Why worry about death any way, I sometimes do but I wonder why now. When we die that's it so enjoy yourself and wait for the next life.

I worry about death because I doubt the existence of a next life.

The end is definitely something you should be concerned about.

I imagine being dead is like sleeping.

You feel nothing........................

When you close your eyes you don't realise you are asleep. At least I don't anyway.

We have all had that time when we have accidentaly fallen asleep but we don't realise we have done it until we have woken up.

That particular moment I never realised I was asleep until I had woke up. I imagine being dead being the same, apart from the waking up bit.

The best thing about sleeping is the waking up.

Why bother to fear the inevitable, fuck that, I'll intend to enjoy my life until it ends.

I'm only afraid if I was to be murdered.

I'm sure you would be scared if some guy took you hostage with a gun to your head.

But if I had a disease that was going to end my life I'd take advantage of the time I have left and not sit there worrying about something inavoidable living in regret that I didn't get out there and enjoy myself when I'm in my last minutes.

Think of Freddie Mercury when he knew his time was running short. He didn't just sit there moaning about it, he got out there and did what he loved doing. Making Music.

I'm sure people would respect you more if you did what you loved doing instead of moaning all the time.

when i die, a giant big tittied angel is going to take me high up and we will fuck forever.


the rest of you are going to be mindless or whatever pessimistic bullshit you come up with

If someone put a gun to my head I'd make weird sexual noises until it became to awkward for him to hold me any more then he'd leave.

In all seriousness though I'm of the camp that doesn't really worry about death. It kind of hurts my head a little, because to think of my death is to think about the concept of eternity, and to be honest I find eternity to be more scary than death, for some reason.

It is false hope, and it is bad, we see this whenever we see someone living for their death. Or dying for it.

It's quite simple. Think back to 1668. Remember that? Good year. Very quiet, as I recall. That's what being dead is like.

We don't make ourselves believe it. It's your side that has not made us believe otherwise. It's about facing and accepting reality as we find it. Courage is required to do this, and to forge our own purpose rather than accepting one dictated to us. But it's not required to accept death as the end. Intellectually, it is very natural to do so. Psychologically it may be a different story, but that is more to do with comprehension than acceptance.

On the topic of scary beliefs, you are the one with hell. And that wonderful depiction of heaven. So if anything I should be taking tips from you.

I worry about death because I'm not at an age yet where I can truly accept my mortality, but I'm too much of a thinker to not dwell on it.

Of course it's bad when you bring in the extremes. You can make anything sound bad that way. But there's absolutely nothing wrong in hoping there will be something. Remember, hoping is not the same as falsely knowing.

The same as there's nothing wrong in hoping you will be a millionaire, or that you will go to the moon. They all seem pretty unachievable, but as long as you're aware just how low those chances are it's not false hope. It's just hope and wishful thinking and we all have it in some form or another. You'd have to be a pretty rare person not to hope or wish for things that seem impossible to get.

Heaven is scary but not as scary for me as ceasing to exist. But hopefully I won't find myself residing besides Acheron or Styx any way.

Extremes?

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, oblivion to oblivion.We would not dare sleep if it were so terrible. We do not know, in the deepest, dreamless parts of sleep, that we will ever wake.

I consider living for dying extreme.

So do I. But it is not fringe.

Ok moving away from the cryptic ode which didn't convey your sentiment quite as well as you may have hoped...I would like to move back to where you suppose that believing in an Afterlife as false hope, how can you be so sure?

Dying 'before my time' as it were is one of the biggest fears I have in life. I would have no problem with dying when I'm old and fragile and did most of the things I wanted to do in life. But even more than dying before my time I fear the idea of knowing I'm going to die. Like being diagnosed with cancer or something and having 6 months to live. I have honestly no idea how I would react to that but the thought alone freaks me the fuck out.

