Do Deists Believe in an “Afterlife”
I Believe We are Energetic Beings
Anyone answering this question with a flat yes or no, simply isn’t qualified to answer this question. The question itself stems from the belief that a church, holy book or organization is supposed to tell its members what to believe and how to believe it.
In its’ simplest form Deism is simply an understanding that a God/Creator exists and we can determine that with reason and logic. The more we examine the universe, physics and science the more, not less real God becomes.
Your fellow Deists then leave it to you to use your reason and your God given logic to determine what that means to you in your life and frankly there after. Hence the answer to the above question is some do, some don’t and those that do have a lot of different views as to what it might be like.
So the only honest way I can answer this question is to tell you what I personally believe. First I believe in some type of afterlife, I would call it more a continuation of life. I certainly do not believe in either the heaven or hell of the revealed religions.
Neither make sense in any real way, they are completely ridiculous if we use logic and reason to consider them. There are many reasons though that I personally believe that some part of our consciousness continues after death, some include…
- Science has discovered that humans and all life indeed has a field of energy that exists outside of and around the body and this field has a real effect on us both mentally and physically. There is even evidence via experimentation that some or even most of our memories may exist in this field and the brain is more of a receiver then say a hard drive. If you want to learn more about this I recommend the film “The Living Matrix“.
- The many reports of near death experiences specifically from people who were clinically dead. While revealed religions hold up cases of visions of heaven and hell as proof of their paradigm, many people have had completely different experiences, this leads me to believe we create our own realities on this plane at least for a time as a coping mechanism.
- I have personally experienced OBEs (out of body experiences). I am not someone who says I can do it at will and I believe most who claim so are frauds. It only happened twice to me but I remember both times vividly. I am also a “lucid dreamer” and know a dream from an actual experience. All I can say is you have to experience this to understand it. During one of my OBEs I didn’t meet God or any entities, I just moved around my home, looked at my son sleeping in bed and returned to my body. Another time I simply “walked” around my apartment and saw myself sleeping on my couch, when I touched myself the reentry and awaking was abrupt. In both experiences there was a level of vibration experienced that is so unique it is unmistakeable.
- The very fact that a life force even exists is something that tells me it likely continues after the body dies. If you kill a person dead even in a way that is as gentle as can be done and leave them dead long enough there is no way to “revive them”. You can hook their body up to machines, pump their blood, make their heart beat make every body system “function” mechanically. If you scratch the arm of someone in this state nothing will heal it, no bandage, no drug, no suture, no nothing. Only the life force can do something as mundane as heal a scratch.
- The first law of thermodynamics tells us “that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another”. If our life is energetic, if our conscious is energetic and we know that they indeed are the energy itself can not be destroyed, its form may change but it will continue to exist.
These are my reasons, well just a few of them. On the next post I will tell you what I think an afterlife or better stated a continuation of existence might be like.
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I like what you said, it makes sense. My questions: using the laws of thermodynamics and having our energy converted after we die, what were we converted from when we were born and what do we become after we die? Does our energy convert to a hovering around another person, perhaps a fetus somewhere? Is our energy source stored someplace by God to be used at His discretion? Or, does our energy evolve to either a lesser form of life or higher?
If we were in God’s hands before birth and when we die return to His hands, then why were we not in His hands while living on earth? If God is the source of all energy, then He must be the source of all life. Good and evil exist from the source of all life and therefore the Creator is responsible for what He has made. If you were to make a product, wouldn’t you be responsible for it to work correctly?
Lets say I am make a product, say a gun. I provide it to you.
If you let it rust and degrade, am I responsible when it doesn’t work?
If you choose to kill an innocent man, am I blamed for your evil deed?
If you act as a hero and save the lives of many with it, am I to be held as valorous as you for having made the gun?
If you shoot yourself in the foot by stupidity am I responsible for your injury?
If you drop it in a swamp, it is my responsibility to replace it because you lost it?
Think about those concepts.
A gun is designed to do a specific task. If not taken care of, it will rust and degrade naturally to the point of not working just like when we die regardless of how much we take care of our self.
