Although I identify as Christian, there's a big part of me that just can't believe in any form of life after death, any preservation of the self beyond our tenure on the material plane. I do think there's a part of us that exists in another dimension, outside time and space; but I think what we think of as our "self" is just as much a function of time and space. I think when we die, something irrevocable happens, and even in Heaven, if there is anything resembling Heaven, it's different, this self that we were cannot, will not be experienced ever again; at best, it will be recalled imperfectly. I think we're here, we're temporary like seemingly everything else in the universe, and that it can't be any other way, and that it's sad, but it's worth it — because the choice is either to be and then not to be, or never to be at all. Might as well be for a while.
But then at other times — because I admit it, that scares me, that I will be obliterated, and the only thing that makes me feel better is knowing I won't be around to experience the despair of having been obliterated; and that is terrible comfort — at other times, I remember that I don't understand what it would be like not to be bound by Time and Space, I can't understand it, but God does, if there is a God, and maybe if I did, too, an afterlife wouldn't feel so out of the question, quite so impossible.
