is just a show

Ok... Something like that.... It might need some work, but the point is clear, I think...
 
(1) Are there Christians who were evil? Yes. However, just like there are bad Christians / Catholics, there are also bad (insert whatever religion you have here). Let's start with atheists: People like Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler are the most obvious.

(2) Christianity is a RELATIONSHIP not a religion.

(3) I'm no biologist (I'm in physics), but even if I wasn't a Christian, I still wouldn't believe in evolution for a few simple things:

- The tendency in nature is for things to go from orderly to disorderly - the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics states it clearly. If you don't believe, just leave your house for a year and try cleaning up the dust. How is it possible for random molecules to randomly form organic substances without reason? And lest you think it is easy, the chances of it happening is infinitesimal. Just ask the chemists on the forum, they can tell you better.

Even if you think of this a parallel to getting 1000 monkeys randomly banging keyboards in the hope that one of them gets Shakespeare, the odds that it happens is way too small to occur. There are too many events that "just happened to be there" for it to happen by chance.

- Even if organic substances somehow managed to be formed, it still doesn't account for the existence of life.
- A little bit of Google shows this: you can get an animal, lets say a cat to adapt and you can call it evolution. But in nature, nobody has ever managed to get a cat in nature to give birth to say, a dog. Would a fish breed a giraffe? Highly unlikely.

All these are pretty clear evidence of Intelligent Design.

(1) Hitler was not an atheist - the fact that no religion wants to claim him as one of theirs does not make him an atheist. There have been some evil atheists, but the point is that atheists don't generally kill people in the name of atheism. Whereas throughout history there have been millions of people killed in the name of just about every religion you can name - and the killing still goes on. But you are correct, religion doesn't make people evil any more than atheism does.

(2) Christianity is a religion. A set of beliefs involving an omnipotent, supernatural being and an afterlife. You can call it a relationship if you want, but nobody who isn't a born-again-Christian sees it that way.

(3) Yep - science cannot explain exactly how the first organic molecules came into being and how those organic molecules formed themselves into a self-replicating life form. But once you have self-replicating life forms, with an imperfect replication system, competing for existence in a habitat with finite resources, evolution becomes inevitable.

Regardless of whether there is currently a sound and provable theory for how nature got to that first self-replicating life form, to prove intelligent design you need actual proof for intelligent design, you can't just point to the fact that science doesn't yet have a bulletproof explanation for an alternative and claim that as proof. That is what is known as "God of the Gaps", which is a common logical fallacy.

You have science, which (as it currently stands anyway) does not yet give us a complete understanding of everything, although great advances have been made since the first scientists thousands of years ago. And then you have religion, which can explain everything - although the explanation is pretty much the same for everything ("God did it"). Religion is fine if it works for you.
 
I've just checked your profile. Are you really 20?

Yes, I'm really 20. :)

I haven't added to this thread in quite a while but everyone is welcome to contribute to the debate/discussion. My current position on the whole thing is neutral. Although it would seem that as the days go by, I'm drifting further and further away from religion. However, I still don't buy into the "we evolved from Apes" theory. There's a number of flaws with that.
 
Actually, we did not "evolve from apes." That is a misunderstanding of what the theory of evolution really teaches. My father taught evolution as part of high school biology for many years and nothing would frustrate him more than people saying things about what evolution teaches that were not true. He always said that it did not matter if you accepted the theory or not, but at least get it right.

What Darwin and others taught is that humans and apes have a common ancestor way back when. Humans did not evolve from apes any more than apes evolved from humans. To give an analogy, President Obama shares ancestors with President Bush (and I share the same ancestors as both). Our mutual ancestor lived about 200 years ago. To say that Obama is descended from Bush or Bush is descended from Obama is nonsense. Same with humans and apes. DNA and fossils are slowly starting to reveal who that ancestor might have been and when it might have lived.

Ok, end of science lecture. I just could not let that one go by.
 
I come from an extremely Christian family, but label myself as being agnostic.