As a product of this god who has a brain to make decisions unlike a gun, I am responsible for my actions. If I made a bear trap and set it in the woods and another person steps on it, am I responsible?
Religious people claim that a god sent them to save those people. He (god), through a chain of unrelated events, “mysteriously” steered the person to that area. Praise God!
Once again, I would be responsible since I have a brain to make decisions and decides not to do something unlike a gun that does not think.
If I am dropped me in a swamp and “lost” me, I will try to get out and press charges against you for attempted murder.
@Pesco Billy to go along with what ModernDeist is saying, think of it as trying to make A.I. (artificial intelligence). Who would you blame in the same scenarios that were presented. (which by the way have you seen the movie “Her”?, it’s about a A.I. operating system.. kind of weird and can be a eye roller) Since we know without a doubt we exist then yes, we would be responsible when it didn’t work and would have to fix it.
If the A.I. killed a innocent person. Did my programming allow such a action? If it did, then I would be responsible. If the A.I. destroyed another A.I. would I be responsible. Only if the other A.I.s did not have the same abilities or the ability to defend themselves. But if all A.I.s have those abilities then they are responsible for what they do because of freewill that is program into them.
If the A.I. through its calculations came up with the cure of cancer, yes I would receive the praise for making a A.I. that was capable of that accomplishment.
If the A.I. did something to harm it’s own programming, that would be it’s own fault if I gave it the ability to make that decision for such an action.
If I dropped the A.I. in a swamp and could not find it and there was only one then I think society would be pretty mad. If there were a lot of A.I.s, I don’t think others would care and I would have to go create or buy a new one because I lost it.
Hmmm. Energy can’t be created or destroyed, but information can be.
The information that is ‘ourselves’ is lost when the hardware of neurology can no longer ‘run’ the software that is ‘ourselves’. At which point that information is lost, just like that unsaved text file when the dog stepped on the power-strip.
The ‘energy field’ and ‘aurora’ nonsense is just that. Might as well wonder about the ‘secret life of plants’ and other pseudoscientific nonsense.
And there’s no clear difference between an OOBE and a dream.
There are zero documented cases of data which would be unknowable to the waking person to have been acquired during an OOBE.
If you can prove such a thing, the Randi Foundation has a million dollars waiting for you….
And no, people who are brain-dead have bodies that still (attempt to) heal themselves. So there’s no connection between having the lights on, and having someone home.
N_J
Well first information can be created but modern cosmology tells us it exists infinitely after its creation. Some theorists (again cosmologists not new agers) actually are pretty sure information isn’t ever created either, more accurately discovered. That the inforamtion I am apparently creating by typing right now to you already existed, I am just manifesting it in this current form.
Now on your pessimism for OBEs I don’t really care, this site is for people that believe in Deism and discuss things about it. Not for skeptics to bitch about something they don’t agree with. That said I love the Amazing Randi and point out what he does often with people that claim to do psychic readings, etc. Such doesn’t apply to OBEs, one can’t prove or disprove an OBE, one can only experience it for themselves and make there own decisions about it. As for zero documented cases that is absolutely untrue, do some reading and some research. I won’t waste my time telling you about it though, as I doubt you would listen.
Also if you don’t think living beings have an energy field you are simply ignoring proven scientific knowledge. This isn’t even disputed, the only dispute is what this energy is and what it means. I don’t really know if it is an aura and I doubt just about anyone that says stupid crap like they can see it or read it or cleanse it, most people saying such crap are hucksters or idiots.
The problem for people like you is you likely don’t know what Deism is and confuse the discussion here with the likes of those mentioned above.
Your link above leads to a “page not found”.. here is the link on You Tube in English with Spanish sub-titles ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5ZU0GSoeo8 )
Anyone answering this question with a flat yes or no, simply isn’t qualified to answer this question
You must be a true idiot to write such illogical sentence. Their either is or isn’t an afterlife.
Ihab A.
You are the one demonstrating ignorance here. The question was not is there or is there not an after life, it was do deists believe in an afterlife.
