The Atheist Afterlife

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The Atheist Afterlife: The odds of an afterlife - Reasonable. The odds of meeting God there - Nil (ISBN 9781897435298) is a book on life after death written by philosopher David Staume and published by Agio Publishing House in 2009.

Author

Staume is a philosopher, atheist, secular humanist and public speaker. He also claims to be a member of rationalist and freethinking associations.

Overview

“”An afterlife based on reason has profound implications. An afterlife that requires only physics requires no God; it makes the concept of God irrelevant and removes the 'God of the Gaps' completely. It enables us to prove that many religious conceptions of an afterlife are false, including the concepts of judgement, selectivity based on belief, and the existence of Heaven and Hell. It removes the concept of an afterlife from its religious associations, so humanists and other rationalists can examine it on its own merit.

—From the back of the book.

Staume makes the bizarre claim that the survival of consciousness after death is somehow compatible with the law of conservation of energy and is consistent with the laws of physics. He does this via for the largely discredited idea of mind-body dualism. He writes that "If an afterlife exists, it must be an externalised inner reality. This is the only rational and possible context of life after death". According to Staume the afterlife will be the same as a dream experience while we're actually dreaming it.

He compares the afterlife with dreaming: "If an afterlife exists, it would be the same as the dream state, with three qualifications: we won't be waking up in the morning; it would be as real as our life is now; and it would correlate with the actual dream experience, rather than remembered dream experience". He writes that the afterlife is controlled by thoughts and feelings, for example totally new objects and scenes in the afterlife are created via imagination and thought processes.

While there is no manual stating what self-identified atheists should or should not believe, it seems likely that the majority would not be in agreement with Mr Staume.

Other works

Mr Staume has also written the somewhat remarkably-titled "The Beginner's Guide to Sex in the Afterlife: An Exploration of the Extraordinary Potential of Sexual Energy". - which may - or may not - improve his credibility.