atheists say no God..christians say yes there is...?

First, let's get through your sweeping assumptions:

1) Atheism means nothing more than having no belief in deity, period. That doesn't necessarily mean you don't believe in an afterlife either.

2) There are many sects of Christianity that don't believe it's as simple as "heaven or hell". Some believe "hell" to be nothing more than the grave, until a mass resurrection.

As for proof of "where a dead person goes", you first have to establish some evidence that a person's consciousness exists beyond death, and that there's some place where these consciousnesses permanently reside. The burden of proof is not on me to disprove it.

Without proof of a heaven we have look at the cold hard facts in front of us. When a person dies they cease to exist. How Christianity and other religions claim that there is an afterlife when nothing points towards it is beyond me. To say that we don't know which is real, when we KNOW that our bodies rot and our brains do too, is just stupid.

There is no escape for Christians, no matter how much they try to make excuses and wiggle out of it.
The burden of proof lies with the one making the positive claim.

It is not that we have a certain belief about death. We just don't believe in heaven. there simply isn't any evidence that we are going to heaven. I don't have any faith in either an afterlife or a lack thereof. It does, however, seem most reasonable that we just end up feeding the worms.

If we put any kind of ideology aside, the one thing that everyone can agree on is that when someone dies, what *appears* to happen is that they die, their life ends and their consciousness ceases to exist. This is what we observe to happen. Religions claim that something happens beyond what we see, and that what we observe to happen is therefore not what really happens.

The question therefore is: is there good reason to believe that anything happens beyond beyond what we observe, and is there good evidence to support these claims?

I don't think there is. There isn't really any convincing evidence that I've seen, that any such afterlife really exists. The only real evidence (apart from religious dogmas) is that of near-death experiences, and these can be explained rationally and scientifically as the misfirings of a dying brain. Near death experiences also fundamentally can't really be accepted as proof of an afterlife, as anyone who "came back" to tell the tale, didn't really die.

We still don't understand how the brain works, but science is understanding more and more as time goes by. It's becoming increasingly clear that human behaviour can be explained entirely in physical terms of how the brain works, and that there isn't really any need to appeal to any kind of supernatural explanation. If we accept that, the human mind is simply a result of the electrical impulses that occur in the nerve cells within the brain.

It's not clear, therefore, how an afterlife would even be feasible, as once those impulses cease, the mind no longer exists. There doesn't seem to be any plausible mechanism by which any consciousness might continue.

There is some evidence and common sense on the side of the atheistic position. Have you ever seen what happens to a person who suffers from brain damage? Or senility caused by the slow deterioration of one's physical brain? People in these situations lose their memories,their ability to reason, to think, to argue, to wonder, to imagine....and isn't that what "consciousness" is? The YOU that is YOU is in your brain, that is where it exists, physically. Your brain is where you are, and your body is a life support system for it. When it goes, you are gone, the you that is you.

The neurons, the blood vessels, the synapses, etc, are the places where you are, so when your brain stops functioning, whether this occurs slowly over time or suddenly, such as it would if you were shot in the head, it is all the same.

The reason that you don't go on existing after death is because your life support system has stopped, such as after a massive coronary, which then cuts off the blood supply to the brain and the brain dies, or it can occur if you are shot in the head and your brain is irreparably injured.

Either way, the place where YOU were, is no more.

There are other reasons to lead to the conclusion that there is no after life. The stories in the bible and other religious books are so preposterously ridiculous, it is difficult for me to read them without laughing at how stupid they are, and I am constantly amazed that people take them literally. Also, you would think that if a person continued to exist, they would be able to communicate with us. That has never happened.

Logic tells us that we are born, we live, and we die. The main reason that people think otherwise is that they are afraid of the notion of not existing anymore, but the fact that you are afraid of something does NOT mean that the stories you make up about after lives and gods and so forth are the slightest bit true

They are stories which clearly indicate that people do not want to die, and that they will bo to great lengths to create an illusion that will comfort them by telling them they will continue to exist.

It is ALL wishful thinking, and I wish believers would grow up already.

Face the facts, this is it. Make the most of it.

Lady Morgana
Atheist

I'd have to say heaven and hell are pretty wild ideas. How do you know you don't go to another planet? How do you know you don't turn into a unicorn?
I've never seen any one come back PERSONALLY and give any evidence to ME of an afterlife... But I sure have seen a good deal of evidence that dead animals just rot and that's the end of it.

People used to think the whole universe turned around earth. They thought they were THAT important. But over time we have learned we are just on one of billions of planets in a giant universe. I think it's really silly to think this is about us.

It's like a flea on the floor of Notre Dame asking "Why did they build this for me?"

People just cannot accept they lack imporatance for more than a blink of the eye in universal terms.

There is more proof that God exists than there is that 9/11 happened.

How do you know 9/11 happened? Because people saw it and recorded it. But can't people lie? Can't TV be faked? You trust that it happened because it was recorded by witnesses.

If we use the same criteria and standards to look at whether or not God exists, you will find thousands of witnesses over hundreds of years, all telling the same story. Written testimonies all pointing to the same conclusion: that a loving, knowing, powerful God created the Universe, the Earth, Life, and Heaven and Hell. His Son came to earth for a purpose, and that story is found in The Bible.

both of those believes are "faith" because there are many many things in the physical world that cannot be proved by metaphysics (well, maybe they can, but we do not have the intelligence to do so just yet to answer everything). Correct me if I'm wrong, "atheism" is a faith of humanism and rejection of supernatural existence, with or without proof.

In addition to Christianity, there are soooooo many other religions exist that believe in the existence of the supernatural whelm. That is a whole different topic, but at that point, one would need to examine the claims and proofs from the different religions to determine their validity.

We have proof of what makes a "person".

We know that a personality is formed through a combination of brain morphology and metabolic electricity. When a person dies, the metabolic activity ceases and the brain eventually decays.

The structure and metabolic energy which formed the "person" ceases to exist.

The person ceases to exist.