Ovazor

I don't have a problem with the idea that one day I will cease to exist, nor do that make me think life pointless even if it will eventually come to providing snack for a bunch of worms.

Life is here and now. If I can make somebody happy today I don't consider it pointless even if I know for certain that the person will be unhappy again sooner or later. After all, I'd have increased a very small amount the total happiness the person will experience during her/his lifetime. In the end the person dies anyhow, but so what? It matters when (s)he is alive. Helping other people live better is a worthwile goal even if both the people and the deeds will be forgotten eventually.

I don't really feel a need to give life meaning. I just live my life and let others live theirs, and feed the worms when the time comes. I don't feel bad about feeding the worms, I'll be dead then. I don't think this can be "handled", it must be just accepted.

schu

What is the meaning of life for a bacteria or any other life form? Physically there is very little difference between them and us. We all come into being, replicate, and die. The big difference between humans and other life forms is that we have evolved with self awareness. Does that self awareness make us different, or only allow us to think we are different. We just think we are different and from that idea flows all the religions of the world. Other life forms can't contemplate their own demise, but humans can. Some people can't find enough meaning in this life and commit suicide, check out so to speak. Some of us can find meaning on our own and others need the crutch of religion to find meaning.

The nothingness of death isn't so scary when you think about it a bit. After all, where were you before you were born? I know some like to tell tales of previous lives, but I've found all those stories to be questionable including Bridy Murphy story. This was one of the first life before life stories from the ‘50s. It doesn't stand up to close scrutiny.

Another question that comes up how is the mind related to the brain, and what happens to the brain when we die? I like to think about the brain as a light bulb. If you turn it off (go unconscious for the brain) it can be turned back on. But if it is smashed with a hammer it can't be turned on again. Well, where did the light go? It didn't go anywhere, it just stopped being. What is the state of being for someone who has been thrown from a car in an auto accident and knocked unconscious? Oblivion. What is his state of being if (still unconscious) a truck runs over his head? Oblivion. Same state of being, but now he cannot be revived and the state is permanent. A better example than a lightbulb may be a computer. If your computer crashes but the information is still on the hard drive it can be revived, but if the hard drive is destroyed, as the human brain is soon after death, there is no hope of retrieving the information. The information stored in the brain is what makes up a persons consciousness, being, and inner spirit. When it is gone, so is the person. Like the lightbulb and the hard drive it has just stopped being.

Many people like to claim that the information has just been transferred somewhere else. If that were so, there should be some evidence of it. There is none. It takes energy and a medium (not the supernatural kind) to transfer and retain information. Without being able to show what these are, all claims to an afterlife are implausible in spite of the thousands of years of religious hope.

sighhswolf

Why do we as human beings think that we are owed
some existence after death?
Why should we be exempt from all of the known natural laws of the universe?
That is arrogance...

Wolf

dangin

Don't waste this life preparing for the next, it won't happen.

Use your energies to make the time here the best you can. And really, if you believe that death is nothing, blackness, the end. Then death should not be frightening to anyone. The moment of death may be scary, particularly early death, but the longer one lives, the more prepared one can be to no longer exist.

Don't waste your life.

Oresta

Originally posted by Veil of Fire:

There is no meaning to life. It is we who give our lives meaning. That is the wonder of it.
Is it a meaningful life that is lived in ways that try to avoid coming back as a cockroach or 16th century concubine? ...or to escape the dreaded "loss of Heaven and pains of Hell"? I think not.
I live my life to the highest good I can because I choose to, not because I must. What's the difference between that and sectarian morality? Authenticity of self.
(With thanks to Buber, Jaspers, DeUnamuno. et. al.)

CX

Why should we be despondent about our own deaths? It something we will never experience because once we inevitably die we will not have conscious personal identity to contemplate it with. I see nothing terribly frightening or saddening about non-existence. A wise man once said, "I didn't exist for an eternity before I was born and I'm none the worse for it". If anything I feel that the absence of an eternal afterlife gives the life I have more meaning and makes it more precious. The problem I think comes from the indoctrination we recieve in a culture of belief that an afterlife exists. Within that context the contemplation of one's own nonexistence seems unfathomable.

Perchance

I would probably be much more despondent if I believed in heaven and immortality, actually.

After all, if a god/dess did exist and created me, why? It was probably for some purpose. What that purpose may have been... well, I've heard it range from praising the god/dess to "learning" something new to protecting the planet.

But what if I don't think it's a good idea? What if I want to do something else? What if the god/dess was not worthy to be praised, or the goals to be achieved were trite or stupid, or just not what I wanted to do?

I think there will be oblivion when I die. No reunion beyond life with anybody. No immortality. No reincarnation. Bam, that's it.

And it's freedom. I am bound by society's rules, by my own conscience, by laws- but all of those are human-designed. There is no one sitting in the sky, for me (or at least I don't think so ) waving a flag or blowing a trumpet and telling me to pay attention, I have Things To Do.

I violently hate the very idea of fate, predestination, imprisonment, call it what you will. I can admire people who think of themselves as serving some higher purpose- up until the moment when they begin to insist that everyone should serve the Higher Purpose. If I thought that, when I died, I wouldn't be able to escape, that there was no end in death, that I would be bound to do something or other...

That disgusts and horrifies me more than anything else.

I don't know when I'm going to die. Of course, if it were tomorrow, I think I would probably fight it- not out of fear of death, but of love of life. But I'm still pretty young. If it comes when I'm older, my body failing, a lot of what I wanted to do accomplished, and a lot of the people I love dead, I hope I can lay down my life gracefully and pass from the world. I already know there are conditions that could befall me that would cause me to end my own life (Alzheimer's is one of them), so I hope I have some productive years before that happens.

Sorry for the ramble. I just got interested in the topic .

-Perchance.

abe smith

WOW! What a thread this's turned out to be! WOW, Rhea! .... You asked, V of F; and you've got some back-down-to-the-bone-marrow answers. I"d already dealt w/ this somewhere up-along today just now; but I haven't the skills to refer you there.. it was in the "Ah...FUCK" thread, I think. David Hume's life & death {Sam Johnson's Boswell wrote about that.} typify how some non-believers are able to survive The Way Things Are. Abe

IvanK

To extend this analogy, which I (analogy maven that I am ) think a good one: when you turn the light switch off what happens to the light? The electrons stop flowing through the filament, the atoms in the filament return to their normal state, they stop giving off photons and the photons that have been given off are absorbed into the environment.

Similarly, when the biological, chemical and electrical processes that give rise to that entity we each call, "I," cease, that entity also ceases and whatever it has given off is absorbed into the environment along with the physical body which formed its physical basis. Next case.

Why is it not a matter of **COSMIC PHILOSOPHICAL IMPORTANCE** that everything that lives, must die? Why do beings who (as one wiser than I has said) can't keep themselves entertained for a rainy afternoon want to live forever?

Our lives are what they are and what we make of them, end of story. I personally try to live so as to be more concerned with what I need to do in the next moment of my life than with whether or not there will be a life for me after I die.

Oh and another thing. Why is it that almost all the people who "remember" some past life remember that they were kings, queens or nobles of some sort? Where are all the people who should be remembering things like "I was a peasant's fifth daughter who died shortly after birth of the croup" or "I worked like a sonuvabitch all my life, was hungry and cold most of the time, lived with eight other people in a filthy hovel and died aged 23 from a dose of clap?"

[ June 14, 2002: Message edited by: IvanK ]</p>

Evil Jello

"A wise man once said, "I didn't exist for an eternity before I was born and I'm none the worse for it"."

I'm pretty sure it was Mark Twain. I can't find the exact quote right now though ;( .