After Life - Has Your Belief Changed With Age?

Discussion in 'Faith & Religion' started by Faye Fox, Sep 12, 2019.

  1. Faye Fox

    Faye Fox Veteran Member
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    This was the topic a few days ago in our senior cancer survivors group. The question is if your belief in an afterlife or no afterlife changing with age? I promise not to reply or comment further unless asked and then to be kind, respectful, and non judgmental.
     
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  2. Patsy Faye

    Patsy Faye Supreme Member
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    Had the belief in afterlife from a very young age - it has not changed
     
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  3. Yvonne Smith

    Yvonne Smith Senior Staff
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    My beliefs have changed a lot in recent years. As a child, I was raised going to a Pentecostal church, which is probably one of the more controlling churches, where people are told what they can or cannot wear for clothing even.
    Challenging, or even questioning, what you were told in church was pretty much forbidden, and when something didn’t make sense to me, I just thought it was due to my lack of understanding about that passage of the Bible.

    Why would a God who was against child sacrifices expect a father to sacrifice his own daughter just because she was the one to come running out first to meet him ?
    And why would ANY father even commit that to God, knowing that it would be most likely someone in his family and dear to him ? Surely, he didn’t think the “fatted calf” was going to come galloping down the driveway to meet him ?
    This, and other things really didn’t make sense to me, and even after I learned that the man didn’t actually kill his daughter (but did commit her to the church for life), there were still a lot of things that I could not understand.

    There is a lot of evidence of an early civilization that was highly developed, and then disappeared (maybe during the flood ? ) and most of the Bible books were written after that civilization was gone, and the writers just wrote to the best of their understanding.
    I do believe that this earth was planned and engineered by a higher intelligence, but whether we have a personal afterlife, or that just means mankind will have another , better life, I am not certain.
    I hope we do.
    I would like to believe, and I hope, that I will see my family (and even my beloved Chipper) in Heaven, and I am comforted by that thought.
     
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  4. Lon Tanner

    Lon Tanner Supreme Member
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    Even though I said my "Lay Me Downs To Sleep" as a Child I questioned the reality of After Life. As I aged and now that I am 85 with not too much time left the concept of a After Life seems utterly absurd and not logical at all.
     
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  5. Hedi Mitchell

    Hedi Mitchell Supreme Member
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    Once I am done here- it better be me last !
     
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  6. Bill Boggs

    Bill Boggs Supreme Member
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    I, too, was raised in a Pentecostal Church. During and after military service
    I questioned my earlier beliefs an have changed my beliefs since I have
    grown up and older several times. My logical mind, if indeed I have one, tells
    me when this life ends, it's over. No after-life, no reincarnation, no nothing.
    In my being, It is fair to say, I don't know. Yet, I often pray and whether those
    prayers ever rise to the height of my kitchen table and no further, I still have a
    yearning, created in my younger years, that we'll undertstand it better bye and
    bye. And I believe if there is a here-after, whether or not the dead in Christ rise
    and those that remain are gathered together to be with the Lord or however it
    works out, I believe, even though I have been mostly a scandrel, I will be in attendance.
     
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  7. Bobby Cole

    Bobby Cole Supreme Member
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    My thoughts about there being an afterlife has never changed but the different concepts within that belief has changed quite a bit.
    I seriously believe that the idea of having streets of gold, mansions and gates of giant pearls is simply what mankind can understand in lieu of what there really is.

    When the Bible tells us that there is “joy unspeakable” it stands as a definitive clue that we cannot possibly understand the length nor breadth of what “Heaven” contains.
    Heck, mankind cannot even understand nor properly define thought nor consciousness so how can this one lone human proclaim with certainty what is really awaiting?

    Now the only real question I might have is whether it will be thumbs up or down? Dunno. Contrary to what some folks might believe, God is the only one who can and will be the judge of that.
     
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  8. Frank Sanoica

    Frank Sanoica Supreme Member
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    @Faye Fox
    Please do comment further......if your own feelings regarding the topic converge together as I think they may, it will guide me toward tactful response.
    Frank
     
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  9. Bess Barber

    Bess Barber Veteran Member
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    I believe anything God says. I don't care what it looks like, what it feels like, what anyone else thinks or even if it doesn't make sense, His Word is good enough for me. Believed it when I was young and still believe it being old. :D
     
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  10. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    I think I have discussed this elsewhere a year or three ago, but I don't mind going through it again. I was raised to believe in the Christian God, and that He is the only god there is. I still believe that, but I didn't really understand just what it was that I believed about God. Some of it seemed contradictory and, even as a child, I had some of those discussions with a couple of the pastors who we had. Some of the answers were satisfactory, others not so much. But I have never had a problem realizing that it just might not be possible for anyone to understand all of the things of God, or even that God would think it was important for us to understand everything, so that didn't shake my faith.

    Other than some fleeting doubts, I have never believed that there was no God. However, my response to this has wavered somewhat over the years. I won't to through the story of my mother's death again because I know that's here somewhere, but I became angry with God at the age of thirteen. In part, this was convenient because it allowed me to go through high school without all of the responsibilities that my faith would have otherwise required.

    When I decided that I did need God in my life after all, around the time that I was adopting my son, I had to decide what it was that I was going to believe about God and to figure out which church to attend. Growing up in Wallace, Michigan, there were only two churches to choose from - Evangelical Covenant and Lutheran - but in Southern California, there were hundreds to choose from.

