Chris Holmes Online

Scott Adams is fun to read. Today he has a post about Atheists that made me think. In the post he writes:

I sometimes call myself an atheist because it’s too hard to explain Spinoza’s version of god. And it’s too hard to explain that agnosticism is the only intellectually defensible position.

That comment made me think about the way I view religion and my own philosophy about life after death. I, like Adams, often use the term Atheist because it is a lot easier to say that to explain to people what I really think about God and the afterlife. Explaining my beliefs could take a long time; telling people you’re an Atheist takes about a half a second.

But I think I’ve come up with a better way to explain myself and still stick to the succinctness of “I’m an Atheist”: From now on I’m going to tell people I belong to The Church of I Don’t Know.

Because that is basically the way I think about God, religion and the afterlife. I simply don’t know, and I believe several things are very possible. For instance, I believe it is very possible that when we die the light simply goes out. There’s nothing else: No Afterlife, no Heaven, no Hell, no ghostly apparition. We just cease to exist because our brains cease to function.

That outlook is rather grim (at least to some people), however, so I also happen to believe it is very possible that there is some sort of Next Life. Maybe this life is just one in a long chain of lives; maybe we have somewhere to go after this, and somewhere to go after that, and so on and so forth.

Or maybe we just become one with the universe, from which we were born, living subconsciously in the cosmos without form.

Or maybe we reincarnate.

Or maybe we become Gods of our own universes.

Who knows?

The fact of the matter is: I don’t know. And I’m perfectly OK with that.

Because there is one constant among all the possibilities floating through my head: No matter if we existed before this life, or if we’ll exist in another form/place/time after this life, we have no knowledge of anything else other than this life. We know nothing for certain outside our immediate existence.

Which means that the only proof we have, the only thing we really know for sure, is that we’re alive now; this is the life we’ve been given. So it stands to reason that we better make the most out of it.

As to the rest of it – whatever came before and whatever is next – I don’t know. And I think that’s an answer that should be OK to give.