Need to believe

Some people seem to have a need to believe, and can't leave their views in the realm of just opinion.  I don't understand it.  It seems to me whenever someone claims something odd, the natural expectation should be skepticism and it is foolish to be otherwise.
I imagine that there exists a personality trait ranging from cynicism through skepticism and ending up in gullibility (if not schizophrenia).  What I don't understand is how cynical those who want to believe something can be when presented with counter-evidence, or even just good hard questions.

Jehovah's Witnesses and others expecting the end of the world soon

A few observations.
First, most new religious movements are apocalyptic.  We see it in both Paul and in the stories about Jesus.  Luther claimed the then-reigning Pope was the anti-Christ.  Seventh-day Adventists and Mormons both show this.
Second, with JWs, I think the hold on them is emotional, not rational.  They are given a vision of an eternal paradise they will live in forever (not heavenly but much more down to earth, with things like lions for pets).  Second, they are given the notion, over and over, that they must remain loyal or they will lose out forever.  This is all playing on wishful thinking and on fear.  Also, they quote the Bible constantly, although as a general rule the Bible text quoted does little if anything to support their point and when it does there are many other possible interpretations.  They are, of course, selective, as are all fundamentalists, as to the passages they prefer.
This is the sad consequence of the Protestant doctrine that the Bible is God's Word, which any reasoning and unindoctrinated person can easily see it is not.  However, the approach does work with some people already indoctrinated that way.
Finally, the idea that we are living in the last days has a certain logic -- a lot of people think we are doomed since technology has changed the world so rapidly and mass communication makes all the world's problems so visible.  There is also the egoistic notion, "I am important, so the times I live in must be important.

Greed, racism, immigration and Brexit

The way I see it America is a nation composed almost entirely of illegal immigrants.  None of the original European population went there legally and they stole the land for the most part.  Even later immigrants for the most part just arrived.  It wasn't until the twentieth century that restrictions were imposed (at first on a racist basis against Chinese).
There is nothing really unusual about the American story.  Vietnam stole most of its territory from the Chom and the Khmer.  One wonders who they stole it from back in prehistory.  The Indo-European speakers stole most of their land from earlier inhabitants.  It goes on and on -- even the Native Americans constantly fought and periodically wiped out one of their tribes.
What is really behind resistance to immigration is a combination of fear (of Muslims mainly) and greed (I got mine, and I don't want to share).  The plain fact is that mixing peoples of different types almost always leads to difficulties of one sort or another -- mankind is evil that way.  There are some however who rise above these primitive instincts.  As we just saw in Britain, they tend to be a minority.

Non-god gods

I Comment again on pantheism and Taoism and transcendentalism and Spinoza's god and deism and all these things that to me are much the same as they see the existence of some sort of force in the universe but not a purposeful God, or at least with odd purposes from our point of view.
The problem I have with them is that they create the problems created by theism and offer no better solution.  The problem of suffering being the main one.  If you assert the existence of any of these forces, how do you explain suffering (evil is another issue --- one can have suffering, and there is plenty of it -- without postulating evil).  The only escape is to assert that the force doesn't care or has some longer range intention -- and that is the essence of the theist escape from this issue.
They also strike me as ways of concealing what is in effect another invocation of the god of the gaps.  The theists at least are honest here -- they say God did it -- and we know the problems of this and how unacceptable this it is, in the end, but isn't all these other approaches much the same thing, except putting the entity at a greater distance and calling it something else?
Again, the issues of absence of apparent purpose in the world or of an ethical authority -- these theories (if I may call them that) have the same problems that outright theism has.  If purpose comes from God, then there is no purpose but God's purpose, and what happens when he achieves it?  If right and wrong come from some force why not call it God, and why follow it anyway?  What if it tells you to do something wrong?    We much generate our own purpose and reason out our own ethics as best we can, disregarding authority, culture, and so on and depend entirely on philosophical reasoning (the Utilitarians, Kant and Socrates [Plato] are good helps here, as is basic Buddhist teaching, none of which are based on any claim to any sort of external being or force and which are based only on thinking the good and the bad of things in as much detail as possible, without a claim to either special knowledge nor to assurance that one will always be right.

Brain and subjective experience

I can imagine a number of ways there might be an afterlife.  Perhaps sentience is a property of existence we haven't identified and it behaves like a normal electromagnetic wave, propagating itself, and when it finds a good live unoccupied brain (in the fetus one supposes) it goes in and parasitizes it (actually the relationship is probably more symbiotic), and then goes elsewhere when that brain dies.  More likely when the brain dies it also dies, as otherwise we have to find a way for it to leave the sinking ship and find another baby.

I do agree with those who say sentience is unexplained, and it seems unexplainable.  As with a lot of things, this does not give me the right to insert the supernatural.  It could, as I just said, be nothing more than an undiscovered aspect of nature.  The brain has chemicals that can be associated with certain emotions and subjective experiences, but they are not those emotions and experiences but just an association, and this explains little.  Still, mind can go while brain remains, but when this happens it seems to be associated with brain malfunction -- to me a pretty big clue that sentience depends on brain.

More about afterlives

As I have posted before, an afterlife depends on the details.  The Christian'/Muslim afterlife sounds terrible.  Either you are in Hell to start with or you are in Heaven, but still have free will but have cashed in the Jesus-Sacrifice card, so the slightest misstep or bad thought and pop its to Hell with you.

Then there is rebirth, which as the Buddha taught us is a horrible trap of nature forcing us to live life after life after life in a world of suffering and death.  Even pleasures in this world are self-limiting and temporary.

We are wired by natural selection to have a desire to live, and like all desires it causes us to grasp after life, and this just adds to the suffering.

