| | The problem is which afterlife to bank on. Various theories from various religions are in general conflict. The Mormons, for example, do not believe in Hell. EVERYBODY goes to Heaven in their view, just to different levels of it. So the Mormon ideal is not about trying avoid being tortured for eternity - and any God that behaved that way should be terminated with prejudice anyway - but rather about perfecting ones self in order to more quickly move up the ladder to being another God, oneself.
If I were to pick afterlives on the basis of attractiveness, theirs certainly has some nice points, as in, instead of having to blow yourself up to get 70 virgins, as a God, you have literally billions of wives with whom you spend an eternity having sex in order to create trillions of spirit children in order to populate all the new planets you're meanwhile creating for them. Does this sound good already?
Anyway, the problems of conservation of mass and energy tend to make me sceptical about most paradises, much like time travel. However, there is ONE scenario that works for afterlives, potential paradises, miracles, telepathy, magic, and even time travel, and that is the one in which we are all in a vast simulation. Or, maybe its not so vast at all. Maybe we turned off large portions of our memory in order to be fed a computer generated universe in which we alone are a real person, and one day perhaps we will awaken and remember why we decided to do it. Like afterlives, unfortunately the scenarios of virtual universes are also endless, leaving us to assume, just to be safe, that everything is actually REAL and we better PLAN on it. Or you could try jumping off the skyscraper, as in "Vanilla Sky." If you live, then it's a sim.
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