You have made yourself look like a fool. And when you do this and insult others at the same time you look like an even bigger fool.
I believe that all sentient beings have a bioelectrical aura which has their consciousness. When an individual dies their aura (or soul) goes to one of two bioelectrical plains, where you go depends on the density of your soul, and the density of your soul depends on if you were good or not. Basically your good deeds must outweigh your bad deeds (where you go doesn’t have anything to do with what religion you are).
I don’t think our energy stays coherent for any extended period of time. What we are made of, whether matter or energy, gets dispersed and becomes parts of other things including possibly other lifeforms. But I don’t think we are aware of this as a single unit. In fact, I think that universes go through cycles and eventually we will become part of a living being, not being aware of the time passed… but this would be in a totally dispersed fashion, as I think that the cohesiveness of our energy is lost fairly quickly. What it means to me, is that we don’t have a soul per se, but due to conservation of energy we return back to the “pool”.
I’m sensing a lot of “I want it to be true” irrationality going on here. Let us take a moment to take a step back a remember one of the main ideas of Deism, nature.
Do we observe in nature proof of the afterlife? If you answer is no than you’re kind of stuck with no afterlife. If your answer is yes then you’re going to have to prove it to everybody else for them to believe you, because we as Deists are inherently skeptical of miracles.
We can also look at what classical deist people like Thomas Paine said, which boils down to “Don’t know, but it’d be nice.”
Nature wastes nothing, in fact because of thermodynamics it can’t. So if there is an energy that is a spiritual or conscious “You” then it must go somewhere upon your death.
I like to think of the water cycle (nature). Water exists in a solid form, evaporates into the air, and is redistributed where ever and whenever conditions allow. Your “soul” or “conscious energy” could evaporate on death and be spread across a million different people like drops of water in a lake. You need to prove that this individual energy exists first though.
Avoid being caught up in this idea of “memory”. People who are very much alive and conscious lose their memories all the time. People even create memories of things that never happened. Memory is fragile and not the bench mark of being alive or rational, although it is helpful.
Do you believe in ghosts? If yes then you are stuck coming up with some rationality for the soul or individual conscious energy. If no then you probably don’t believe in life after death anyway.
Nature wastes nothing. What is the benefit to life after death? What would that do for the great natural cycle? What are the pros to including it? Wouldn’t it be easier and more efficient to just….not?
And always remember, the most logical answer is probably true.
(on an unrelated note, how do you see during an OBE? I mean with no physical rods or cones to interpret physical reflected light it seems impossible according to the natural laws God has created…and no responding with “Well how do you see in a dream?” because all you do is compare the “realness” of OBEs with the “realness” of dreams…unless you think dreams are real too)
It is amusing that so many atheists use there is no proof of an after life as their argument.
Personally it scientifically makes sense to me that there may be an afterlife and there is a lot of commonality of stories of NDEs by people in different cultures and times.
Would I like it to be true? Sure. I that why I believe it? No. I would like Santa to be real and I don’t believe in him. I would like to believe that governments really do try to do the best for their people, but I don’t believe that either. There is a metric shit ton of things I want to believe that I don’t believe.
The proof argument is quite simple to me, science has offered no more proof in the absence of an afterlife then in the existence of said same.
While I have never had an NDE I have had two OBEs and as a lucid dreamer I know they were not dreams. I can’t do it at will like many claim, (I think most that claim it can be done at will are scammers by the way) but it does happen. While this is something I can’t prove, it is something I know, I know it as much as I know when you drop shit it falls. You are welcome to believe as you see fit, one day we will both either know or not know the truth. LOL
As to how you see during an OBE, I have NO IDEA how, I just know that.
“Do Deist’s believe in an afterlife?”
I do. I’m not arrogant enough to believe that our Supreme Creator is only capable of creating humans. I belive He has created many beings and we currently do not have the technology to communicate with them. Once humans learn how to tap into a higher percentage of our brain capacity, communication may be possible. I believe our souls are moved into another beings body. The soul is the most powerful thing He created and I do not believe it dies off once the vessel which contains it passes away.
