I noticed there were no new threads so I assumed some federation issues again. When I went to check on their instance @ukraine@sopuli.xyz just throws a 404 and the main domain page a standard web server install message. Anyone who has any info? @doo@sh.itjust.works & @Burstar@lemmy.dbzer0.com ?
I guess pursuing the question much further is necessarily going to take us to the big one, “what happens after we die?”
And there’s only so many times I can deliver the punch line “lots of things that just don’t involve us anymore.” before I start to feel like a “that guy” about it.
I’ve always had an alternative take on the “afterlife”. Some people like to think of spirits as this tangible thing, like a ghost, or something that is self aware. I see it more like how someone would say “The spirit of the city comes alive at these events!”. So in that case, the city has a spirit. It’s not a ghost, but that’s more along the lines of how I interpret the spirit. My grandma died in October. Her spirit lives on with me until the day I die. I will continue spreading stories of the things she’s taught to me. In that way, she will continue to inspire people who she’s never even met. So in that way her spirit lives on.
So now that you get the idea of what I mean by spirit, here is what I think happens to us when we die. In the short term, you cease to exist. You don’t experience anything more. You don’t look down upon people from the heavens. You don’t roam the earth observing life. You just…don’t exist anymore. In the long term your spirit lives on. Each persons spirit will continue a different length of time. I’m sure there was probably a guy named Tom who lived in what is now Boston, back in the 1600s. I have no idea about who or what Tom did, because everything he ever did has been forgoten. Toms spirit has died. Others have their spirit live on for much longer. George Washingtons spirit lives on as long as America lives on. There may or may not have been a guy named Jesus. If he did exist, he’s got to hold the record for longest living spirit. I can’t think of anybody elses spirit from 2000+ years ago we still think about today.
The point is, while you’re alive you have the chance to make an impact on as many or as few people as you can. Physically everybody is going to experience death differently. Ironically, people who are executed through lethal injection have the easiest death I can think of. Pain free. The rest of us are going to experience something much more horrible. Some die in their sleep peacefully.
But after you’re gone, your spirit is all that remains. How long it remains depends on who you inspired, and what concepts you gave birth to for societies benefit.
My take is that the afterlife comes in three phases, yes phases because as much as it gives the fundies a hard-on there’s literally nothing humanly possible to do that could justify a permanent state of the worst torment imagineable.
Phase 1, atonement, you do the hard work for the souls you’ve harmed in your life to forgive you and release the chains that bind your soul.
Phase 2, forgiveness, you do the harder work of forgiving what wrongs have been done to you. Those chains hold you to your material existence, and you have to let go of them to be ready to move on.
Phase 3, reunion, the veil behind which no eyes may see. All you’ll know is that by now anyone you haven’t met yet from your life has done the soul rending work you have and walked beyond it. They’re on the other side, and they’re waiting for you to join them, what that’ll look like, probably some 4-D amalgamation of every heaven or paradise or state of eternal bliss ever foretold by human words, and yet also none of those things, because not only do we not understand it, doing the hard work of being forgiven and doing all the forgiving is what it takes for you to be ready to understand it. I think it is what specifically god spoke of when they said they are both and yet neither of human binaries, and incomprehensible in their true essence to the human mind.