Church of Reality

God, Immortality, and the After Life

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God, Immortality, and the After Life

There are things we know and things we don't know. However we can make a best guess and take a position based on the information we have available. The Church of Reality has already taken the position that God does not exist, and that we are going to maintain that position until God comes out of hiding into objective reality.

As to the afterlife, all scientific evidence suggests that we are our brains and that when our brains cease to function we cease to exist. Until someone comes back from the "other side" in a way that objective observers can document, we will stick with this position. The belief in life after death is a denial of our mortality.

There is perhaps a way to escape death, but that involves investing in the technologies that could prolong life indefinitely. We might actually be close to reaching that point, and for those who want to live forever, you might want to invest in developing the science that can make it possible.

Although people die, they still survive in a number of ways. If they have children, then their genes are passed on, cut by 50% in a mix with someone else's genes, which then divides in half with each subsequent generation. Additionally, the moral and cultural values we teach our children, those that are actually learned, are also passed on.

Google is the afterlife in the Church of Reality. Your immortality can be crudely assessed by the number of online articles about you 100 years after you die.

In the Church of Reality, we become part of the Tree of Knowledge - the sum total of all human understanding. If we have accomplished something significant in our lives that is worth remembering then our legacy will be passed on to future generations. I believe that the preservation of one's thoughts and ideas represents the best form of immortality because it is what represents you, who you are, how you lived, and what you contributed. As the First One of the Church of Reality, I hope that this church will be my legacy. I hope that others will take what I started and build it into something great. And I want others to share in the creation of what I hope will be the religion of the future.

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Newsflash

The God who Wasn't There is a really great film that I highly recommend. I saw an early screening of it at Stanford and I loved it. It goes into the early history of Christianity to determine if the character Jesus ever actually existed. I was surprised to find that much of the Jesus story was already in fiction for hundreds of years before Jesus was supposedly born. This is a documentary of how the Jesus myth was created and how little today's Christians know about the history of their own religion. Here's a really great Trailer for the movie. (18mb Quicktime format)

Most Atheists like myself have generally believed that the story of Jesus was at least based on some real events, some popular preacher that may have really existed and was later turned into a supernatural figure by his followers. But it is becoming clear to me that Jesus is total fiction and the stories are adapted from the fiction of the time. I recommend this film to everyone. It gives you a LOT to think about.