The words “I believe” is simply a pretext to an upcoming speculation. Nothing wrong with speculating for fun, but the answer to this question has not yet been discovered. The correct answer today is simply. “I don’t know”.
Perhaps you should actually read the article?
If it’s logical to believe in a God who created humans, it seems logical that God has a purpose for humans and that is for them to better the universe by acting humanistically. It seems further logical that when a human dies, God judges whether that human acted sufficiently humanistically to become one with God eternally or to be reincarnated for yet another chance to act sufficiently humanistically to achieve one with God after their next demise. If this means I believe in a heaven, so be it.
There is a huge flaw in your logic and it is in the initial assumption, “If it’s logical to believe in a God who created humans” it appears you assume this is the deist position, it isn’t.
To the deist God is a creative force, a first cause. God may or may not have directly created humans in the way you infer, but most deists don’t believe that god did so. God created all that is, or perhaps is all that is, the rise of life form of something like a human is a result of that creation. Not like the creation myth of the God of the bible at all.
If I plant a forest, I am the creator of the forest but what I start changes based on nature, weather, etc. Some new tree may show up in the forest and while I created the environment for the forest to grow, I didn’t create that tree nor that species of tree.
WHY DO YOU DEIST BELIEVE IN GOD, BUT REJECT AND OMIT GODS REVELATIONS, SCRIPTURE? DO YOU BELIEVE IN HIM PARTLY, BUT NOT FULLY. ALL THE MORE REASON OF PROOF OF MANKINDS SELFISHNESS… THAT MANKIND WOULD GO AND RECREATE HIS/HER OWN RELIGION AND CALL IT TRUTH. EVEN THOUGH YOU HAVEN’T A CLUE WHAT’S ON THE OTHER SIDE (AFTERLIFE). SO DEIST HAVE A RESOLUTION, BUT HAVEN’T CREATED NOR CAN FULLY GUIDE MANKIND TO THE TRUTH OF IT ALL FROM BEGINNING TO END. THIS IS A HUGE ERROR. THIS IS NOTHING, BUT A DISTORTION OF THE ASSOCIATION OF GOD AND WHAT HE STANDS FOR. WHY EVEN BRING GOD INTO EQUATION IN THE FIRST PLACE? THIS IS NOTHING BUT DECORATIVE SPEECH THAT IS FALSE.
Lisa, I was going to write a long response to your sophomoric nonsense. However I will just say, you talk like a person with paper asshole. Seriously! Be well and try to find something more constructive to do than intentionally seek out peaceful people just to verbally vomit all over what they believe. Learn to be respectful of others.
ModernDeist I didn’t mean to offend you or anyone. Nor was I looking to intentionally cause harm or insult anyone and their beliefs. I accidentally stumbled upon this site and quite frankly I was just confused how God got involved in this whole belief system.
Thanks but no thanks for even responding to my question, which was why was God even included in the first place. Instead you refer to yourself as being peaceful while hurling insults which never address my response in the first place – I assume you don’t have a competent answer.
I assume understand that you don’t believe in revelations or what God has revealed I just didn’t understand why you believed in him, but not anything that he stood for. It was just a huge head scratcher.
I honestly, didn’t consider the question that I was posing as an insult, but a logical question worth responding to.
Peace Be Upon You All
Oh by the way ModernDeist… I was not personally “verbally vomiting” all over what you believe in, just reciting the words of the God you say believe in. I am not the originator of his words, but I do believe in him (all of him) just like you.
Oh get over yourself you are the typical Christian born again type feeling it is your responsibility to tell others how to live.
Organized religion of all sects is devoid of logic, reason and most importantly EVIDENCE of any kind for what you claim.
How did God get into Deism? That is a serious question from you? Are you daft? Do you know what a deity is?
Your God that you believe in is a deity. A higher power, a supreme being etc.
Deists are deists because we believe in a HIGHER POWER, we call that higher power God. Again most of you that act like you did here would do well to know the first thing about something before speaking about it.
