This story appeared in The Toiler Times, the student newspaper of Manual Arts High School.
By Carlos Guerrero
What really happens after you die? There are many theories regarding this mysterious event. There is no single answer, just theories. What you believe is up to you. Many people have their beliefs and religions yet theories abound which cannot be ignored. Two of the most known theories are reincarnation and afterlife. Not one of these can be 100% proven. What one believes is subjective.
Reincarnation is when the soul or spirit is brought back into a newborn body after death to live a brand new life. The reincarnated person will grow up again maybe as a different race or a different gender, who knows. Reincarnation is a difficult theory for people to believe possibly because it is hard to believe that everyone one knows now will not even exist after death. People like to believe that when they die they will still be around to watch over their loved ones. If reincarnation is true then watching over loved ones is not possible because no one will have any memory of the life they had lived before. For all one knows this could be our hundredth time being reincarnated we just do not know it.
Afterlife is one of the other theories that is related to God and religion. It is believed that what happens to a person is up to God and depends on one’s actions during one’s lifetime. This one might be easier to believe because it makes people think that they will still be around in spirit with full memory of all things they have experienced. Many people would prefer to believe in this theory because it’s easier to believe that when one dies the spirit will still be around. Philosophically it doesn’t matter whether you live or die because in the end one never existed because those who cared about one and knew one will be dead as well. So ultimately one’s life will not have mattered, a difficult thought to digest.
“There is nothing to be feared in death; it matters not a scrap whether one might ever have been born at all, when death that is immortal has taken over our mortal life.” This is a quote by Lucretius, a Roman poet and philosopher. This supports the philosophical theory that it will not matter whether one lives or dies. In the end one never existed at all.
Speak Your Mind