re: Satanic Temple puts up display at Michigan Capital

quote:

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That's the thing, you can't. Your premise is not true.

Premise: If I, personally, am able to verify whether or not my belief is true when I die

The bolded is the problem. You can't verify if your belief is not true if you are wrong. You won't exist. That means the conditions are not met to satisfy your premise.

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Here's where it gets tricky because you get into a lot of caveats based on the particular belief and the particular outcome. If there is nothing and my consciousness just disappears for eternity, the truth of an afterlife is verified to be untrue, even though I'm no longer aware to be able to know or understand it. That's an example where I cannot knowingly verify the truth claim, even if the truth claim is verified by my death.

If, though, my soul goes to Heaven (or even Hell) and I'm aware of it, my death has allowed me to verify the existence of the afterlife, and assuming I still have awareness of some kind, I should be able to compare my current state with what I believed about my that state while I was alive to determine if my beliefs were true or false. Either way, the outcome verifies my beliefs one way or the other. The question is whether or not I'm able to know or understand it.

My initial point was that certain religious beliefs can theoretically be verified by an individual even if it doesn't (or can't) happen in the here-and-now.