I'm personally of the opinion that when you die, you just go out like a candle. It's a scary thought for some people, so they react by insisting there's an afterlife of some sort - they go down this road of thinking that without an afterlife, life would be pointless, which I think is kind of sad.
What it all boils down to is that without you giving it a purpose, your life is already
meaningless. You have to give it meaning, and there's a pretty good chance it's only going to mean something to you and a select few people around you, there aren't - comparatively speaking - that many people who can leave their mark on the world in such a way that their life had meaning to everyone. You've got to make the most of what you've got, I say.
Of all the possible supernatural theories of what happens when you stop happening, I think reincarnation is the most plausible
and the most comforting. It's still entirely possible that there is some "life energy" or consciousness that we can't detect, but which is transferable between things on the planet and something like this could explain things like ghosts and crap as well. Personally I've never seen a ghost and never experienced "past life" stuff so I don't insist this is correct, I just can't completely dismiss it because it's still plausible. For how many thousands of years did we not understand electricity, and we still don't completely understand gravity, we have absolutely no way of detecting a "life energy" (and no those crappy "ghost finder meters" that the quacks on those television shows use don't count), but hey it's remotely possible.
But yeah, I'm personally of the belief that if you spend your life worrying about what happens when you die, it'll get here before you know it. Chances are pretty good most of us won't see it coming, so why bother trying to plan for it? If you go through life thinking "it's okay I'll be reincarnated and do better next time around" or you're not enjoying life to ensure you're granted access to some paradise, what happens if you're wrong? You've wasted your time here, that's what. Compare the chances of that happening, to the chances of some probably man-invented burning afterlife used entirely as a method of control actually being real, and you'll see it makes more sense just to live each day like it were your last, and to try leave something positive for the people around you to remember (because in my opinion, memory is the only immortality).
