Finding ways to cope with the loss of someone you love is a self-preservation mechanism. You can never blame someone who lost their children or their spouse to believe they are in a good place and that they will see them again soon.

The afterlife is a touchy subject. For that comforting belief to work, you have to believe that:

1. you keep your individuality and are not merged with all other people after they die
2. you will have a physical body, capable of hugging, kissing, seeing, hearing and talking
3. people will look like you remember them and not change age, gender, or physical appearance
4. you will not look like they did at the time of death, which would be horrifying in some cases
5. you stop aging and stop being sick
6. you and your loved ones will recognize each other, both physically and mentally when you get reunited
7. you will be able to find each other in the billions of people that populates the afterlife
8. you will still feel the same about each other as you felt on Earth
9. you will have kept all your memories
10. the afterlife will include pets, but not mean or dangerous ones
11. you get reunited at the moment you die and not 20 million years after
12. family members and friends will all find each other and get along
13. there will be no conflicts to spoil heavenly relationships
14. you will not get bored of seeing the same people for 137 trillion years
15. every good persons will be together
16. you will not miss people who are not there

Another way to look at the afterlife idea is that reality doesn’t matter as the afterlife concept is for the living and not the the dead. It doesn’t matter if the popular afterlife belief or the biblical version is true or not, since its main goal is to provide comfort for people who lost loved ones.

You can choose to believe in something without evidence for personal comfort or to make sense of something so horrible you would not be able to live otherwise. But there is a difference between something you choose to believe and something being true or real. I think the afterlife is a personal belief and not something you can convince people of with arguments.

In this case, you would be better off believing in a totally made up version of the afterlife and surely not the one proposed by the Bible.

The popular version of the afterlife is a warm place full of people you love, without conflict, sickness or death, forever.

the biblical version is a large floating cube with streets made of gold, presided by creatures full of eyes and mercenary angels. There is also an idea of a New Earth with a New Jerusalem, without war, sickness or natural disaster. You get access to that version only at the end of times, which is a timeframe not defined. People you love who were not Christian or messed up on one important thing Jesus allegedly said in one of the parable that was edited, mistranslated or mis-reported in the chosen and published books that made the final version of the Bible.

Which version will make you feel better when a love one dies?

Selective Awareness
When walking outside, I sometimes focus mostly on all the sounds around me and try to differentiate them all, building a 3D auditory map of my surroundings.

Passive Thought Observation
Before going to sleep, I close my eyes and observe my thoughts. I can see them appearing, morphing and vanishing like ever-changing clouds on a cinema screen.

Controlled Fly-through Mental Exploration
I create a mental 3D scene and imagine flying around a room, going under tables, raising close the ceiling, as the scene angles and details are changing. Another scene I like is to imagine slowly taking-off with a jet pack and feeling my body lifting from the ground and looking at the changing perspective of the landscape as I go higher. I also imagine flying above a wheat field, twisting and flipping in the air, then flying over a cliff — all with images so vivid it looks like a camera on a plane.

Natural Complexity Awareness
I look at the fractal structure of branches, the multiple layers of moving clouds at different altitudes, etc. I also imagine how the landscape where I stand would of there were no roads, no buildings and nothing built by people.

Scale Awareness
I sometimes mentally zoom out from me and see my street, my town, my country, my continent, the Earth and keep zooming out to the solar system and galaxy level. At that moment, I have the very clear feeling of being on the surface of a planet, in space, way off the center of our galaxy. I also do the opposite and imagine the atomic structure of the floor or my body, being made mostly of empty space between the nucleus of the atoms and their orbiting electrons.

What mental games do you play?

If you are Christian, you have to believe in magic, as the Bible is filled with it.
If you believe in New Age therapies, you probably believe in magic as well, as they routinely invoke untested or untestable magical ideas.

But where do you draw the line?

If you must believe in angels & demons, giants, wizards, talking donkeys & snakes (all mentioned in the Bible), do you also believe in unicorns, mermaids, leprechauns, gnomes, trolls, fairies, vampires, ghosts, elves, dragons, and werewolves?

If you believe in exorcisms (as clearly depicted in the Bible), do you also believe in voodoo power, magic potions, magical charms and talismans, rain dance, psychics, astrologers, and curses?

Would you believe in a creature I made up 5 minutes ago called the Hexegan Beast? What if I write a book about it and add some Photoshopped pictures of it as proof? What if 50 people told you they also heard about it. What if someone creates a TV show about it on the History Channel? Does it makes that beast more real?

What if I tell you I heard from my psychic that you can cure cancer using purple crystals blessed by a blind albino Shaman? Will you stop your medical treatment to follow it?

