Secular Elation

Well, let's just hope we aren't. None of us have ever experienced death

Acutally, I think we have all experienced death.

Do you remember anything before your birth? No, certainly not. There was nothing. There was not even darkness. There was just, simply put, nothing. I imagine that is what it will be like after we die.

Of course, I don't know for sure.

crocodile deathroll

You cannot not gain any perception of time no matter how long without the existence of a living brain. So even if you were totally unconscious for 10^10^10^10^10^100 years and you opened your eyes to the world again, you would be as equally oblivious to that stupendously huge interval of time as you would be to a nanosecond.

paul30

It depends.

Sometimes death is a welcome release from intolerable pain.

Sometimes the protraction of pain is worse than death.

Sometimes just the protraction of life is worse than death.

This doesn't mean we know what death is or feels like; just that anything would be better than some conditions.

auto-da-fe

For all intents and purposes, we can suppose that any experience viewed as a negative is worse than death to the individual. Since the individual will never know death in any sense (except the death of others perhaps), will not know when it happens, will not know anything after it happens, and will not even be conscience of the fact that he/she is dead. It cannot be compared. To compare death to anything, you would have to have knowledge of death, which none of us does.

Quantum Ninja

Then suppose that your brain is somehow kept alive for eternity in a glass jar. I'm not saying that this is realistic, it's just a fate that I can imagine that would be worse than death.

exnihilo

Perhaps Life itself is worse than death, depending on the circumstances of course. For many it would seem preferrable to have never been born. But, this question is a philosophical one that has no claim to objectivity and is thus only relevant to each person's subjectivity.

Amos

To be robbed of eternal life? That is, if death is the end of our temporal life it must be many times worse to be robbed of eternal life!

The key here is to find a distinction between temporal and eternal life and to do this we must first realize that temporal life cannot be conceived to exist without eternal life because a pair of opposites cannot be conceived to exist without the other-- or life could be conceived to exist without death.

So therefore, death must be an illusion or life cound not seem real to us and life can only seem real to us if eternal life is real and if eternal life is real it must be possible to be robbed of eternal life or death could not be one of our fears.

Does that make sense?

braces_for_impact

Read a book called "Johnny's got his gun."

People gamble on the idea that death is a release from pain every day, we call it suicide.

spacer1

Amos,
Why is it that death must be an illusion? If, as you contended in your previous paragraph, "a pair of opposites cannot be conceived to exist without the other," then musn't death be real for life to exist? (They are opposites, right?) Then, having supposedly proven that death and therefore life are both illusions, you go on to substitute "eternal life" for "life" and "eternal death" for "death", and suddenly the illusion disappears.

Couldn't we just as easily say: "if life is real it must be possible to be robbed of life or death could not be one of our fears"? This seems a lot more sensible than saying life and death are illusions, but somehow eternal life and death exist in exactly the same fashion.

Amos

Hello Spacer, death is real? Real what?