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.

I have made appropriate sacrifice and homage to the Great One, Cthulhu. With his blessing, I shall be assured an honoured place in the extradimensional sunken city of R'lyeh. I do his bidding, such that I may be rewarded when he awakes.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

I will when he stops being bad at it.

I am not afraid of death. In fact I never think about it except when discussions like this come up - not because I try not to, but because it doesn't bother me at all. One day I will die. I will die, and nothing can stop me doing so. And even if it could I wouldn't want it to. I want to die, in seventy or eighty years. During that time I will enjoy myself so that when it comes to an end I will have as few regrets as possible.

Believing in an afterlife is overcoming your fear by changing the object of it. It's like overcoming arachnophobia by getting your father to take the spider away, or overcoming claustrophobia by installing a skylight and French windows.

I'm not so sure how you distinguish overcoming the fear of death with simply being used to the idea of it being the end. I mean, I know I am much less disturbed by that idea than the religious who do not hold to it, but I don't know that I could say that it does not bother me at all. Eternal life bothers me too. But I know that I want to be alive tomorrow, and I can only assume that I will keep wanting that to be true. There seems to be some emotional contradiction, in which I am disturbed by both death and immortality. I would rather remain less than a century old forever, if you know what I mean.

Eliezer Yudkowsky paints a utopian picture of an ever-increasing population of immortal humans spreading throughout the stars after defeating death. I'm not so sure that that would be desirable itself, or that we could psychologically handle lives that long (or writing that many Christmas cards). Especially when the Stellar Age of the universe starts to wind down.

I personally don't hold the same fear of immortality that other people do - at least, not of the idealised "never grow old but otherwise totally normal" version. I think seeing the course of the universe first-hand would be an unmissable opportunity.

e: fuck having a whole race of immortal humans though, that shit would be unbearable.

Hah, thankee, I hope that I am at least giving a fraction of the argument you are proposing to me.

Do we know that Heaven and Hell, whatever you call the Afterlife, is in the bounds of our Universe, scientists debate the reality of alternate planes and 'alternate universes', could Heaven be one of those? What say you?

But before you start thinking about that you need to come up with a solution to the problem proposed earlier:

Believing in an afterlife solely so you won't be afraid of death doesn't make sense to me, but maybe that's just because I've never been afraid of death myself.

I don't want to die tomorrow, because I am young and my family would be heartbroken and there are things I want to do. I'm not afraid of dying tomorrow because I don't think I will, but even if it was likely I don't think I would be very afraid. I would just get out and do some exciting shit today. There would be great disappointment but, as far as my imagination goes, not fear.

Eternal life would bother me. Death being the end does not, at all, though I am not keen for it to come too soon.

Sorry OH, I can't elaborate any more than I have done already without confusing my argument too much.

Eternal life would not bother me if I had people to share it with. The worst thing about living forever would be to continually lose everyone around you for eternity.

Or you could be like motherfucking Hob Galding and not give a shit.

I'm not really sure who that is but that's my approach!

I would love to be immortal. Specially if I could be a vampire.

Yes Im immature, get over it :D

I'd be angel, angeloi class just for the wings! Soaring around on hench feather dusters with a burning sword. Nyah.

I used to think living forever would suck, now I think it would be pretty neat. Which is weird since it conflicts with my fear of eternity that I stated earlier, but there's something about being able to still be alive 1000 years into the future that would be really cool.

I wish they were real, Vampires are totally hot. Only problem being though is that I wouldn't trust them, I'd end up getting bitten :(

So do I, except for the fact that I would have to be there for it. Shit takes a long time. Also no food or air and what have you. Eternity drifting in space without even a stable telescope is not my idea of scientific bliss.

Perhaps one of them is nothing but an uninhabited version of Pokemon's Kanto region?

Those hypotheses are not interpreted correctly by the public properly. There are additional spatial dimensions in various models, which are alien to our intuition and don't really amount to much more than solutions to specific mathematical problems. The same for parallel universes, of which there are two different hypotheses. One is a solution to quantum mechanics (the many worlds interpretation), whereby both outcomes of a quantum event occur in different universes that bud off from one another (and NOT as a result of human decisions). The other is the proposition that our universe is one of many that are born and die, though this is much more complex than it sounds, especially with ideas such as false vacuums and the actual physical distance between you and your perfect double. I don't know what's up with some of these, it's beyond me and I don't know if they are all different models as or if I'm just getting different aspects of it depending on the author describing them.

But that any one of them should correspond perfectly to any human fiction(?) and be esoterically accessible to (some of) us? I don't think so. Such conflagrations of religion with bleeding edge science are always very clumsy, and I've heard them all.

I was working under the assumption that, if not humanity, some form of civilization would still be around. That'd be the most interesting thing to see.

He makes a deal with the Lord of Dreams to grant him eternal life so he has someone to talk as an equal with. They meet in a bar every 100 years and have a chat.

The first hundred (Or is it two hundred) or so years go well, then he has one hundred years of pretty much hell on earth where he's drowned for being a witch, thrown out of his town, robbed of all his possessions, watches his family die in front of him and spends about more than a decade living as a begger and perpetually starving.

He's less than happy when Dream next meets him and yells and spits in his face for the majority of the conversation. When Dream finally asks if he wants to undo their agreement he says something along the lines of 'Hell no, dying's a mug's game. I won't be having it.'

Badass.

Valhalla is the place to be when you die. Drink, depravity and large scale wars for the upcoming apocalypse.

Vampire? That's for wusses! People who really want immortality and invulnerability would become Necromorphs! Literally finding life in death, and regenerating any wounds in a matter of seconds.

Well... I guess you'd be massively ugly... but who's going to dare tell you that?

(OT: Dead Space is an incredible game.)