How long do you think it will be before religion is no longer a significant part of our culture?

[Genki Hikari]

33. We are NOT born with an idea of an afterlife

People are TAUGHT that concept.

I have never once wondered what happens after we die, for the same reason I don't wonder about where I was before I was born. I wasn't here (not born). Then I was. And then someday I won't be here anymore. There's more evidence that in death I'll go to the same place I was before I was born, which is nowhere extra-dimensional. We simply cease to be, and I've never had a problem with that. That's why I value my time on this planet so much.

He's a big-time idiot about some stuff, but I do agree with Richard Dawkins about what life and death are about:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

Accepting that one day we will cease to be, and that's all there is to it, is certainly better than the terroristic threat of eternal life. That would be horrifying, not something to look forward to. Abhorrence at the idea of eternal life is a common concept in Eastern thought, but few people in our culture have considered what it would entail (the movie Highlander sorta went into it--a rarity in our culture). It's because they can't wrap their minds around how long eternity would be. When anyone gives it serious thought, eternal life has no good outcomes.

And, once again, the believers of some religions DO seek death. It's the only way to get to that "life after death" part they're all so interested in. You can't get there without dying, you know.