Does the existence of a creator imply the existence of an afterlife?

Well yes, that's one of the things Michel Foucault proposed; that diagnosis of illness requires a concrete standard of "wellness" which often has no factual basis.

 

agreed. but to argue the statement. psychology is founded on a basis of theories. sigmund freud believed in the oedipus complex. wikipedia it!

 

I'm aware of Sigmund Freud's work.

The point pertains more to "abnormal psychology", and the idea that there is a right and wrong way for a mind to be working. There's been particular interest in schizophrenia in the past few years, as a condition that appears to have no working diagnosis or model, just symptoms and palliatives which either work or don't. It's hinted at (though rarely outright stated) that mental "illness" can be a sane response to an insane situation.

 

whats your point? if you are implementing that anyone here is coined "schizophrenic" then you are horribly mistaken. for one, i was diagnosed "bipolar" but it is a label and just that. there are symptoms of schizophrenia in bipolar, but it doesnt make me schizo. two, you need to research more, because people with any disorder is still a person, whether you want to consider that they even have a disorder. three, most people bipolar, just have a different thought process. Abraham Lincoln, considered mentally ill wil bipolar, schizophrenia. Edgar Allen poe, schizophrenic/bipolar. Beethoven, bipolar. winston churchill, kurt cobain, carrie fisher, alexander hamilton, william faulkner, earnest hemmingway, Sir Isaac Newton, Ozzy Osbourne, and even Mark Twain. doesnt make a difference if youre bipolar. finally, some of the most famous people in history were given that label, and thats all it is.

 

whew, talk about going off on a tangent...

 

i apologize. peoples ignorance is fear of the unknown. death and bipolar are similar views in my opinion for that reason; he brought up the subject.

 

I didn't actually accuse anyone of being schizophrenic or bipolar, nor did I intimate that there is anything bad about being either of those things. I merely made reference to another individual who postulated that "madness" was subjective, with a particular interest in schizophrenia as an example of a mental illness with no working model.

So, um... chill out please?

Tangentially, most bipolar people I've encountered say that it definitely does make a difference that they're bipolar. Some of them consider it a gift!

Yeah, again: I don't think I expressed ignorance or fear of the unknown. I won't ask for an apology, but only because I know I won't get one.

 

Not necessarily. You'd have to believe that there is also something immortal or even potentially immortal in us which survives death.

 

Yeah, I'm pretty sure you can have a creator without an afterlife. I'm not sure why, culturally, we tend not to, but I suppose it could just be coincidence, that they're both attractive ideas for different reasons.

Let's flip this then: Do we think that an afterlife necessitates a creator?

 

consciousness.

 

Once again, not necessarily. It could be that we are like insects undergoing a kind of metamorphosis. During the stage we call 'life' a conscious entity - a spirit perhaps - comes into being. Death would then be the shedding of what is only really a shell, releasing this new entity into an eternal spirit world. All of this could I suppose have happened without a creator, just as its possible to believe that order etc in the universe, intelligent life etc have come into being without one.

However, that isn't my own view, just a line of speculation.

 

Personally I believe that order is just what we call what is. We as a species have lived all our lives within the rules and quirks of our universe, so we imagine it as The Way Things Are And Should Be, and anything outside that is "disorder". There's no real reason why our universe shouldn't have turned out differently, with by fluke different physical laws that we would then, naturally, assume to be The Way Things Are.


Some see the presence of life in this universe as sign of a designer, a creator, but that assumes that life is meant to be here, that it's a good thing. What if life has come about as a result of the universe being badly designed?!


Our universe isn't even particularly good; it has entropy and thus a built-in expiry date.

 

Clear enough that our 'order' is actually only a way of viewing things. Science, philosophy etc are simply attempts to describe/account for order in a way satisfying to our thinking mind.

Myself I can't see the universe as not good, because I see in it beauty and grace. I feel happy to be alive, even if there are problems which I can't solve. I think the human world may not be so good, but we can hopefully improve things as we progress and evolve.

 

I meant more that it's inevitable that we'd regard our universe as ordered, because we have never experienced anything else. We lack the reference points to make the claim really.

On balance, the universe does seem to be good for us. But then, if it wasn't, we wouldn't be here.

 

some people think that what we believe actually dictates what happens after death.


the mind/things that infiltrate consciousness do "project" reality, do they not?

 

a synapse of the brain..

 

On a subjective level, perhaps, and some believe that the world exists only on that level. Personally, I think the "real world" - of physical forces which we experience through our senses - is far more plausible than that.

 

do you not believe theres other senses? ones that created life? im not implementing a universa being, by any means, created us but how do you think our chain of fate procures our destiny after life?

 

synapses occurs when any neuron is fired off.

Your entire body is glowing with synapses

 

i know, but the point i was making its a final synapse constantly repeating itself, not that i believe in this theory of death, but energy cannot bet created nor destroyed right?