Concept of An Afterlife
Atheism does not consist of any positive beliefs, such as "There is no Heaven" or "There is no Hell" or "There are no gods." True, many atheists carry their atheism this far, but being an atheist doesn't mean you carry things that far. We weren’t alive before we were born and we’re not going to exist after we die. According to atheism they are not happy about the fact that that’s the end of life, but can accept that and make their life more fulfilling at present. For all that many religious people claim that belief in life after death is a comfort to them for people of any kind of consciousness after death is profoundly disturbing. A lot of that is down to the grotesque images of eternal torture with which the religions have tried to coerce belief over the millennia. Consciousness ceases once the brain stops functioning so you will not be aware that you are in a dark urn as you will no longer be. Even though the body is still around the person has essentially ceased to exist any longer as they previously did. No longer existing is sometimes not a very easy concept for people to grasp. They dont talk about the physical body of the person or other’s memories of the person but instead about what they feel truly makes up a person and makes them who they are, their mind. Nothing left of the person but a dead body that will begin to decompose like anything else that has died. Atheists believe that humans do not have souls nor an afterlife. Even though it is a naturally parallel concept to atheism shared by many rational people it is not necessarily a common belief to all atheists and is no way a claim of atheism itself. Atheists encourage others to quit worrying about what happens after death and enjoy and make the best out of the lives they have.
Many people seem to use it as a placeholder for the entire collection of an individual's thoughts, feelings, memories, and emotions. But the fact of the matter is, all of these things are ultimately just chemical processes in the brain. Modern science is slowly mapping the brain and its processes, and while we don't understand everything about how it works, we do understand a great deal. Atheists do not believe that the soul is a real thing; that is, something that exists outside of normal brain chemistry. As atheist does not believe in a soul, they also do not believe that any of these things survive beyond the moment of death. There is simply no evidence in reality to believe that some sort of mystical entity known as a "soul" somehow exits the body and moves to another plane or dimension of existence also for which there is no evidence. It’s common for people to point to so-called "out of body" experiences as evidence that our minds are separate things from our bodies. They claim that minds are immaterial and fundamentally different from our physical bodies. What they cannot explain by this is how such experiences can be produced at will through purely physical means like drugs and electrodes. A very common, but not entirely universal, component of Near Death Experiences is the image of bright light at the end of a dark tunnel, medical science can not only explain how this image is created naturally, but also predict when it will occur as well as when it won’t. It cannot be ruled out, that when approaching death, you may experience "dreams" your own conscience has created. So before death, it is indeed possible to enter a sort of heaven, and that being your final experience, may set a certain mood or feeling before your total annihilation of 'being'; which will come without pre-existing knowledge. Atheist would like to believe in an afterlife but there is just no proof. When we die, our physical bodies cease to exist and become decomposed into the matter that makes up the biosphere of nature. That is the scientific view. No afterlife experience has been reported.
Reference:
http://www.positiveatheism.org/mail/eml8346.htm
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