spacer1

Amos,
The real opposite to life.

crocodile deathroll

I felt the most terrifying was the introduction of Christian eschatology, the deeply held belief I was burdened with when I was a kid that all mortal sinners will spend an eternity in hell. I felt that my habit at the time of failing to live up to my religious obligations and not kneeling down every night by my bed and saying my prayers I was doomed for a certain eternity in hell, unless I had only just walk out of church after confession and I was hit by a bus.
This was the nonsense those Catholic nuns taught us and it terrified us of death more than anything else, and I believed it.

Godless Wonder

What is fate?

If you mean by fate, an ultimate outcome of life for the individual, I would say that there is no fate worse than death, and no fate better than death. In fact, there is no fate except death. Death is the only possible fate.

If, you mean by fate, what happens to you in this lifetime, well, there are many things which may happen to a person in a lifetime. Death will be one of those things in any case, so death itself is neither good nor bad, so I'm not sure it makes sense to ask if something is better or worse than death. It may be like asking if something is better or worse than a triangle. The untimeliness of a particular death can be bad, The time of life immediately preceding death can vary in quality from one individual to another a great deal.

Well, them's my thoughts.

Amos

Sure, but how can they both be real if death is the cessation of life. It seems to me that neither of them are real and if eternal life is eternal because we cannot die only eternal life must be real.

Amos

What you are saying here is that whatever is born to live is sure to die. This is true but that does not mean that we are doomed to die. Let's recognize here that our fear of death confirms that God said "you'll know that you will die" whether we believe in God or not.

Godless Wonder

(Just a head's up to "emotional" if you happen to be reading this you might want to stop now.)

I take it by "we", you refer to "our (possibly) immortal souls?" I have found no evidence for the existence of immortal souls, and have no reason to think our "souls" are not entirely described by the matter of which we are made. When we die, I can see no evidence to support the idea that our "souls" continue to exist independently of the matter of our bodies, and so I strongly suspect they do not. There is much evidence to support the idea that a person's "persona", "who they are", is intimately connected with the physical body. Destroy a portion of a persons brain bit by bit, and watch the person's personality, "who they are" gradually disappear,bit by bit. Think about Alzheimer's. When a person ravaged by Alzheimer's dies, what kind of soul is left to continue? Does God restore the person's soul to a previous state from backup tapes? The soul is the brain.

Huh? Taking your words literally... I don't see how it follows, but perhaps I read too much into it. I don't see how our "fear of death" leads to any kind of conclusion whatsoever about God. I have a "fear of death", in the sense that I will certainly take action to avoid death, and if threatened with death, will be frightened. But I definitely don't fear being dead. While I am alive, death is to be avoided at all costs, but once dead, there is no "me" left to experience anything at all. It is senseless to fear being dead. Come to think of it "senseless" is literally what I suppose it is like to be dead. I suppose it is very much like being in a deep non-dreaming sleep. Remember what's that's like? Me neither.

spacer1

Amos,
Because both exist. I use the term "life" in a similar way to the way I use the word "consciousness". They both refer to states which aren't easily describable, although we generally recognize them when we see them. I am sure you also understand what is meant when it is said that someone has died, or that a plant or animal has died. You cannot redefine "life" and "death" as we know them.
If life and death are not real, then why do we fear death?? In an earlier post you said we feared death because we feared "being robbed of eternal life". Isn't the end of eternal life just eternal death, though? How is this relationship any different to normal life and death? How is eternal life any different to just life???

starling

Death isn't the problem, it's Entropy. Entropy is probably the leading cause of death since um... life. So anything that horrendously increases Entropy, but falls just short of death is probably worse than death.


Starling

crocodile deathroll

What if there is only one soul, your soul? Have you any evidence that other souls exist?. In fact how can you know crocodile deathroll is not an automaton with no soul?

So that when you die and all the events you have experienced in your life are totally forgotten and your "soul" reemerges in the body and brain another physical being somewhere else in the universe, then who or what is going to remind you, supernatural of otherwise, that you have already lived your one life, if the memories of that life have been totally annihilated with the death of its brain?

When you die the whole context of history that you observe will disappear with it and the entire universe only objectively exist in a timescape where all events past present and future are all equally real.

So in that background you may just as easily find yourself reemerging back in the middle ages and that life to you will be experienced as "one life experience".

If this continues infinitum you would personally experience the life of every one that has lived and ever will live. The net result will result in the existence of only one soul for the entire universe, yours!. The only known means to which the Godless universe can gain any insight of its own existence.

The IMO this puts the weak anthopic principle in a nutshell when the real purpose of life is only to exist by virtue of mathematical necessity and not supernatural intervention.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Normal,
You assert: That is a bald-faced assertion which is logically equivalent to the universal negative proposition: No thing can be experienced by anything other than senses.

For all we know, rocks can experience being dropped. It’s the height of presumption to extrapolate your needs onto the rest of creation. You think you need your five senses to experience anything. Fair enough. But stop there. To assert that your means are the only means that all other entities may use to experience creation is pure assertiveness.

You ask, I imagine a perfectly efficient sensory deprivation chamber that I’ve been kept alive in from the moment of my conception. I have no memories and no sensation and should be as good as dead. Yet I detect a change in the randomness of the electrical static that passes for thought. For I do sleep. Eventually I would have a self-generated binary thought: I’d be aware of being aware of a difference in the static of my brain waves. This experience would qualify as a non-sensory experience. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic 8/5/03