Amos

Thanks for your reply Godless Wonder but I never stated that our souls will continue to exist beyond our death. Maybe I used the wrong words and I apologize if I did, but the difference between "sure to die" and "doomed to die" lies in our perception of death. I am thinking here that "doomed to die" has a negative connotation about it while "sure to die" does not. The difference between these two moods depends on our satisfaction with life and here our attainment of eternal life is one reason to have no fear of death. That's all.

Fear of death is not an argument for the existence of God but on the other hand, if you fear death when you are in danger you confirm that you know about death and that also you can die. I believe that God told us that when we eat from the tree of knowledge we will know that we will die as if we are an outsider to ourselves and this is where the fear of death comes from.

winstonjen

Yes. Being a fundy, knowing that you are a fundy, hating it, and being unable to change from being a fundy. In short, being unable to think for yourself.

crocodile deathroll

IMHO I do not believe the soul emerges at conception. It is considerably much later. And I surely cannot imagine the existence of a soul without consciousness.
In my view the soul cannot exist without any preexisting memory, and that is usually when the individual is around 18 months of age. That is usually your earliest possible memory. I cannot remember any event before I was 2 years of age and so that is subjectively when the "soul" as I experience came into existence.
Before 18 months my neurons were merely gene slaves slavishing following genetics instructions to hardwire my brain, so they are not truly thinking for themselves, they are just following biological rules.

The best explanation I can come up with that at the fetal stage of development, you are collective conscious with all fetal neural material and by the virtue of gestalt switching you select just one of them, and when at a critical phase.

Amos

Of course I know what you mean but this is a philosophy board where we can look at things from different angles.

No, eternal life is not eternal death because in eternal life death is not known or it could not be eternal life. I also don't believe in eternal death because we can't be deather than death.

The difference between temporal life (your "just life") and eternal life is our perception of life in relation to us. So the question really becomes "who are we" and if we know who we are there can be no fear of death.

It is only when we 'feel alienated' from our true identity that we can fear death and before we can feel alienated we must have been shown that we have an identity other then we know and in this dual mode can we be robbed of eternal life.

crocodile deathroll

I also must add that even if death is the absolute end, then that part of our brain that causes us to be anxious about our mortality will also die. So even on that basis, the fear of death is irrational.

spacer1

Amos,
Okay, so you don't believe we die. If you understood what I meant by death in my last post, though, then can you explain what it is that survives temporal death? How do we live on after temporal death?
But your system of belief rules out the existence of death, so what is there a fear of, if it isn't death? Why should there be a fear of death in the first place, if we never die? Also, what does 'knowing who we are' have to do with life and death, or eternal life?

crocodile deathroll

This article may shock about the extraordinary lengths some people go to in their irrational beliefs about the afterlife.
'I'm not afraid to die', says defiant Amrozi
.
By executing these morons we a playing right into their hands. We are only giving them what they want, a so called "martyr's death". They deluded that through their actions in Bali they for their so called "acts of grace" in the afterlife and sit on the right side of Allah. Nor is it rational for Christians to believe they will spend and eternity in Hell. A life long spell in prison would be a far more effective deterrent for these cretins.

Personally I am strongly fed up with concept that one carries their baggage of sin or grace after they die. And if I were to hold a 44 magnum against my head and it went off and blew my brains to pieces, it would make absolutely no difference to me if someone else's finger was on the trigger and it was murder or my finger was on the trigger and it was suicide.

Amos

Not at all. We all have an ego which is temporal and that idea of our existence must die for us to become eternal and once eternal we no longer die but linger in the contribution that we made to our soul. Note here that our ego identity is built on a "blank slate" wherefore we can call it our own but is an illusion because we can call it our own. See the duality in this?

So again, the "I" identity that we pretend to be must die because it is temporal and can be raised once again in our soul where it becomes a small part of our true identity wherein we are eternal and wherein we are because it is our share of the collected consciousness from many generations past. In this collected consciousness are we the continuity of God as Lord God and is called the "Thousand year Reign" in the bible. In eternal life there is no death because our ego identity is raised to become part of the total being that we are and our gathered knowledge is "assumed" into the larger pool of omniscience we once were illuminated (guided) by. We are kind of like Atlantis and just melt into the [celestial] sea. This may remind you of Assention and Assumption and so that is what that is all about.

crocodile deathroll

Sounds like a lot religious BS
Why didn't your god save himself a lot of trouble, not create Earth and take us into eternal life right from the start?

exnihilo

Death is not the opposite of life. Death is part of life and vice versa. Neither coiuld exist without the other. Thus, the opposite of life can only be conceptualized as non-life.