If you believed in God but no afterlife, how would you live your life differently?

[Au Naturel]

Intelligence, beauty, strength, and charisma are all just tools you find on the road. You use them to accomplish things you want to do. Not that any two people will have the same defintion of them.

We created culture and civilization because we didn't want to be subjected to the same Darwinian pressures our prehuman ancestors were. Once you get to a certain level of intelligence, it doesn't matter if you have more because you can lean on the intelligence of those around you. Only those in the extreme bottom end of the distribution curve have a problem. The same is true of any other desirable heritable trait. People who are commonly thought of as beautiful don't have more children than plain people. Athletes don't reproduce better than couch potatoes. Cultural factors are much more important.

Prior to the creation of culture, we were definitely being selected for various traits. Stupid people didn't survive long enough to reproduce.

 

[Jonn]

There is a debate about: "dysgenic mating".
This fits in well with the concept that adaptability is more important than intelligence.

 

[Au Naturel]

There is a debate about: "dysgenic mating".
This fits in well with the concept that adaptability is more important than intelligence.

I'd argue that mental adaptability is a kind of intelligence. Humans are obviously extraordinarily physically adaptable.

Culture allows us to be stupid without serious consequences. Thinking is hard and people are lazy. I think that's a more likely explanation than dysgenics.

 

[trustinnerwisdom]

Philosophical and Theological thought exercise because such things are an enjoyable pastime that also exercise the mind....

Christianity is what I'm thinking mainly of here, but this question could apply to any religion that believes in an afterlife:

What if every basic and generally accepted tenet of Christianity was the same, except for a key difference. How would you live your life differently than you do now?

The key difference would be that neither Christianity (or other afterlife believing religions) nor the Bible would teach of an afterlife. God would exist the same as God is believed to be (ie omniscient and omnipotent), Jesus would have existed as believed to be but...no afterlife. Once you're dead...you're dead. That's it. No eternal soul. Just the blessing of being created as a human by God on the planet earth to experience life. Jesus would have walked the earth not to preach of an afterlife, but to preach other accepted tenets such as being kind, loving one another, etc and that's it. No Heaven. No Hell. Just this life. The Lennon song, Imagine, comes to mind.

How would you live your life differently?
What would you do that you don't do?
What wouldn't you do that you do now?

Sometimes these kinds of questions are difficult for some people because they create a significant amount of cognitive dissonance to the point that some people purposely avoid even "going there" (ie thought exercise) because such thoughts can elicit anxiety and fear.

Human beings should continue constructing their realities, as fitting their realities.
If they didn’t construct an afterlife, that concept of afterlife shouldn’t exist before someone constructed it, because they thought they needed a concept of afterlife (a new fancy word in that case!).
Maybe even brag about their new fancy word on social media as ‘Afterlife - the life you built after that you stopped working 9-5’