Big question has 113,000 answers

By CHRIS DANIELS

Is there life after death?

Can the web help me find an answer to that big question that has plagued mankind since we first came down from the trees?

The hunt begins.

An old Chinese expression attributed to many different people says that the longest journey begins with just one step, and

The the first step, or the easiest one anyway when searching the web, is of course the mighty Google search engine.

Type in life after death and immediately there are 3.26 million places to start looking.

This surfeit of sites is, however, thankfully reduced to 113,000 after putting quote marks (" ") around the words.

And first cab off the rank from those 3.26 million hits is an essay entitled Life After Death put on the net by the good people at the World Assembly of Muslim Youth.

They offer some convincing reasons for believing in life after death, including: "Whenever a human society is built on the basis of this belief, it has been the most ideal and peaceful society, free of social and moral evils."

Number two of the Google results takes the internet student of the afterlife on to a much different path - afterlife-knowledge.com, the home of engineer, author and lecturer Bruce Moen, who hopes a visit to his site will "reduce fear and uncertainty about death and help you increase your Afterlife Knowledge".

Turns out Mr Moen had a waking vision in 1974 and discovered that he had another me which he calls the disk - a sort of collective consciousness that connects him to others by something that looks to me like a multi-strand, fibre-optic cable. It connects between Mr Moen's shoulderblades.

He travels into and around the afterlife and his reports are positive. The world beyond the River Styx is not such a scary place after all.

For those like Mr Moen who receive communication from the afterlife, there is after-death.com, which is a forum for anyone who is in contact with someone who has passed over to the other side.

Hello from Heaven! is the book about it all. Apparently Hello from Hell! was never really going to drag in the punters. But hearing original stories from those who have died and come back to earth is always worth while.

My journey of discovery took me next to www.lazarous.com, the curious website of a man who died, but then came back to life.

On this particular journey, he meets a man he thinks could have been Jesus, carrying, believe it or not, a laptop computer - a big white laptop computer. Pity the experience hasn't taught Mr Lazarous about spellcheckers.

Time to make a beeline for the atheists - those logical types who have no time for the supernatural, the unproven or paranormal.

Atheists, like believers, have a large presence on the web, and infidels.org is one of the largest collection of non-believers to be found.

Infidels, agnostics, atheists and self-proclaimed freethinkers seem to spend a lot of their time getting into long-winded arguments with the born-again Christians evangelising on the internet.

After all that, the weary theological web traveller begins to long for the straight-down-the-line attitude of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth: "There is life after death because all the prophets said so."

So, as one of those wise men said : "Walk far enough in one direction and you'll find yourself right back where you started from."

Lazarous.com

World Assembly of Muslim Youth

Infidels.org

Afterlife Knowledge