    One thing that I learned was that my confusion as to just what it was that I believed was that, although I attended an Evangelical Covenant Church, we had never had an Evangelical Covenant pastor. Of the two that I remembered, one was Baptist and another was Lutheran. While they probably tried to teach Evangelical Covenant theology, that was not a part of their background or training. Besides, Evangelical Covenant was one of the few denominations that I didn't have near me in California.

    I attended several different churches and did a whole lot of studying on my own, and what I came up with were the Anabaptist churches. While some Anabaptist churches consider themselves to be Protestant, others consider Anabaptism to be separate from Catholicism or Protestantism, originating from the Radical Reformation rather than the Protestant Reformation. All of them originally believed that, because it was true, but some of the Anabaptist denominations found that it was easier to recruit people from other Protestant churches if they were Protestant. Indeed, the Anabaptists were persecuted by the Catholics and the Protestants. I became a member of a Grace Brethren Church because it was close enough to what I had come to believe and close enough to where I lived at the time. I still consider myself to be Anabaptist, although I haven't lived close enough to an Anabaptist church (other than the Amish) to attend one since I left California in 1983.

    I believe that there are some churches that define themselves as Christian that have strayed so far from what God would want that He may not recognize them as being His followers, but that's for God to decide, not me. At the same time, I don't expect that there is any one specific denomination or sect that God has in mind as being the one true religion. I don't think that God expects us to get everything right but I do think He expects us to try.

    As for the afterlife, I believe what the Bible tells us about it, but that's not much. As a Christian, I believe that my task is to strive to make myself approved of God, but I don't believe that I am necessarily saved because of one emotional moment or because I have recited a particular incantation. I believe that there is a heaven, but I don't know what it's going to be like or whether I'll ever see it.
     
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  11. Bill Boggs

    Bill Boggs Supreme Member
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    One more comment and I am through because I don't know anything.
    But we speak on matters of faith and we are told 'for now we see through
    a glass darkly' and we can not understand it. 'But then, face to face, we
    shall know even as we are known.' Yet, I believe much of religion has
    strayed. Sometime I think we place more emphases on building monuments
    (churches) to God and and placing more interest in numbers (attendance)
    and money (offerings). I know it takes money to build and operate any
    Organization but it often appears all efforts are on the money. Even preachers
    are hired to enhance that effort. Or preachers, often build a church,
    hoping to turn it into a money tree. But then I said I didn't know anything.
     
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  12. Holly Saunders

    Holly Saunders Supreme Member
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    Today is the anniversary of my mums' death. She totally believed in reincarnation.. she believed you reached a certain plane in the afterlife depending on how you lived your earthly life, and from that plane you'd be reincarnated , and then to a higher plane etc.. until you'd reached the Side of God, and no longer needed to return to ''learn'' any more !!

    On every anniversary of my mum's death, I ask her if she's listening ( and I like to believe she is)..to show me somehow some way there's an afterlife, that she's there... and much as I believe when I'm going through stress, that the tiny fluffy white feathers which land in my garden are from her, I have yet to gain any real ''proof'' or that her soul is in the afterlife...

    of course she could be walking around as a 40 year old male in Africa somewhere by now.. who knows.. but..anyway... here's to the memory of my mum today 13th September!!!
     
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  13. Faye Fox

    Faye Fox Veteran Member
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    Edited to remove some personal information I decided not to share for the world to read. I have had my identity stole twice by revealing too much info online.

    So many thanks to all of you for your responses. I loved each and every response. Interesting that this forum response was similar to our senior group.responses. I love that some of you offered more than a simple answer to the question. I respect all your beliefs and ideas.

    Is there life after death? I have always believed that there is, but now when I die, instead of a hologram that looks like me ascending into the sky to await judgement, I will leave energy in the form of a magnetic pattern that as long as the earth exist, others may subconsciously receive. Should I do evil against others while alive, then that pattern will be mine forever, unless corrected. Confessions won't change this, just actions. So, yes my idea on life after death has changed and I no longer live in fear of eternal fire, if I don't conform to a groups understanding of an ancient text. I have separated the physical from the spiritual and feel comfortable in what I know as truth as it applies to me.
     
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    Last edited: Sep 13, 2019
  14. Yvonne Smith

    Yvonne Smith Senior Staff
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    You are not the only one who thinks that it is possible that life on earth was brought here, or engineered by a higher intelligence through DNA manipulation, @Faye Fox
    If you are interested, most of these threads are to be found in the paranormal and conspiracy section of the forum, where anything that goes off the mainly traveled Road of Thinking is put.
    Mormons also believe that mankind was brought here from somewhere else, and is in their Journal of Discourses, although it is not taught in most of their training classes.

    Reincarnation is something else that has fascinated me ever since first reading the book, “The Search for Bridey Murphy” many years ago.
    Edgar Cayce, called the Sleeping Prophet, also believed in reincarnation, and found Bible verses that he said alluded to it.
    There are a lot of stories of people who have uncanny memories of a past life, and those memories often check out to be valid, so I do think that there is something to the idea of the spirit coming back to inhabit a new body.
    There are people that we are just drawn to in our life, and it seems reasonable to me that these people could be ones that we have been close to in other lives.
     
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  15. Faye Fox

    Faye Fox Veteran Member
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    @Yvonne Smith My father believed that humans were from other places. I am neutral on that as the science of evolution has validity also. I haven't had experiences or even dreams that would convince me one way or the other.
     
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