Is there any religion that believes when you die, that's it?

[seaglass]

Just wondering if it's a requirement of religion that there is something else once your physical body dies.

[ck4829]

1. I believe that there were some Early Jewish Sects that did

I also know it's not the answer that you wanted, but there were also plenty of early religions that said that the afterlife was not a joyous place, no matter how virtuous you acted during your time on Earth.

[Big Kahuna]

2. I read somewhere that Orthidox Jews do not beleive in an afterlife.

[Talismom]

5. They don't say that, for certain there is none. They just say that

we don't know--we're not privy to that information and our responsibilty is to perfect this world while we are here (translated to bringing about Tikkun Olam).

[Vinnie From Indy]

3. Festivus!

When people die a list of their grievances is read at the gravesite to all of their friends and family!

[elehhhhna]

4. YES. My personal one.

Interms of afterlife myths, the Mormons have some doozies, including marrying dead people to each other.

[Rowdyboy]

6. The Mayans thought the afterlife was a series of frightening watery caves

were filled with horrific dangers. Gave them a reason to keep living!

[Lydia Leftcoast]

7. In Hinayana Buddhism, the desired outcome of successive cycles of

reincarnation is annihilation, i.e. release from the cycle of rebirths.

[seaglass]

17. Are you a Buddhist Lydia? I have been reading about

Buddhism and find it very thought provoking.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

19. No, I'm an Episcopalian, but I had to learn about Buddhism as part of

the background for researching the history of the Japanese language. (My source materials were medieval Japanese literary works, most of them heavily influenced by various types of Buddhist thought.)

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

8. Jehova's Witnesses.

They do believe in mass ressurection and "final judgment", but meanwhile, there's no you. No heaven or hell. Also, those that are judged badly in the endtimes are destroyed - again, no heaven or hell.

[manic expression]

9. The Aztecs

they believed the soul disappears, but not before a painful journey after death.

Most religions do believe in the continuation of the individual, in some way.

Out of my own curiosity, why do you ask?

[seaglass]

10. I just started a course last night, Religions of the World and

it was just a question that popped into my mind.

I know that in Christian belief there is this kind of pact that if you're good (various definitions of good) then you will be rewarded after you die. There is also reward in Islam and I know in Hinduism and Buddhism that there is reincarnation which I think has an eventual end but there is still a goal beyond your first existence. So it seemed like a pretty functional system to keep people striving to be good. Obviously there are also punishments if you are not "good" but no one strives for that.

So that just got me to wondering if any religion believes that you live once on earth and that's the end of it and what benefit would it be for people to believe that?

[UncleSepp]

11. The benefit would be that you'd best make good use of your time

For a religious belief, that would mean "don't fritter your time away with things that don't contribute to both you and the world becoming better". It works just as well for non-religious ways of thinking, doesn't it?

[seaglass]

12. That's exactly it. It would seem that religion wouldn't be necessary

unless you were unable to define and act morally without it.

[Igel]

13. A number of Xian 7-th day groups

believe that if you die, you're gone: you are your body. This parallels the Jehovah's Witnesses. Heaven's not for men; hell, in many cases, is nothing more than the grave.

The escape clause is wide, however. Those that are deemed worthy are resurrected and given a new, non-physical body at some point. But some hold for an even wider escape clause. A small number of 7th-dayers, based on an obscure NT verse or two and a non-willingness to believe that God would just let people die and stay dead because they were unlucky enough not to be born within earshot of a minister, believe that all those that weren't given a chance to believe will be resurrected in essentially their own physical bodies, and then given the chance.

The entire eschatology can't tolerate too close a critique; the texts, if taken literally, point to a number of events. How to put them into a chronology is less than trivial, and it's fairly simple to pull almost any chronology to pieces given even trivial differences in assumptions (I'm not asserting there's one that's not easy to pull to pieces; maybe there is, maybe there isn't). Reasonable people, with quite similar assumptions, really do disagree.

So do a lot of unreasonable people.

[varkam]

14. Materialism vs. Dualism

Well Materialism, though not so much of a religion as a philosophical position on the mind, holds that consciousness cannot exist apart from matter. Most scientists and philosophers subscribe to this view. For lack of a better phrase, we are essentially "meat machines". Our brain is our mind and our mind is our brain. It rules out the possibility of an afterlife or reincarnation, as when we die we pretty much blink out of existence (or at least our consciousness does).

Dualism is the philosophy that most people who are not scientists or philosophers hold. It basically asserts that consciousness *can* exist apart from matter by virtue of the soul (or whatever you'd like to call it). Dualism is the philosophy of mind that pretty much *all* religions hold (as if you're going to have an afterlife, you need a way to survive bodily death).

[u4ic]

15. Unitarian Universalism

aka believe whatever the hell you want. :rofl:

[toddaa]

16. Taoism

In fact, Daoism emphasizes that death is as important as birth and is a gift.

[Dogmudgeon]

18. Three major "schools of thought"

Other than "that's-it-ism":

1. Heaven or Hell. (Buddhist Hell is reincarnation into a specific "realm"; see #2)

2. Reincarnation, a.k.a. Metempsychosis (actually, there are some slight differences).

3. Non-existence until Resurrection.

I don't think it's a requirement of religion to have an afterlife; it's just that religion usually involves issues that belief in an afterlife handles well.

--p!