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You had me right to until the last sentence. Without evidence of anything beyond death, all interpretations of what's beyond death are equally valid. Some require fewer assumption than others so you could say by Occam's razor they're more likely, but making fewer assumptions still means making assumptions.
A shared experience constitutes good evidence. But the experience might involve a special technique for getting the experience. So if you don't do the technique then you don't get the evidence.
The technique might involve serious time and effort. So most of us will never do it.
So now we have 2 sets of people, those who did the technique and those who didn't, with different evidence in hand, arriving at different conclusions.
Why? Things in reality don't work that way.
Occam's Razor is not the only tool; Hitchen's Razor makes for a very good bullshit filter. And so far anything about the afterlife, or even the entire concept of the afterlife to begin with, is entirely asserted without evidence.
Correct, and so is the assertion that there is nothing following death.
For clarity, I do agree that I think there is nothing and that any concept of anything following death is a coping mechanism, but I'm not going to pretend that a lack of evidence for an afterlife is evidence towards nothingness.
But it is. The lack of evidence for unicorns is evidence there are no unicorns. That's how evidence works.
If someone makes the claim they are required to provide proof, they have the burdon of proof. If no proof is to be found it can be rejected. Hence, Hitchen's Razor.
And yet you claim that nothing exists beyond death without evidence. You provide no evidence and assume that a lack of evidence on other theories is evidence of your theory. This is the same methodology theologists used as "evidence" for the heavens. By assuming a default position exists, you're allowing a lack of evidence on any other position of the argument to support your own position.
My point is that nothingness as a state of being (or lack thereof) beyond death is its own theory that also has no evidence. This is the same for all theories of what's beyond death and therefore all theories are equally valid, or invalid if you prefer.
From my perspective in programming terms, you're seeing a variable without a value and assuming no value means 0 whereas I'm saying 0 is also a value which is different from "no value was defined".