You do not need to believe in God to believe in the afterlife

Perhaps that's true. But science is incompatible with belief in an afterlife. We've done a pretty good job of studying life in the last century. Of course there are still plenty of details left to be worked out, which will probably happen in this century. Nonetheless, we know the basics of how life works, at least in our carbon-based DNA-structured little corner of the universe. It clearly is all about matter and energy, just like everything else in the universe. When the energy conversion process we call "metabolism" shuts down, that's the end of life. There are no mysterious little trapdoors allowing some strange little bits of tissue that have somehow managed to stay alive, or some strange little electrical signals that have somehow managed to avoid attenuation, to escape into another part of the universe and recombine into a living organism, violating nearly all the laws of nature in the process.

When you're dead, you're just dead. That's it.

To believe otherwise is to believe in the invisible, illogical supernatural universe that defines religion, the one from which fantastic creatures emerge periodically to wreak havoc on us, the one into which our "souls" travel after we die. It's certainly okay to believe this wacky stuff, but it puts you in opposition to science and casts suspicion on everything else you say. Science has been tested exhaustively (and often with great hostility) for 500 years and has never been disproven. So to claim that any major part of it is false invokes the Rule of Laplace, which requires you to provide some really solid evidence before we are obliged to treat you with respect. And the religionists have never come up with one shred of evidence. The best they can do is one tortilla, out of billions, with a scorch mark that is alleged to be the image of a biblical figure of whom no portraits exist against which to compare it.

No evidence, no respect. End of discussion.

No! There is absolutely nothing "reasonable" about a wholesale makeover of the science of biology, which now allows some portion of a live organism to continue living after it satisfies all the conditions of death. Again, this invokes the Rule of Laplace. Before we are obliged to respond to this hypothesis with anything other than laughter and the ritual burning of your lab coat, you must present evidence to support it.

The Rule of Laplace (also called "Sagan's Law"): Extraordinary assertions must be supported by extraordinary evidence before anyone is obliged to treat them with respect.​

Religion has almost a monopoly on the most extraordinary assertions ever made. And it steadfastly refuses to provide supporting evidence. Therefore, it deserves zero respect.

What "info"? You have none. Since the scientific method was developed half a millennium ago, finally giving us a reliable tool for discerning truth from fiction, all religious assertions have fallen--squarely and loudly and with a big splatter--on the side of fiction. You may have some helpful hints about psychology, since the instincts rattling around inside our brains include the urge to believe irrationally in supernatural phenomena. But psychology is one of the "soft" sciences so this isn't much of a victory. It certainly won't get you in the door of the biology department with your assertion that "life after death" is anything more than one of the stupidest oxymorons ever contrived.

I'm always amazed (forehead-slapping amazed) that people who present themselves as scholars haven't examined faith in enough detail to discover that there are two kinds. This single, colossal failure to draft their premise accurately is going to render all of their conclusions at least suspicious, and at worst laughable.

Rational faith abounds. My dog has never bitten anyone, even when he had good reason and would have been forgiven for it or even praised. So now that he's halfway through his life I rationally assume that he won't start biting people now. In other words, I have evidence to support my rational faith.

I have a friend who has an unerring ability to pick the losers out of the 3.5 billion men on this planet when looking for guys to date. Every man I've seen her with was at best a basket case and at worst an abuser from whom she needed to be rescued. She freely admits that the men she dated (and in some cases almost married) before I came along were no different. Despite all this she has no intention of examining her habits and preferences and ways of making choices because it's just too much trouble. Yet she is positive that the next man will turn out to be the knight in shining armor who will rescue her from her own life. Now that is a textbook example of irrational faith. All the evidence supports the hypothesis that she shouldn't try to pick her own mate.

God and all the mumbo-jumbo of religion fall in this same category. There is zero evidence to support these beliefs. On the contrary, we've been collecting evidence for half a millennium and all of it supports the fundamental premise that underlies all of science: The natural universe is a closed system whose behavior can be predicted by theories derived logically from empirical observation of its present and past behavior.

Of course we have plenty of instincts and emotions that seem to justify belief in the supernatural; humans have been fantasizing about gods and other fantastic phenomena for tens of thousands of years, way back into the Paleolithic Era. But instincts and emotions are not evidence. If you don't believe me, sit in the back of a few courtrooms and notice whether judges and juries accept them as such.

Certainly. Faith and reason are clearly not opposites. The only reason people who claim to be smart say dumb shit like this is that they've never had the balls to examine faith clinically and discover that it comes in more than one variety.

There is rational faith and there is irrational faith. They're not too difficult to tell apart once you know they're there.

People who believe in gods and angels and parting seas and pillars of salt and men coming back from the dead and (my personal favorite) sea level rising to a height that far exceeds the total amount of water on this planet do not want to acknowledge the incontrovertible fact that they are being irrational.

Oh, and I forgot to include the afterlife in that list.