Agnostic (who leans deist) who believes in the afterlife here.....

[dmallind]

16. Perfectly fine, as long as you recognize the difference between belief and knowledge

To me believing in an afterlife is no worse than believing the Cubs will sweep the next 5 Series. As long as you don't start pretending it's based on anything but baseless wishful thinking filling in a gap where we have no concrete knowledge.

These analogs are closer than many might feel from their, admitted, flippancy. We have lots of reasons to suspect that postmortem consciousness or soul survival does not fit in with what we currently do know. For example the 100% correlation between sensation and cogitation and activity in specific parts of the brain that we know for sure do not have postmortem activity. Trust me I know the believer response is that we just know this activity is "merely" always concomitant with sensation, not that it is necessary for it. True as stated, but a tiny loophole lacking even the slightest evidence that suggests something else may be necessary instead, and that that something may somehow survive death. In short the believer must ignore the overwhelming implications of perfect correlation of a very mechanistic likely cause, and assume with no evidence a completely undetectable and unguessable metaphysical cause for sensation and thought. Similarly we have lots of reasons to suspect the Cubs will again fall short. Their poor pitching, lack of consistent hitting at key points in the order, the overwhelming advantage in talent and payroll of other teams. Yes again the believer can say that talent and consistency are not the way teams win over a 180 or so game season even though it always has been so, but that there is some assumptive "hand of fate" that will give the Cubs 110 wins and no chokes in the postseason instead, even though it never has before and there's no evidence showing it might now.

The difference is only in the probability, and here the Cubs have a major advantage. There are less than 3 dozen entities that can win the Series. They actually are (incredibly) a MLB team with real profesional players who compete within the league. The putative means of postmortem existence have no such immanent status. Truly, the likelihood of the Cubs 5-peating is exponentially, logarithmically more likely than post-mortem sensation or consciousness. But the belief is similarly based, and there is no problem with believing either as long as you don't try to pretend there's evidence for it, don't try to pretend there is some hidden knowledge accessible only to believers that makes it likely, and don't expect others to take it all that seriously.