So sure that there isn't one? Because the brain is the seat and origin of intelligence and consciousness. Consciousness is what it is like to be a brain. Damage it and the personality can change. This alone makes a mockery of afterlife claims. What state does the "soul" take? Having lived 30 years with the new personality does the old one reassert itself in heaven or not? What if that damage occured in your first year of life? Would you then experience the afterlife as the completely different person you would have been? What if the damage takes away your inhibitions to sin? Are you still accountable, or are you for all divine intents and purposes dead at the moment of injury? Talking of personality changes, we all change hugely through our lives. At every age we are very different people. Which exists in the after-life? The final version (which may be besotted with dementia) or one of the others? Which is the "true" self that endures? Is it perhaps a new one? We know that consciousness is the product of the brain, but the brain's structure is completely different as a child from the adult. Less connections and more myelination etc when fully developed. If there really is a "soul" (an idea that is very hard to take seriously) then it is clearly not in control and all memory storage is in the hardware. Is it still "us" when liberated from these influences? Can it even feel emotions without the body? I know the names of the hormones that are responsible for such sensations. I feel the buzz in my lower back as my adrenal glands dump into my blood stream, my collar flushes with blood and endorphins flood my brain as I type stuff like this. That is passion, and without the organs and tissues that make it possible, what is left is not me. Arguing things that I am passionate about is one of the things I enjoy, and no heaven can have anything more than a facsimile of that while my adrenal glands (and, hell, my fucking brain) have been converted into a colony of Clostridium perfingens bacteria.


And even taking a strict, open-minded scientific approach, "no afterlife" is the default, the null hypothesis. It doesn't posit anything additional, we would expect not to discover that it is true if it is true. But if it is wrong then we can know that it is simply by being able to observe any possibility. The trick is then getting that knowledge back to the living. We are told by the religious that this has occurred. Either it never has, the orchestrator of the afterlife are incompetent or there is some inconvenient law of reality getting in the way, because none have actually produced evidence for this. Even out of body experiences, which are both testable and would prove that conciousness is independent of the physical, has never been proven. The tests are so easy to do.

Ok, I understand fully what you are saying. I don't know where to start in arguing back because you are so steadfast in your belief. Might I add very simply, and I know this might just be construed as antagonising but this is what I believe: God works in mysterious ways, we don't know what the soul is for certain, but I imagine it is some sort of ethereal body for all our sentiments, memories and consciousness. I know you find it hard to belief the proposition of the soul but contemplate its plausibility, scientifically or not and you might be remarkably surprised.

Might I add this quotes as well? From the Bible: "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it" (Ecclesiastes 12:7) and "And the LORD God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." (Genesis 2:7). In the New Testament can be found a statement by Paul the Apostle, "And so it is written, the first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam [was made] a quickening spirit." (1 Corinthians 15:45).

One thing I never understood about those scripts is why the word "and" has to be used to much. It really disturbs the flow of reading.

Why is that important? I just took from the scriptures, some of these quotations begin on the word and but then that is mine and Wikipedia's fault for a seemingly inadequate copying process.

Of course in hindsight, the Bible employs the word 'and' a lot, maybe it's a powerful linguistic technique that brings us closer to God?

You know, if bible quotes could work, they wouldn't be needed in the first place.



http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20110630.gif

Arguments for the existence of a vanilla God are a little more complex than that.

Yeah. That's not vanilla, though, it's Neapolitan. Three flavours. Also, it's not an argument for existence, but consistency with observed reality.

It's like you didn't read his post at all!

One of BM's posts isn't going to make me an atheist nor will it destroy my belief of the soul. Of course they also make me contemplate and question long after the debate is done! Testament to his skill.

The whole post was me contemplating the proposition of the soul. It's also part of my objection to ghosts, though they get reduced to a much greater absurdity by the end.

Since you apparently don't get snide remarks, I'll spell it out for you:

BM made a lengthy post detailing how absurd the very concept of the soul is, based entirely in fact.

You responded with "God works in mysterious ways, we don't know what the soul is for certain, but I imagine it is some sort of ethereal body for all our sentiments, memories and consciousness", which is the most blatantly ignorant handwave of an argument I've ever seen.

Please at least try to respond to people without just falling back on "but god's mysterious".

Don't be rude to my only sparring partner.