What if I tell you the angel Gabriel told me to leave my family, change my name to O’rok and go to a cave for 20 years? Will you think I’m crazy? If you’re Christian , Jewish or Muslim, you must believe in angels as it’s part of your Scripture — so why would you not believe me?

If you believe in magic, how to you tell if something is possible or not?
How do you evaluate a source of information?
How do you access if something is unreal or a hoax?
Do evidence count for something in that world view?

What does the study of the Bible, the existence of God and the creationists (or intelligent design) arguments entail?

• History, based on evidence of archeology and external historical records
• Cosmology to compare with the biblical cosmological views
• Textual criticism to reveal authorship, editing, the role of scribes, and contradictions in the Bible
• Knowledge of other scripture and ancient stories to put the biblical ideas and stories in context
• Physical geography, plate tectonics, geology, geomorphology and climatology to compare with the flood story
• Biology, anatomy, biogeography, genetics and phylogeny (classification) to understand the Theory of Evolution
• Argumentation to detect logical fallacies and dishonest tactics
• Creationism and Intelligent Design to understand their framework, history and techniques

What do you mean when you think is something or someone being invisible?

True invisibility means to not be detectable by visible light, infrared, ultraviolet, radar, and the or any of the other wavelengths.
It also means to not have visible or measurable effects on your environment that would tell people you are there. You can’t leave footprints, ripples, vapor trails, weight changes, or any other physical signs.

Did you ever imagine how you would manage to create something large or complex from scratch?

Starting your own bank
You’d have to rent at least a few commercial spaces, decorate the offices, hire people, buy computers and banking equipment, install the ATM, deal with employee issues, advertise, design and print all your brochures and posters, get tons of money to start loaning it, learn how the money market works, establish branches, make money by investing the borrowed money wisely, get the political ties to get a huge bailout of you mess up badly…

Creating your own army
You’d have to find a lot of people, dress, feed, house & train them, buy them weapons, equipment & vehicles, find them something to do like some peace keeping or third-world country dictator toppling…

Starting your own car company
You’d have to learn about how cars work, rent a big factory, buy all the specialized equipment, buy and install tons of computers and phone lines, hire tons of people including engineers and janitors, design a car that actually works and is safe enough not to get sued on your first day, get all the patents, build a testing facility, establish a distribution chain, spend tons of money in advertise, transport your cars to the distributors and compete with all the existing car manufacturers.

Setting up your own space exploration company
You’d have to buy computers, CAD software, learn how to use it, design your spacecraft, rent a large warehouse, buy all the material to build them, produce at least a few of them, buy the fuel, find a market willing to pay, hire pilots, train them on your spacecraft, transport your spacecraft to the launching site, hire lots of lawyer for when your spacecraft plummet into a residential area and make an enormous mess…

Starting a terraforming company
Once you have your bank to fund your projects, and your own space exploration company, you can create your own terraforming company. First, you have to learn what terraforming is, then you have to learn about astronomy, chemistry, physics, geology, climatology, oceanography, and long distance space travel. You must then find a planet to transform into an hospitable New Earth. You have to build the enormous pieces of equipment to create water, filter the toxic atmosphere, transform the soil from rock to organic soil and make sure the changes are permanent and self-sustaining.

1. Baby Muppet Executive Briefcases
2. African-style Elvis Collectible Plates
3. Salvador Dali Pasta
4. John Wayne Gacy clown outfit
5. Barbie Pregnancy test
6. Fisher-Price Anthrax
7. Pokémon Personal Land Mine
8. Javex Sulfuric Avid Mouth Wash
9. Playboy Heart Surgery Clamps
10. Gerber Baby Vodka

1. I know nothing about people whose life is not mentioned in books, while I only have superficial knowledge of people whose life has been recorded in literature.
2. I have only superficial knowledge of astronomy, with no knowledge at all of trillions of other planets and stars.
3. I have no idea of how it would be to be able to perceive the full electromagnetic spectrum with all the all wavelengths (visible light, infrared, ultraviolet, radio waves, X-rays, microwaves, gamma rays and cosmic rays) at the same time. I don’t know how I would not be lost with all that information.
4. I don’t know how to build a combustion engine, a computer or even a TV set from scratch.
5. I know nothing about the exact way my own body use DNA in conjunction with my cells to keep me alive and functioning.
6. I know nothing of the millions of species that became extinct without leaving a fossil and have only very superficial knowledge of the ones who left a fossilized presence.
7. I have no idea how elementary particles such as lepton, muons and bosons can be so amazingly small and far apart, yet create the building blocks of atoms, which in turn create our physical environment.
8. I have no idea how memories and data are stored in my own brain or how my neurons use chemical reactions to access and organize data to form a coherent pattern that is the article I’m writing.

