One Life. Live it.

The proposed existence of an afterlife is irrelevant to this current existence, in short.

There are two main possibilities. Either the afterlife exists, or doesn’t. Let’s take possibility one, it doesn’t. Well, presumably if it does not, after you die, you just cease to exist. This sounds scary at first, except by definition it…cannot be. If you have ceased to exist, you therefore **cannot **be aware of the cessation in your existence…by the very fact you have ceased to exist. So, thereby if the afterlife doesn’t exist, it doesn’t matter.

The other possibility is naturally that the afterlife does exist. And if it does, you will acquire the knowledge of its existence upon entering it. And so, the question of the afterlife doesn’t matter in this possibility, because it will be answered when it is most important.

There is no point spending this life worrying about the next.

This theory does have a number of caveats, such as the concept held by many religions which is that you must live a good life in order to pass to the next. Firstly, everyone should be trying to live a good life in the first place, irrelevant of the consequences an afterlife might bring. Secondly, this life is certain. The next is not. (discarding for the sake of brevity ideas about The Matrix)

Furthermore, what kind of supposedly omnibenevolent God/Supreme Being would inflict *eternal *suffering and torment in return for *temporary *sins in this world? What sin could one commit to deserve literally infinite suffering?

“The only thing you can really control is how you react to things outside your control” — Bassam Tarazi

Originally published in 2015 on my old now lost blog, and has since been re-edited