As for your victim based bullshit, “Instead you refer to yourself as being peaceful while hurling insults”.
Um, I am pretty sure that if I “stumbled” into your church and told you and your friends that everything you believe in is wrong and a lie and said in a loud yelling voice that it is “NOTHING BUT DECORATIVE SPEECH THAT IS FALSE”; that all of you blue hairs would be pretty angry at me.
Your bullshit here is you think you have a right to define and claim ownership of the concept of God. You know nothing of Deism so you act as if our version of God is the same as yours, it isn’t, not even close.
Deists don’t first of all refer to God as he or she, only God or it. God Is, that is enough. We don’t see God in general as a person, more as a force, an intelligence, a singularity of all thought, consciousness and intelligence.
Your bible is no more useful to us than say The Egyptian Book of the Dead (where the 10 commandments were lifted from by the way) or say The Next Harry Potter book.
Now go back to your own life. Deists want nothing from anyone, we don’t evangelize or tell others what to believe. We don’t fear or obey God, we simply believe that there is something best called God.
To Modern Deist I say that if God created the universe and a few steps later in evolution humans emerge, it is at leadt arguable whether God should or shouldn’t get credit for the emergence of humans. To Lisa I would say that Revelation falls down on the job when the only answer to non-deserved bad things happening to humans and nature is that God has benevolent reasons that we humans cannot understand.
Good point Myles, this is my metaphor for God as it relates to humans.
I don’t think God created humans, I don’t think God did so directly, rather God initiated a sequence of events and created life, that life took its course and God knowing that the course would run, left it to run as such, confident in the results even if not “knowing” exactly what they would be.
So say I plant enough trees, bushes, shrubs, vines and herbs to “create” a forest. If I do things right, I can walk away, and a forest will emerge and last hundreds or thousands or even millions of years if no one or no thing destroys it. Am I not “the creator” of this forest. So now I go off to do other stuff, may be plant another forest. In 10 years there are countless species in this forest I didn’t put there, did I create them? Of course not! I created an environment for them, one they filled a space in.
If I do my job right I don’t worry about this forest, I don’t worry a tree I planted might die, there is no sense in a deer praying to me that I provide her protection from the cougar, is there? I may even check in on my forest at times and be pleased with it, but I am not going to interfere with it, so long as the natural processes are progressing. I won’t prevent fire from burning it, because fire and forests go hand and hand and it gives them rebirth. All the animals in that forest if they saw me as organized faiths see God would pray to me to stop the flames if a fire started. The animals that saw me as a deist sees God would flee the flames and look to see what tools the creator has left for them to help them survive and use the parts of the forest that don’t burn to restore life after the flames subside.
Of course in my metaphor, I didn’t create life, I used existing life to create a forest, but the metaphor is still solid. And isn’t it interesting that animals, use what logic and reason they have, to respond exactly as they did in my metaphor in real life?
To Modern Deist: Do you believe as I do that everything has a purpose and that God had a purpose in the creation of the universe even though he stepped back after the creation? If you do believe God has had a purpose, what do you think has been the purpose? Do you believe God is all knowing, all powerful, and all benevolent, and knew at the creation that humans would emerge? If you so believe, what purpose do you believe humans are to serve?
The answer is, I don’t know, I have no real clue what God expected or planned in creation. Though I think it is most likely that God is creation, and God is the creation itself and we are all part of God, in fact we and everything is God. I know that isn’t the answer you are looking for but it is the only honest answer I have.
Like many Deists I see God as an “intelligent force” not a thing that has a form like a person or anything like that.
I can’t imagine the Universe being created by an intelligent God without a purpose of its being sustained. That argues for us humans assisting in that sustainment through humanistic behavior. Where I go beyond Deism is my belief that while God doesn’t intervene in the Universe, God judges a human’s behavior for humanistic sufficiency. Until one’s life is judged to have lived a sufficiently humanistic life to be one with God, they will be reincarnated to try again.