After talking to Christians and being immersed in Christian-based culture for years, I’m always surprised by how different the popular Christian view is from their own scripture.

For example, they believe that:

• Angels are kind and helpful
• Jesus created Christianity as it is now
• When you die after accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior, you go straight to Heaven to meet your loved ones.
• Heaven is a nice place.

If you don’t know already, none of these things are in the Bible — only the opposite.

In the actual Bible:

• Angels are armed mercenaries destroying cities
• Jesus insisted that people should obey the Law (Torah or Old Testament) in full, but like the newer way introduced by Paul.
• You go to Heaven (in fact, a new Earth) only at the end of times.
• Heaven is a large floating cube, presided by creatures full of eyes, not a quiet cloudy place.

I can think of 4 reasons why people would have those ideas, that are not based on the book they believe was at least inspired by their god.

• False Assumptions without Specific Knowledge: They just didn’t read the book themselves — they heard parts read here and there at church and at school but never bothered to read the whole Bible by themselves. They rely on misconceptions heavily influenced by art by the means of paintings, books, movies and TV series, but not the original text.
• Selective acceptance: The disconnect can be caused by people skipping over the uncomfortable passages and remembering only the “good parts”.
• Merging of different accounts: Instead of taking the Gospels individually, they merge the events written in the four existing Gospels to create a new fifth one not based on the actual text.
• Wishful reinterpretation: People can’t accept the actual meaning of what they read so they make up a new meaning based on what they wish for.

There are a lot of people who believe the Bible is at least the inspired word of God — others believe it’s the actual word of God.

If an all powerful deity wrote or inspired people to write something, you would think the message is important.
Do you think a deity powerful enough to create the entire universe has the power to preserve the knowledge it passed to human beings?

Protecting the message means:

• To have unambiguous content. The 30,000+ Christian denominations are a testament to the ambiguous nature of that content.
• To reproduce it without any errors so that all book (mostly before the invention of the printing press only about 500 years ago) are exactly the same. The 100,000s textual differences between the manuscripts can safely rule that one out.
• To translate it perfectly to all languages and dialects. This means to get exactly the same message, regardless of cultural context, words available in that language, emotional content, or double meanings of words or idiomatic expressions in that language. It also mean to change the text to adapt to the new meaning of words and new cultural settings. This is very hard to nearly impossible for humans to do, but a breeze for an all-powerful creator of the universe.
• To have only one version of the text. The multiple versions containing some different books shows us the message is quite loose.
• To make it available to every human beings, no matter where or when they are on Earth. If the Bible is The Only Guide to Salvation, it should have been available to people before year 390 A.D when the last book (Book of Revelations) was included. It should have been made available to everybody before that time starting with the first humans.
• To make sure every human beings understand it, despite their education, literacy, cultural biases, mental deficiencies, age, or their intelligence level.

Your 7 kids are playing in the living room. Your oldest is bullying everybody. The second oldest is sexually abusing the 3 youngest right in front of you.

You hide behind the curtains and watch, without stopping them or even asking them to stop.

By the end of the day, 4 of them are dead because they found the gun cabinet.

What kind of parent would let that happen without interfering?
Would that parent be a good person?
Would that parent be thrust worthy when he or she talks about morals and how people should treat their kids?

Of course not.

But most people believe God is everywhere and all powerful, yet does nothing to stop wars, child abuse, genocide, decease and natural disasters that kill millions. That all powerful being is supposed to see everything but does not stop any of it.

Theogeography is the emerging science of analyzing the distribution of factors such as natural disasters, socio-economic status, IQ, award recipients, divorce rate, crime rate, longevity, health, relative happiness, etc, based on the ratio of specific beliefs.

Since we know for a fact that Christians can ask anything they want and they will get it (Luke 11:9-10). Since Jesus was the Son of God and God himself as well (according to the Trinity, all 3 are the same), he did not lie and had the power to make such claim. You can them safely expect that areas with a high concentration of Christian would show extremely low crime rate, divorce rate, and unemployment rate. They would show very few hospital as they would not need them (they can simply asked to be healed). They would also very little pollution as they would not need cars or buses — they can ask to fly or be teleported instead, which does not pollute.

The HCDA (high Christian density areas) would show no natural disasters such as earthquakes, flood, tornadoes, hurricanes or volcanoes. They would show a abnormally high rate of favorable chance-based winnings (lottery, casino, bingo, etc) and very high concentration of Noble laureates, Grammy, Oscar and other prizes.

