The notion of life after death is a pleasant, comforting thought. However, in the several thousand years that humans have been believing in it there has been not one single bit of evidence for it.

Live is a chemical process; in a way it is like a flame, a low temperature flame but a flame nevertheless. Life after death would be like a flame continuing its existence in some other realm, without fuel or oxygen. When a candle flame is blown out it is gone. It hasn't gone to another realm; it no longer exists. Life after death would be like having candle flames without candles.

It is easy to see how the concept of life after death arose from the human experience with dreams. In a dream a world exists which is not of this world. But the world of the dream is created by the mechanism of the brain. There is no transcendance of t the material world.

While the notion of life after death might seem a harmless fantasy which comforts people, it can be a vicious power ploy for religious leaders who take from people in their real life on the basis of a promise of gains in an afterlife. It is hard to think of anything more disgusting than the suicide bomber who takes the lives of innocent people and brings irrepable sorrow to their family and friends on the promise of a heavenly paradise.

Life is a miracle and it is the only miracle we have.

(To be continued.)