Introduction

Why did I write this blog? After the passing of my father, I began to reflect heavily on death and my own mortality. We live most of our lives trying to avoid the thought of death, but when we lose a loved one, we are forced to confront it. Death is something that is inescapable and touches each and every one of us at some point. It's part of the human experience. What happens when we die is one of life's big questions along with "Is there a God?" and "Why am I here?" My motivation in writing this blog was to try and answer that question to the best of my ability.

There are a lot of ideas of what happens when we die. The materialist will say there is no life after death, that when your dead your dead. Buddhists and Hindus, among others, believe we have lived many lives and will be reincarnated. Mainstream Christians like myself believe in a life after death. Then there is the view that the soul "sleeps" until the resurrection of the dead. The latter position is the primary focus of this blog.

Soul sleep adherents primarily include the Jehovah Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, and Christadelphians, among a few others. They are products of the Restoration Movement and Millerite movement of the 19th century, although the doctrine of soul sleep can be traced back to the third century. It was largely rejected by the early fathers but reemerged during the Reformation. It remains a minority position, though it has garnered wider acceptance in recent years.

So, whose right, and how can we really be sure of anything outside of our observational experience? I've spent a great deal of time studying the issue from both a theological and scientific perspective. This blog is the end result of that research. The goal of this blog is twofold: to give reasons to believe in an immortal soul that survives physical death and to address and refute soul sleep.