You can also expect areas that are not less populated by Christian believers such a Norway, Sweden, China and Japan to have very low IQ, economic success, literacy rate and very high mortality rate, divorce rate, crime rates,  be hit daily by natural disasters and rarely win anything.

It is a widespread notion that the Muslim reward for violent death is 72 virgins. This sounds good if it’s your thing, but is based on several key assumptions. This requires some thought:

1. Will they have a physical body or will they be immaterial? Good luck trying to get some fun out of a virgin ghost.
2. If they do have a physical body, will it be “structurally functional”? A virgin without hands, breast, mouth, or any opening of any kinds is generally less pleasurable.
3. Will they be human? A virgin slug or a virgin cobra take some time to get used to it.
4. Will they be the right scale? A 200 foot or 2 inch virgin is slightly inconvenient.
5. Will they be complete or will they be missing limbs or be horribly disfigured? A blown up virgin in a jar is probably not what you had in mind.
6. Will they be of the gender you prefer?
7. Will they wear an un-removable suit of armor?
8. Will they be age appropriate or will they be fetuses or 122 years old women?
9. Will they be covered in boils, pustules or be constantly leaking pus?
10. Will they be so hairy you can barely feel them under that jungle of fur?
11. Will they be nice or will they never shut up with a flow of disgusting insults?
12. Will they be in the same general location as you or will you have to travel for 2,000 years to meet each one?
13. Will they easily submit to you or will you have to fight off immortal 300 foot tall guards to get to them?
14. Will they have a nauseating smell, an extremely loud male voice or any other highly repellent qualities?
15. Will they be radioactive or make you extremely ill on contact?
16. Will they all look like your mom?
17. Once you “know” they them, will they still be virgins? If not, you could be done with your reward in 2 days and be stuck for an eternity with pesky “non-virgins”…

It is pretty clear by now that zombies have an overall lack of decorum and good manners:

Not the most polite
A simple “thank you” after munching on your brain goes a long way.

Awful postures
Would they kill them to stand straight?

Dangerously outdated sense of fashion
Lot’s be honest here: they look awful — unless they were bitten during a fashion show, of course. In that case, you have can have some fabulous looking zombies.

Poor personal hygiene
Would it be too much to ask for them to shower once in a while?

Atrocious table manners
Ever seen one use a fork and knife when eating? What about as napkin?

Lack in communications skills
I’m sorry, but when did “grrr” and “arrrhhgg” become an acceptable form of communicating?

Total disregard for private property
They break windows, enter private properties willy-nilly, and certainly never respected the “Keep off the grass” sign.

Don’t play well with others
Eh zombies, ever heard of sharing? When you catch someone, leave some for your buddies — They are starving too you know!

Anger prone
You never see a mellow zombie — they always seem angry for some reason.I wonder if Arctic Zombies are more peaceful?

Alarmingly wasteful
They seem to never care about wasting perfectly good body parts. They will your brain but will leave your perfectly good arms arms intact. Shameful.

Thanks to my deliciously quirky wife for her help on this one.

I ask you to think hard about those questions. Which one is worse and why?
Taking your steak rare in a restaurant.
OR
Taking a bite out of a cow that just died in the field.

Killing someone yourself.
OR
Allowing people to invade a country and kill families.

Believing that gnomes listen to your thoughts and have the power to help your life.
OR
Believing that angels listen to your thoughts and have the power to help your life.

Not giving money to help starving people in Africa because you think money will not get there
OR
Not giving money to the homeless guy down the street because you think he’ll drink it anyway

Believing that when you die, you’ll go to on a cloud to see your loved ones for eternity (which is the description given in movies and painting).
OR
Believing that when you die, you’ll go in a giant cube with streets paved in gold, guarded by giant creatures full of eyes, for eternity (which is the version of heaven actually described in the Bible).

Jesus tells: “And all things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive.” without terms, conditions or any limitations” (Matthew 21:21-22). Since Jesus is God, we can safely assume it is the Truth.

Why would Christians need:

• cars, trains or planes? (they can ask to be teleported)
• hospital, pills, casts, doctors or health insurance? (they can ask to be healed)
• plastic surgery? (they ask ask to have any appearance they like)
• money? (can can just ask form something and it will appear)
• bridges? (they can ask to levitate)
• weapons? (they can ask for their enemies to be destroyed by their god, like in the Old testament)
• dating services, bars or other place to meet a mate? (they can ask for the perfect mate right away)
• stoves, fridges or restaurants? (they can ask for the food and it will appear in front of them)
• cooling or heating systems? (they can ask God to change the climate for them)
• any science at all? (they can ask God to tell them directly how it works)