I never had much "faith". The only time I had a hint of faith in me was when I was suicidal and wanted my suicidal thoughts to go away. I didn't love "god" - I just prayed in hopes that he'd perform favors for me. I didn't "believe" in him, really. I mostly figured I'd pray just in case he/it was real.
 
Last edited:
Although it would seem that as the days go by, I'm drifting further and further away from religion. However, I still don't buy into the "we evolved from Apes" theory. There's a number of flaws with that.

Do you mean that you are drifting further away from organized religion, but not necessarily towards an atheistic point of view?

Taking it back to what Spinning compass said, what are the flaws you see with the idea that apes and humans share a common ancestor millions of years ago? And what do you make of the extensive fossilised evidence of early humans that appear to represent steps in evolution from that common ancestor to modern man?

Or do you believe in Intelligent Design, the idea that evolution did occur but that there was an intelligent "helping hand" guiding it along its way?
 
Do you mean that you are drifting further away from organized religion, but not necessarily towards an atheistic point of view?

Well... I would definitely be drifting away from organized religion. I am not sure if I am heading towards an atheistic view at this time.

Taking it back to what Spinning compass said, what are the flaws you see with the idea that apes and humans share a common ancestor millions of years ago? And what do you make of the extensive fossilised evidence of early humans that appear to represent steps in evolution from that common ancestor to modern man?

Spinning Compass has corrected me above when she said that we did not directly evolve from the apes themselves. When many speak of evolution, they usually say that we were once all apes and evolved into humans. That (directly evolving from apes) is what I had problems with.

As for sharing a common ancestor, I haven't read/looked into that (probably due to my misunderstanding noted above and being brought up as a Christian) so I haven't formed an opinion yet.

Or do you believe in Intelligent Design, the idea that evolution did occur but that there was an intelligent "helping hand" guiding it along its way?

When I was a child I believed that God created the earth and that's the way I was brought up. Now though, I honestly don't know what to believe anymore. I do find it difficult to believe that we just all appeared out of nothing with no purpose or end goal.
 
I am not sure if I am heading towards an atheistic view at this time.

You honestly sound Agnostic which is what I am.

You open up the possibility that a god could exist, but choose to not follow any religion because you aren't 100% sure what's true and what's false . . . right?
 
You honestly sound Agnostic which is what I am.

You open up the possibility that a god could exist, but choose to not follow any religion because you aren't 100% sure what's true and what's false . . . right?

That is what would best describe me.

Keeping with the theme of evolution, I was checking up the BBC News website as I regularly do, before I ended my visit I noticed this news article:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-13278255

It seems that scientists now believe we descended from fish?

It may seem strange that humans have evolved from fish, but the evidence can be found not just in fossils but also within our own bodies.

Your face is your most expressive feature; it tells the world what you are feeling, who you are and where you come from. Although no two faces are exactly the same, they share a number of common characteristics; a couple of eyes, a nose, a mouth and a philtrum.

The philtrum is the groove on your top lip that lies just beneath your nose. You see it every day in the mirror so you probably never think about it

It has no obvious function. Instead it is an accident of our origins, a clue to our fishy past and how our faces first formed.

Your face is formed in the womb in the first couple of months of life, from when you were the size of a grain of rice to when you were the size of a kidney bean.

The video (above) of a growing human face shows how this process happens. It has been created from high quality scans of human embryos at early stages of development, provided by universities and hospitals.

This unique time-lapse video shows the face developing from a one-month-old embryo to an age of 10 weeks.

If you watch it closely, you will see that the human face is actually formed of three main sections which rotate and come together in an unborn foetus.

The way this happens only really makes sense when you realise that, strange though it may sound, we are actually descended from fish.

The early human embryo looks very similar to the embryo of any other mammal, bird or amphibian - all of which have evolved from fish.

Your eyes start out on the sides of your head, but then move to the middle.

The top lip along with the jaw and palate started life as gill-like structures on your neck. Your nostrils and the middle part of your lip come down from the top of your head.

There is no trace of a scar; the plates of tissue and muscle fuse seamlessly. But there is, however, a little remnant of all this activity in the middle of your top lip - your philtrum.

This whole process, the bits coming together of the various elements to produce a recognisable human face, requires great precision.

