"He's Alive" has another question:
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I appreciate your response.
Let me ask what do you Believe about Heaven and Hell?
DAR
Notice, no one dies and goes to heaven in the Hebrew scriptures. The notion of a heaven and hell where individuals would go after death was borrowed from other religions and added later.
I am all for there being an afterlife and if we get to vote, I vote yes. But reality and truth aren't decided by vote. All of the evidence leads to the conclusion that consciousness and existence end with death. Just as we observe with all life around us. And this is exactly what the Hebrew scriptures tell us. One is hard pressed to think of a clearer way of stating that death is a complete cessation of existence or consciousness than this:
"For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun... Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest."
Ecclesiastes 9:5, 6, 10.
"For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again." Ecclesiastes 3:19-20
So, I think the Bible gets this right.
As my Bible scholar friend Ralph puts it:
"The truth is that when we die our bodies return to the dust from
which they were made, and the breath of life returns to the air
around us (Genesis 3:19, 22-24; Ecclesiastes 3:16-22; etc.). Any honest physician or veterinarian will tell you the same thing. This is what God promised to Adam and all his descendants (Genesis 2:7;
3:19). God made it clear that he does not want us to have eternal
life (Genesis 3:22-24). That explains why in the entire Hebrew Bible
(OT) not a single person dies and goes to heaven. –Ralph Nielsen
Now, what does God say about eternal life in the Bible?
Gen. 3:19 By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you
return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and
to dust you shall return."
Gen. 3:22 Then the LORD God said, "See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever"-
Gen. 3:23 therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.
Gen. 3:24 He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of
Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.
When God saw that the man might eat from the tree of life and live
forever like God, God kicked him, and the woman, out of the garden of Eden and made sure they would never eat of that fruit. That is why when we die we return to the dust from which we were made." -Ralph
Some standard Bible scholarship on this:
"Much later, biblical religion postulated that the ultimate destiny of the individual does not end with death. There is not a hint of this suggestion in the Torah [the first 5 books of the Bible], however, or in most of the Bible. There, human death is final. Whatever ideal state an individual Israelite can hope to achieve is restricted to one's lifetime and is conditional on heeding God's commands; material prosperity, good health, length of days, self-determination, posterity, and peace (Deuteronomy 28:1-14). With the possible exception of Elijah and Enoch, all biblical personalities die and their death is final."
(Etz Hayim, Torah and Commentary. The Rabbinical Assembly, The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. Produced by the Jewish Publication Society, c2001). Article on Eschatology, p. 1436.
"Life after death. It is generally held by scholars that no hope of
individual survival after death is expressed in the Old Testament
before some of its latest passages, which were probably written in the 2d century BC." (The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, edited by Raymond E. Brown [et al.]. Prentice Hall, c1990). Article on Eschatology and the Afterlife, p. 1313.
"In the preexilic period, there was no notion of a judgment of the dead based on their actions during life, nor is there any evidence for a belief that the righteous dead go to live in God's presence. The two persons in the Hebrew Bible who are taken to heaven to live with God, Enoch (Gen. 5:24) and Elijah (2 Kings 2:11), do not die. All who die, righteous or wicked, go to Sheol (see Gen. 42:38; Num. 16:30-33)."
(The Oxford Companion to the Bible. Edited by Bruce M. Metzger, Michael D. Coogan. Oxford University Press, c1993). Article on Afterlife and Immortality, p. 15.)
I am cross posting these answers on our freethinker forum, feel free to join in there:
viewtopic.php?p=23362#p23362
"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer