“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” – Mark Twain

What happens to us after death? It’s a creepy question, isn’t it, but don’t most of us wonder if this life is it or if, depending on what religious belief followed, there’s some sort of afterlife whether it is reward or punishment, after this life ends? Everyone does, yea believer and non-believers. As a non-believer, I choose to not think about it because, like the quote above from Mark Twain, death is, well, nothingness to me. I think of it as having been in a deep sleep where I don’t remember dreaming, then waking up. I woke up from, well, nothing, in my mind. when I dies, I return to just that. Nothing.

But billions pf people do believe in something beyond this physical life and it shouldn’t be ignored, even by non-believers just because to us there is no objective proof of an afterlife of any kind. And it depends on what god(s) you believe in as to what afterlife you may or may not experience. that’s what make it strange to me as an atheist. If I am a Christian, but before I die I convert to Hinduism, do I experience the christian or the Hindu version of the afterlife?In the Christian world, there is a Heaven, a place of ultimate reward for obeying your god and of course a place of punishment, colloquially known as hell, for those that either did not follow their god’s laws, or for those that refused to believe. As a Hindu, I would believe that the soul is eternal and that I would go through the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth (based on deeds in the previous life( Karma)that might be to a better or worse life), until I reached a level of perfection when my soul would merge with the Brahman, which is the universal consciousness and eternal peace. Of course, in between cycles, there might be a holding place that’s either good or bad, depending on what kind of life had been lived.

Both of these religions had their early beginnings, and even before that, there had to be some sort of ancient belief in something greater than the physical world as humans began in the African savannah, and spread through the Middle East, Europe, and the far east. In that time, people began to wonder about their environment, the natural cycles of the earth from spring to winter and from there, possibly began to believe that if the earth renewed itself every year, why couldn’t they as well, be renewed, of sorts. Of course, we have no real idea other that at some point humans began (and even before humans) burial practices where people were carefully interred in the ground, sometimes with personal items, even flowers. The idea of a loved one being gone and never seeing that person again may be how, over time, the idea of the afterlife began. Since none of us were there, and we have no precise evidence of any of this, we can only guess.

I always come back to the human ego which maintains us in our daily life and will not surrender to the idea of ever ending because, well, how can I end? But we can, and do, and the world might be in a much better place if we had no religious belief and people lived their best lives in the here and now because that’s all we have and to hope for something better, or another chance to be better, is just that ego speaking to our subconcious mind.