Is there life after death?

This is a question to which most of us seek an answer, yet unfortunately, can only debate about the potential answers. In this article, I will put forward some of the possibilities of what could happen to us when we die and discuss the validility of these suggestions.

First of all, I think I should start with the most conventional view that we go to heaven after we die, suggesting that there is life after death. To have such a belief, a person is usually religious and believes that they must live their lives accordingly in order to be granted passage to heaven rather than being tossed into the fiery depths of hell for being a naughty individual. Personally, I don't follow any of the mainstream religions so I will try not be biased here ... but the validity of heaven is DEBATABLE!
For a start, I definitely don't think heaven would be a physical place otherwise everybody who died would eventually overcrowd it! And besides, if heaven was a physical place then that would mean it would be findable, somewhere up there among the clouds! But to argue against this, heaven could be a spiritual place where time and space don't shape it ... this would be a more accurate vision of heaven rather than the belief that it would be three-dimensional like this world.
But this all counts on whether heaven and hell exist in the first place, and this in turn relies on the validity of our religions. Were the writers of the holy books really graced by different Gods or were the writers acting on their own accord? It certainly makes me feel uneasy how people can hang on the every word of religious leaders when it was HUMANS that wrote the holy books, and the fact that new religions are being introduced to the world all the time show how easily that new religions can be founded. But anyways, back to the point of this post!

An argument to completely oppose that of heaven is the view that the human body is like a computer. People who think this believe that when people die, that's the end of it, just like a computer. I can see the validity of this because there isn' t an afterlife for computer motherboards is there! But I do not think we can fully support this belief because humans have natural consciousness that is very powerful ... so much so that many of us find it hard to believe that it simply ends after death.
If it does though, the bright side is that you won't know any different! If you do simply switch off like a broken computer then you have nothing to fret about because you won't feel a thing afterwards! Nevertheless, it may change your approach to life, because if you are LIVING IN WAIT FOR THE NEXT LIFE then you may start LIVING LIFE FOR TODAY, which everybody should do anyway, within reason! Whether you start living life for today depends on how much you think the human body is like a computer and whether you want to accept this theory.

Another theory in support of life after death is the spiritual side of things rather than religious ideas - and there is a difference because spiritual practices differ greatly from religious ones. But the theory I wish to express is that EVERYTHING in this universe is said to be connected and part of the same consciousness. What this means for life after death is that when we die, our consciousness simply leaves our body (a tool which allowed us to explore our world) and become part of the collective consciousness again. Of course, you have to be really spiritual to think this (it's very similar to 'the force' from Star Wars) but it's definitely a theory you can lay out on the table. If it is true, then after death we will all rejoin the same spiritual consciousness we came from ....... in fact, what if this spiritual consciousness is the equivelent of Mother Nature!

Now I'm a Mother Nature type of guy actually! I do believe she has rule over this planet more than any God and their accompanying dogma (note: if this offended ANYBODY then please be reminded that this is an individual belief that won't hurt you!). So, in a way, I do believe we return to the mass consciousness, which could be percieved as Mother Nature. We could do it in the way above (the last paragraph), which would be the continuity of our minds.
Or instead we could do it by the continuity of our bodies, which would mean that Mother Nature would recycle our bodies through decomposition (eaten by worms and soaked into the soil and helping out nature in other ways) meaning that we would live on after death ... but I don't think many of us would like to live on JUST in this way!

There is the possibility we could become free spirits, without a body and humanly needs, free to roam the earth as we please. This could be possible through the aforementioned consciousness/nature theories but who knows eh. This sort of life after death would be quite good as we could keep watch over our loved ones we have left behind. The validity of this, however, is somewhat tarnished by notoriously fraudulent ghost and spirit hunters, such as the TV show 'Most Haunted', who make a mockery of the genuine ghost sightings that cannot be explained. So what I am saying is that ghosts are spirits are probably the same thing, and this could be our afterlife; though if it is, nobody will ever believe it due to some folk making false claims of ghost sightings.

To conclude this article, I just DON'T KNOW what comes after death, if anything at all. But what I do know is that people will continue to seek the answer and fear death as it comes ever closer. What all of us must do is forget death for now as it is a natural thing that will eventually claim everybody, so we should make sure that we do everything we want in this life before it is too late. Live everyday like it is your last, my friends!

If you want to question these theories or suggest your own, then please feel free to do so!