Attn: Anyone familiar with ancient Greek
Offline I want to come up with a term to distinguish someone who believes in an afterlife from someone who does not. Logically, it's false to suggest that a belief in a god or gods implies belief in an afterlife. The converse of this would also not be true. Not everyone who believes in God believes in an afterlife (e.g. many deists and also first century Sadducees), and not everyone who believes in an afterlife believes in a God (e.g. Jains and Theravada Buddhists). I'm looking for a word from ancient Greek that would indicate belief in an afterlife the way the word theism denotes belief in a god or gods.
The correct way of understanding our existence is as conceptually created entities superimposed upon our changing mental and bodily states.
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Why does the word need to be Ancient Greek? Also, what made you think that theism is an Ancient Greek word? (It's not.)
(Also, you may have meant to put 'disbelief' or 'does not' somewhere in there.)
BigUniverse wrote,
"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."
Theism comes from theos which means god. I don't know where -ism comes from
@OP: you could look up the word for "afterlife" in Greek and then put an a- in front. I don't know how well this would work though.
There doesn't seem to be an easy way to get there. The world "afterlife" is an English construction through idiomatic means. You can get rough idea by examining the parts of the word, but other languages don't do it the same way because their means of dealing with the notion is just as idiomatic. German talks of "das Jenseits", roughly indicating "the yonder times". Italian uses "la vita dell'al di la'" or "the life beyond". Modern Greek goes "zoi meta thanaton", "life with/after death". Turkish talks of "ahret", the "other world".
The notion of eternal life in ancient Greek is "aionios zoe" or "zoe aioniou" (life of aeons), but that won't help, I don't think. Otherwise you could talk of "aeonism". An aeon (eon) is, if not "eternity", a very long time and you do hear of the "new eon" with religious overtones.
The notion of "beyond death" can be constructed as "peran thanatou". Perhaps you could talk of "peranthanatism", but that's a bit long to have taken seriously.
Resurrection is "anastasis", but that doesn't seem really relevant to say Jainism. But then, "afterlife", which suggests happy resting grounds and Elysium, doesn't fit too well with Jainism either. I think all these religions share the notion of the eternal soul, but "soul" in Greek is "psyche", which has already been taken over in English.
Sorry, I can't be of more help.
(I kinda like the notion of "one-lifers" and "next-lifers" -- next-lifers don't mind screwing up this world because the next life's more important, but if you've only got one life....)
spin
Trust the evidence, Luke
How about 'apsychist' (lack of belief in a soul) or ephemerist (that things are not permanent - though it doesn't explicitly refer to life).
There are no theists on operating tables.
Not sure about the Greek part, but a word that means that our 'souls' die when we die is 'mortalist'. A word that means that our 'soul' is tied to our brain might be 'neuropsychist', to go along with neuropsychology. Brain dies, we die. Someone who believes that the mind is an informational process which could potentially survive brain death by being copied to another brain (perhaps a computer), might be called a 'cognopsychist', to go with cognitive psychology.
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