[Sethomas]

I've tried to rationalize to myself a disbelief in the afterlife because that would make living a great deal easier. As a schizoaffective with an utterly pessimistic outlook on life and the world, life is far too much effort to ever be conceivably close to worth living. This is so deeply ingrained into my psyche that I feel that there's something intrinsically wrong with the desire to clutch onto life so tightly as most people do in a world so bleak as ours. I mean, really, what is wrong with you people? So naturally, the only thing that has kept me alive since my early adolescence has been the fear of Hell. Obviously, this has been insufficient on more than one occasion.

Now, I wouldn't believe in an afterlife simply because that's in my religious credo. I've already poured much effort in the idea that perhaps its concept is a divine lie, like evolution, installed to make us feel better about something. I'm even willing to disavow the idea that we have a soul. The problem is that the idea of an immortal soul makes objective sense to me from a metaphysical perspective, and it follows that this soul would have to be stored in some form of existence not bound by a dimension of time. Call it Heaven, call it Hell. I assume there's both.

The principle reason for which I believe in a soul is that it's the only solution to the enigma I see in our observation of the passage of time. All of history, from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch, simply is. It is static, it doens't morph, it doesn't develop, it doesn't undergo any process. It is perfectly sensible to say that stellar debris coagulates into a planet on which complex lifeforms evolve, and the chemical processes within the higher lifeforms demonstrate intelligence. But I see no way for humans to be able to sentiently observe time itself on a moment-by-moment basis without the support of a soul. All of history is like a book that has long been written, but we humans have the illusion that we're writing it. If I could be convinced that there is a way to perceive time without arbitration from a parallel state of existence, I might abandon my belief of the soul and thenceforth the afterlife.