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Ok moving away from the cryptic ode which didn't convey your sentiment quite as well as you may have hoped...I would like to move back to where you suppose that believing in an Afterlife as false hope, how can you be so sure?
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So sure that there isn't one? Because the brain is the seat and origin of intelligence and consciousness. Consciousness is what it is like to be a brain. Damage it and the personality can change. This alone makes a mockery of afterlife claims. What state does the "soul" take? Having lived 30 years with the new personality does the old one reassert itself in heaven or not? What if that damage occured in your first year of life? Would you then experience the afterlife as the completely different person you would have been? What if the damage takes away your inhibitions to sin? Are you still accountable, or are you for all divine intents and purposes dead at the moment of injury? Talking of personality changes, we all change hugely through our lives. At every age we are very different people. Which exists in the after-life? The final version (which may be besotted with dementia) or one of the others? Which is the "true" self that endures? Is it perhaps a new one? We know that consciousness is the product of the brain, but the brain's structure is completely different as a child from the adult. Less connections and more myelination etc when fully developed. If there really is a "soul" (an idea that is
very hard to take seriously) then it is clearly not in control and all memory storage is in the hardware. Is it still "us" when liberated from these influences? Can it even feel emotions without the body? I know the names of the hormones that are responsible for such sensations. I feel the buzz in my lower back as my adrenal glands dump into my blood stream, my collar flushes with blood and endorphins flood my brain as I type stuff like this. That is passion, and without the organs and tissues that make it possible, what is left is not me. Arguing things that I am passionate about is one of the things I enjoy, and no heaven can have anything more than a facsimile of that while my adrenal glands (and, hell, my fucking brain) have been converted into a colony of
Clostridium perfingens bacteria.
And even taking a strict, open-minded scientific approach, "no afterlife" is the default, the null hypothesis. It doesn't posit anything additional, we would expect not to discover that it is true if it is true. But if it is wrong then we can know that it is simply by being able to observe any possibility. The trick is then getting that knowledge back to the living. We are told by the religious that this has occurred. Either it never has, the orchestrator of the afterlife are incompetent or there is some inconvenient law of reality getting in the way, because none have actually produced evidence for this. Even out of body experiences, which are both testable and would prove that conciousness is independent of the physical, has never been proven. The tests are so easy to do.
