Hi my name is Jelani Sims and I used to be an atheist 

I used to be because quite recently I stumbled upon the strange topic of life after death.

Let me just give you a little background on my life. I grew up in a very religious family, constantly barraged with christian beliefs

I accepted them for about the first 12 years of my life, then I went to boarding school. In boarding school, I started contemplating about the scriptures about what they were telling me.

Basically I came to the conclusion that religion was put in place to control people of lower intellect. Telling me that If i didn't "worship" what I consider an idol, I would burn forever more was not something that was going to scare me into submission.

It was then when I became an atheist : (

Becoming an atheist was refreshing yet depressing at the same time. Refreshing because I was proud of myself for seeing through the fog that is religion, and depressing because I realized "thought" that we were only living to die.

Two months ago I found this website, read it and thought nice fairy tale. But something sparked in me  A thirst for knowledge that I never felt before in my life. It had begun.

Long story short, after about 2 months of constant research, I have come to the conclusion that the afterlife does indeed exist 

I don't have all the answers yet and i feel I can't get them from constantly reading books and scouring the internet.

I have come here because looking on your posts I feel you guys are people with the same viewpoints as me, and can help me on my quest for a higher understanding of what life after death really means.

My name is Jelani Sims
and i used to be an atheist 


 

Hi Jelani,

It's a wonderful search, isn't it? Welcome to this board, and I agree, trying out some of the activities taught here will make it all much more personal for you. From my own visits "out there" or "in there" as the case may be, I have found that there is a great, vast world of possibility that exists for me, and amazing synchronicities to notice and experiences to explore. All I believe in now is that there is much more to my existence than I suspected, and that love is the great lesson in all of it.  There is no end to the journey once the mind is opened and the heart is awakened, and no separation between "that" world and this one.

love, blink

I don't know if I'd call myself an atheist, but I am one who does not believe there is a creator god in charge of the universe, as in a seperate entity, greater than all of us peons.

I do, however, very much believe in the afterlife and the paranormal. I also have (and always have had) a very keen interest in science.  My heroes include Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov (who wrote more than just SciFi), Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein..

I do believe there is a creative "spark" existant..and WE are it, so in effect..WE are the god we worship.   Or, as they say in the Crimson Circle.."I am god..and you are god, too."

Always got to jump in with my pet peeve - atheism and theism have no necessary connection with a belief in the afterlife.  Not a big deal, but there is no reason someone has to believe in a god to believe in an afterlife, nor the other way around, and I hate to see people (not you, just peopel in general) get all conflicted over something that should be a non-issue.

There are people who would consider me an atheist because I don't believe in a particular, one over all, creator type god, but I definitely believe in an afterlife.  My Dad was an atheist, he believed in ghosts and spirits and some kind of afterlife.  I've actually known people who did believe in an all-powerfull creator God but didn't believe in an afterlife!  Different strokes...

Just to add my two cents, the term "God" carries a huge amount of freight. If we take the attitude of physics, the universe is not, and cannot be an "eternal event" because it simply would have burned out in the first 200 billion years or so. So it is a temporal event set in an eternal frame. Something caused this temporal occurrence. St Thomas Aquinas called it the "Uncaused Cause". To me it's a matter of logic and statistical relationships. If I were a proper Buddhist it would be "Mind" and for a Hindu it would be the "Ineffable Brahm", and so on for all the other ways in which we try to express this idea. I'm reminded of Mohhamed's words, "God has many names, and all of them most excellent."

The image that personally is most appealling is that from Edgar Cayce, that we reincarnate until we get it right, and then we are able to identify with the creative impulse, and thus we become "Co-Creators with God". 

Or another thought from the more extreme nihilist side, if I can identify myself with "nothingness" then I am eternal, because all that is outside of the temporal  world is of the nature of nothingness. And to become identified with nothingness means simply that I do not rely upon the opinions, restrictions and circumstances of the immediate universe in order to define myself, but instead, I am content to simply "BE", which brings me back to the creative instant. Ultimately, this turns out to be the central message of Buddhism, and the reason that Siddhartha cautioned against a belief in a "Soul" or a "God", since these terms are inevitably a repository of social ideas.

So, by denial of the immediate, the BST associated with everyday life, we return to the moment of creation, and the common Source out of which everything seems to have emerged. And from there, amusingly enough, we return to the everyday world. It all seems to be a matter of attitude.
PUL
dave