fschmidt

This discussion is almost 400 years old. Spinoza introduced pantheism in the 1600s. Pantheism doesn't work because God must be a moral force to have any meaning, and to be a moral force, God must be cause and not effect. In other words, God can neither do nothing nor be everything. My view is simply that God is the forces of nature, meaning things like gravity, evolution, and other forces not discovered. This makes God pure cause.

I just registered here, this being one of the few forums left on the internet from which I have not yet been banned. Anyway, to answer the question... The meaning of afterlife in the Old Testament clearly refers to the evolutionary success of your genes after your life is over. It is your genes that have the possibility of eternal life if they are fit enough. The evidence for this is that God repeatedly promises success for the descendants of those who do the right thing and failure for the descendants of those who do wrong. There is almost no discussion of heaven and hell, and what little there is is actually negative (Ecclesiastes 3:19-22).