[keg in kc]

Originally Posted by frankotank

you've got some very interesting posts in here....some interesting ideas. one could make an argument that entertaining the idea of ufo's being real while at the same time discounting the possibility that after life, angels and demons could be real as well......one could argue that this seems illogical?

I never dismissed the possibility.

Stating what my personal beliefs are about anything should never be construed as either an argument for or against what anyone else believes, it's simply a statement about what I at the time (and those beliefs can and do change over time). I'm not trying to convince or convert or dismiss or really to do anything but attempt to understand and verbalize the things that I myself believe.

As far as the afterlife goes, I actually do think it's possible that there is one. I just don't happen to believe in the concept of God as Santa Claus, keeping track of how naughty and nice you are moment-by-moment and sending you to paradise or brimstone based on your marks in the eternal notebook. I don't know if we have a 'soul' in the christian sense. Maybe yes maybe no. I do think it's possible that there's more to human consciousness than what happens between birth and death. Now, whether that can be proven one way or another is another question. Maybe when we die it all fades to black and we're done. Maybe when we die we wake up somewhere else. I have no way of knowing...

Basically just take anything in terms of belief as coming with a caveat that I openly acknowledge that what I believe could be wrong...

And keep in mind that when we're talking about things like religion and what happens after we die we're talking about belief structures that can't really be logical.

I should also clarify that I wasn't as much saying I don't believe non-human spirits or entities can exist. I'm saying I don't believe the Bible is anything more than a collection of stories written by people, I don't think it's representative of any kind of esoteric reality about the universe and I don't believe that the Judeo-Christian interpretation of the paranormal carries any more weight than any other mythology.

In any case, this kind of stuff is hard to express, and people tend to get very defensive about it whichever side of the religious spectrum they land on, which is the main reason I tend to try to keep religion out of the discussion.