I do believe in many ways we and frankly all life are co creators, but I don’t think humans are unique in that way. Hell we think we have a huge impact but you are talking about the universe not earth.
Even the earth will continue without us, in some ways it may be better off if we were gone, though I don’t think that has to be the case, humans have been a destructive force but also a regenerative one on the planet.
But our role in the universe? There are at LEAST 100-200 billion galaxies in the known universe. Our best guess on stars in the known universe is 70 billion trillion which is expressed as (7 x 1022).
Now I am pretty solid with math but I can’t even begin to work out what percent our one star represents as 1 in 70 billion trillion. I am also all about “the butterfly effect” but not at this level and frankly distance. If we are part of “the plan” we are a very small part, infinitely small.
We’d do well to ask our one roll for now on the planet we have been given, then perhaps a few chunks of rock around us.
“The heavens are solitude
I dream of stellar flight
And marvel at infinity
with countless points of light.
Celestial diamonds flashing fire
From galaxies sublime
While nebulae drift endlessly
In boundless space and time.
Planets sin in solar glow
As meteors blaze green.
Comets wander cosmic trails
Past stars we have never seen.
Yet as we gaze at distant worlds,
Mankind has clearly shown
He failed to fully comprehend
The beauty of his own.”
C. David Hay
I’m with you on the vastness of the Universe and the tiny role planet Earth plays. To rule out possible life on other planets as religionists do is tototally illogical. I do believe that what God created God wants sustained and as creatures of God we humans are to be part of that sustainment. I do share with religionists that God is all benevolent, but where I depart from religionists is that God manifests that benevolence not during the lifetime of humans (as I see no evidence of that) but after humans die and become one with God if God has judged them worthy from how they proceeded in life. If not judged worthy I believe they are reincarnated to try again to live a worthy life. I think my beliefs sort of reconcile religion with Deism to the extent any reconcilliation is wanted or useful.
“I do believe that what God created God wants sustained”
Well the problem with that is extinctions and massive biological change pre dates humans by billions of years. For us to believe we are any more important to God than say a Megladon or T-Rex is pretty arrogant.
Those creatures served their role here, we may very well at some point do the same and no longer be needed.
That humans have reasoning abilities which other entities don’t make me believe set us apart with God.
How do you know what reasoning other beings have even those on earth. Wales and Dolphins may be a hell of a lot more logical that we are, just because we don’t understand their language is no reason to see ourselves as superior.
What about elephants, an animal that weeps at the grave of a calf, returns in a year, weeps again, retrieves a bone of its calf, carries it around a while, returns it to the grave, weeps again, then has processed the grief and moves on?
Yea we are the superior species just due to our ability to make war and destruction right?
Adding question, how do you know what traits, behaviors and ability “god” would most value.
Granting that logic is subjective, my logic is that everything has a purpose. The foundation of Deism is logic and explains how we feel about Creation. It is logical to me that God created the Universe with the purpose of it sustaining. Why does Deism have as a tenant that humans are to act humanistically and is that not because logically such behavior supports the sustainment of the Universe? Therefore, in answer to your question, it seems logical to me that God wants humans to act humanistically to sustain the Universe God created. As for the place of humans in the Universe, science puts humans as uniquely above other species and certainly the only species that can conceive of God.
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Humility. It’s the only answer. And anyone who claims to truly know, doesn’t have it. And those who claim that they do are lost in their own arrogance. For those who express ideas or options but can admit that they still don’t truly know…hats off to you. One thing is for sure. We’ll all find out in the end. Or we won’t because maybe the lights just go out. Either way, it levels the playing field. I choose humility. And we can all still choose to live in peace and kindness despite differing opinions. There’s humility in that. Without it, we are just lost.
Thanks for visiting my web site godversuscreator.com. I am a free thinking deist humanist who does not believe in divine judgement, rewards or punishment. These concepts are the foundation of religions that i reject. May i ask why a living god needs an afterlife to deliver his justice and what good comes out of punishment after deth. It is to scare people to submit to the founders of faith. Have fear of god produced better human beings than non-belivers?