Warning: This gets into a bit of existential horror.
This question gives me a lot to think about. I am an atheist, and choose to believe that there is no afterlife, and death is essentially an eternal, dreamless sleep, which seems like the most likely sensation of it based on what scientifically happens. But at the end of the day, I don’t truly know what death is for the conscious mind anymore than anyone else does.
I cannot prove that Hell (I use Hell as a general term for a negative afterlife of suffering, not exclusively the Christian Hell.) is not real anymore than I can prove that it is, and for all I know an eternity of ceaseless torture and pain awaits me after I die. Religions promise an escape from this horrific fate. But if Hell is real, the “wrong” religion will not save you, and you need to have blind faith in order to believe you picked the “right” religion and that your religion will save you to begin with, which I lack. And of course, for all we know Hell could be the only afterlife, with everyone who has died and will die doomed to endless agony after their time on Earth.
With all that in mind, I would absolutely take the Star Wars route of having my consciousness reabsorbed into a greater cosmic will of the universe rather than gamble with whatever happens after death in the real world. All in all, it would not be that much different than just sleeping forever. You might even get to have an equivalent of dreams if fragments of your former conscience briefly intersect within the collective whole. That is more than can be said for the “scientific” death I choose to believe is real, and bypasses the risk of Hell entirely.