Still, I don't want to die, and I think I have reasons that go beyond instinct.  My pet theory at the moment is that we all live in a huge simulation and when we die we just get up and pull the plug -- a sort of entertainment or maybe education.  This is not solipsistic -- as I see it we all participate in the same simulation at different places and times.

Of course why?  Well it seems to me an advanced society would put in place such things much as we put in place carnival rides, and the probability that we are in such a thing, when you sit down and do the arithmetic, becomes overwhelming.  No doubt humans in the future will do as much, creating another level of simulation.

Clarifying or restating the case for atheism

If you don't allow a definition of "God," then the conversation is a waste of time, just as any philosophy is a waste of time if one of the participants refuses a definition.
My view is that there might be "superman" types out there in space, who can work wonders and who would seem gods to us -- not unlike the Greek pantheon, but they are not "God."
I also think there might be a force or presence in the universe that makes sentience and so on possible, but forces and presences are not God either.  This is just avoiding admitting that you don't really believe in God either.  Some honesty in the discussion is necessary.
The deity in question does not have to be the Abrahamic God -- heaven help us if he is as this God seems rather evil -- he could be Brahma or Zeus as many of the ancient philosophers perceived him -- the key is the word "omnipotent."  The thing is if he is not omnipotent he is not God, but superman, if he is God he is irrational because omnipotence, as even the Scholastics understood, leads to self-referential logical contradictions -- otherwise known as reductio ad absurdum proofs that the premise is false.
Now the "standard" resolution offered for this is the assertion that God is omnipotent -- he can do anything -- except things which he cannot do.  The problem with this is that this limitation applies to every motivated being.  Indeed, I am omnipotent if you allow such an exception -- I can do anything except what I cannot do.
This is what is behind the assertion that God is irrational.  There is also the clear evidence we live on an earth where life is dominated by the principle of natural selection, and natural selection implies constant fear and suffering and disease and death.  To me this is the "problem of suffering" and rules out any deity with good intentions.  A de fiat creation would have been kinder than God using this method to create life.
It is fairly obvious to me that these arguments are not understood by some of the participants here, since the responses are not to the point.  All I can say is that if you don't understand the arguments about God, you have no business having opinions on the subject.  
Regarding Buddhism, the Buddha was (if he existed historically) pretty much an atheist in the sense that he did not think there was a god, but he didn't care much -- he said our problems are the same as those of the gods if they exist -- the problems of existence and karma and suffering -- so gods are not relevant.  As Buddhism evolved it accepted existing rituals and deities of the areas it entered, as part of its generalized notion of tolerance that goes beyond just getting along but includes allowing "worship" of extraneous deities in temple by those so inclined and the withholding of criticism or question by the monks, who are trained better, of what those untrained may do.  I think this historical practice has been wise, but it does have its problems.

Reductionism was a fad of the 1920s and few nowadays think it more than sophomoric and a line of maybe teenagers who just now had it occur to them.  Materialism is impossible since what you would have to have now is something sometimes called "physicality-ism", as we now know matter is only a form of energy and energy is pretty much hard to pin down, and may end up being an illusion of vibrations of fundamental strings or some sort of gyrations of space-time and space-time seems to be doing outrageous things. 

Basically atheism has little to say about existence except there is small evidence of a purpose-driven, history involved deity -- certainly not enough to justify it.  The old materialism is "there is only matter and the void." We now know that is untenable.

I watched a fascinating lecture yesterday from Australia which ended with a cartoon she drew showing the scientists on one end showing neurons and neurochemicals and so on doing marvelous things and on the other end showing mind and economics and society and literature and law and music and so on, separated by a big question mark.

That is the difference between an atheist and a theist -- not that the atheist has answers but that they are willing to say they don't know and see no need or reason to insert a divinity into the issues.

Personal afterlife

I tend to suspect the Hindus and Buddhists are closer to reality when it comes to an afterlife than the Western teachings.   My main problem with the western view is that it is all or nothing -- one fewer sin and it's heaven; one less and its hell -- forever.  Makes no sense at all.

Of course being reborn doesn't do one much good either -- you are dead -- the new baby has to deal with your bad karma or is lucky if it is good.

The thing is, we are sentient -- we are minds.  The mind is not the brain or any other part of our body, but somehow a product of our life -- largely our brain.  This is something science cannot answer.  They can point out that certain regions of the brain or certain chemicals lead to certain mental experiences, but what is the link?  That is the "hard problem." 

So the universe is space/time, energy, mind.  Not much mind in whatever manifestation of existence we are in, as far as we can tell with today's knowledge, but just as we really cannot pin down the nature of space/time nor the nature of energy (we can measure them and make predictions a lot of the time, but we have no hint of their essence) I would say as much about mind.

There is little in this speculation, though, that would lead us to think there is a personal afterlife.

Pantheism

I have pretty much the same problems with a pantheistic concept of God as with any other, and really don't see much difference.  The ideas of omniscience and omnipotence to my mind already imply a sort of pantheism -- God is everywhere as the book of Jonah tried to show.  My complaints about suffering remain the same.

Now if what is being talked about is not a god (the word pantheism implies a god but words don't have to mean what they are derived from) but instead a generalized force of ethics and sentience and awareness that we partake of, and maybe rejoin at some point as the Transcendentalists had it, then pantheism is a flavor of atheism.   Forces are not gods -- gods are beings with personality and objectives and emotions and all that.  As I have said, this reminds me of Taoism, except there no attempt is made to understand it all.

Pantheism as a theist notion carries the same problems as other theist notions such as the need for evidence that is not produced, the problem of suffering, the absence of any discernible presence of such a being in either history or physics, and so on.