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So upon death, life just...ends? Interesting. I thought that virtualy all religions had some sort of version of an afterlife.

Well, as I said we do believe after a fashion in the reunion of the ru'ach (spirit, animating presence) with G-d after a person's death; but it's not a soul in the Christian sense, so there's no telling if there's a continuation of any sort of consciousness in a way we can understand. I'd rather spend my life focused on what's going on now, rather than spending my life preparing for death.

I know that we believe that life just ends, and then some become spirit beings, and the rest end up being resurrected on earth after Armageddon happens.

I didn't know that Jews believed in a lack of afterlife, to a point at least. The one Jew that I personally knew seemed to believe in an afterlife, I may be mistaken about what he believed, he seemed to joke about it a lot.

There's Jews and then there's Jews. For obvious reasons, Jews with a more messianic bent to their beliefs tend to believe in more of an afterlife than I've described. But we certainly don't have such a rigidly defined heaven or hell - even the concept of Satan/Samael/Azazel/Asmodeus in some of the apocrypha and medieval Kabbalah/etc. is a rather undefined idea. Of course, we can't have a limbo or purgatory, because we don't have sacraments of baptism or confession, nor do we believe in original sin being the baggage of everyone.

So, The idea of an afterlife is somewhat of a personal element depending on where the individual's beliefs lean?

Reliant121 wrote:So, The idea of an afterlife is somewhat of a personal element depending on where the individual's beliefs lean?

No matter what your religion is, unless you're a completely robotic dogma-spewing automaton, isn't that always the case?

Mikey wrote:

Reliant121 wrote:So, The idea of an afterlife is somewhat of a personal element depending on where the individual's beliefs lean?

dogma-spewing automaton

Answered your own question, most religious people I have encountered have been somewhat in this fashion. Besides Reema and my mother that is. And members of the forum evidently.

Yeah, that is very true Reliant. Most people I talk to about religion usually just say something around the lines of "I jut don't believe that" and if you ask why, the answer is "because the priest told me so." It's one of the reasons I like this forum so much, I have people that when I argue religion/lack thereof, I get reasoning.

However yes, most of the religions out there tell their parishioners agree or die.