To fuse correctly the three sections must grow and meet at precisely the right time in the womb.

If the timing is out, by as little as an hour, the baby may grow up with a cleft lip or cleft lip and palate, which can be extremely disfiguring. Around the world one in 700 babies are born with clefts.

Fishy features

There are other odd things about human anatomy that can only really be explained by our fishy ancestry. For example, if you were to cut up a shark you would discover that its gonads are lodged up in its chest, behind its liver.

Like the shark our gonads also start life high up, near the liver. But unlike the shark they need to descend.

In a woman they descend and become the ovaries, located conveniently near the uterus and the fallopian tubes

In men, they become the testes; but to get down and fill the scrotum they have to make a far longer and more tortuous journey south.

One consequence of this journey is the creation of a weakening in the abdominal wall. And as a result, men are far more prone than women to what are known as inguinal hernias.

An inguinal hernia can appear as a lump in the groin area and may be painful; the lump normally disappears if you lie down.

The lump is actually the contents of your gut protruding through that weakness in the muscle wall left behind by the descent of the testes.

Inguinal hernias often require surgery, and if you are unfortunate enough to get one, blame it on fish.

Hiccups

An American called Charles Osborne has the dubious honour of holding a record for the longest recorded bout of hiccups - 68 years worth, from 1922 to 1990. It seems that again it is our fishy ancestors who are partly to blame.

A hiccup is caused by a spasm of the diaphragm, a big muscle in the chest, followed by an involuntary gulp. Both these actions have watery roots.

In fish the nerves that activate breathing take a short journey from an ancient part of the brain, the brain stem, to the throat and gills. In us, it is more complicated.

To breathe properly, our brain stem has to send messages not just to the throat, but down to the chest and diaphragm. This complex arrangement means that the nerves are prone to spasm, which can initiate hiccups.

Once a hiccup has started, it is kept going by a simple motor reflex that we seem to have inherited from an amphibian ancestor.

For the ancient tadpole, the nerve controlling this reflex served a useful purpose, allowing the entrance to the lung to remain open when breathing air but closing it off when gulping water - which would then be directed only to the gills.

For humans and other mammals who hiccup, it has no value but does provide another bit of evidence of our common ancestry.

What does everyone make of this? I thought science was confident in an Ape link.
 
I'm quite an evolution noob, but:

All living creatures are supposedly related to each other. The more different a living this is from another living thing, the more their genetic code will differ. We share many similarities to chimps and other primates (our appearance is quite similar and our intelligence levels don't contrast as much as they do with other mammals) so it isn't surprising that our genetic code isn't all that different. Such similar genetic code would allow a scientist to see that we're very closely related. Scientists have also seen evolution in effect through fossils; fossils can be used as a sort of time machine that allows us to travel into the past to see what occurred millions or even billions of years ago.

The primates that humans came from was the homo genus. We're the only extant species of this genus. The BBC saying that at one point in time we humans were fish isn't all that weird. It was only our last common ancestor that were primates (just like we humans are), but hundreds of millions of years ago our ancestors were said to be fish. The fish went through many transformations before becoming primates. Our ancestors at one point are said to be an aquatic life-form that eventually made it to land and from there they constantly evolved into various types of life-forms.
 
Last edited:
What ??? said is pretty spot on.

Fish were the first creatures on Earth with backbones. Basically everything with a backbone is descended from fish. Dinosaurs, lizards, cows, birds, gorillas, turtles, snakes, us. Some animals like whales and turtles evolved from fish, evolved to live on land and breathe air, then went back to the ocean. An octopus is apparently as intelligent as a small monkey but it does not have a backbone, it is not descended from a fish.

This is why you often hear animals classified as vertebrates (animals with backbones) and invertebrates (animals without backbones).

We share a common ancestor with just about everything, it just depends on how far you go back. We share something like 98% of our DNA with a chimpanzee, so it is assumed that we share a common ancestor fairly recently with chimps. We share about 60% of our DNA with a fruit fly, so our common ancestor with a fruit fly is a lot further back in time. Back before fish had even evolved.
 

New Threads

Top Bottom