Markx, If you follow your mind, that question what IS true, how do you hope to find it? Your mind seeks Truth, but your Heart already knows it. That's why I say: Follow your Heart, forget your mind... Use words to make it understandable for you, but don't let the words steal their true meaning... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Love, Nelson
Not believing in an afterlife, in justice after we die, all that stuff, is not an empty feeling for me at all. It means, as I think Xelios said, we must assume this is the only world and we must make it as good as we can. We must make justice here; even better, make this world a place where justice and revenge and such are not needed. As for dying and that's it: I'll be quite happy to be feeding the worms when I'm dead, and through them the birds and cats and everything else. Be one with the universe. Groovy stuff. That stuff about not waiting for an afterlife, but trying to make this world as goodas we can because it's the only world there is, reminds me of someone. I only know a few christians, but one of them lives his entire life in basically a holding pattern. He sits back and waits to die, waits for the apocolypse, waits for the rapture, whatever. In his opinion, the sinners are screwed and he's off to ehaven when the shit hits the fan, so everything is cool. He isn't interested in helping the ones he sees as sinners. He gathers with his buddies and plays organ music and sings and waits for the world to end. He doesn't give a damn about this world. Absolutely crazy.
A true Christian helps all the Children of God and make the world a better place to live. Unfortunatly, not all Christians understands that... Love, Nelson
I'll let you all know what, if anything, is on the other side, when I get ther. Only if it is possible for me to come back. "Hippie-of-Darkness" "Brother to Anvil"
*Grins* Of course there isn't a hell, but wouldn't it be nice if Atta actually had to deal with 72 pissed-off virgins? Oooh! Oooh! Oooh! And they'd be armed...with lawn tools....oh yeah. I think that even beats my 'being eaten alive by pigs' idea. *Sings* I believe in love, Love! Love! Love! I believe in loooooove! Love! Love! Love!
I recently read a nice little book titled, Being Good, by Simon Blackburn, Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University. As it happens, Blackburn and I share a common disbelief in an afterlife, though he writes far more eloquently on the subject than could I. Here, given as a single paragraph are some quotes I recorded in my journal from the chapter of this book dealing with death: “Death is the same for one who died yesterday as for those who died a thousand years ago. Death has no duration at all, for the subject. Actually, ‘the state of being dead’ is a misnomer. Death is not a state of a person. It is not any kind of life: peaceful, reposed, reconciled, content, cold, lonely, dark, or anything else. It is often felt that death is an enigma. Why? Life is mysterious. Death can only be thought mysterious when we try to imagine it. We try to imagine ‘what it will be like for me’. But death is nothing for me, not because it is mysteriously unlike the things I have so far known, but because there is no me left.” Perhaps Seneca best explained the “two eternities argument” of which I am so fond: “Would you not think him an utter fool who wept because he was not alive a thousand years ago? And is he not just as much a fool who weeps because he will not be alive a thousand years from now? It is the same, you will not be, and you were not, neither of these times belongs to you.” And Epicurus' argument, while not identical to that made by Seneca above, certainly is succinct: “While we exist, death is not present, and when death is present, we no longer exist.” My personal view is that death (though not my dying) will be nothing new to me. I’ve spent half an eternity before March 31, 1957 “being dead.” It wasn’t pleasant. It wasn’t sad. It wasn’t anything. Of course as Blackburn wrote above, the confusion occurs when we attempt to think of death in terms of “being dead.” As Epicurus suggests, death has no being, and being has no death. They are mutually exclusive. Another half eternity of nothingness lies ahead, but it doesn’t lie ahead of me. I will never be part of this nothingness, because I am a living being. I hope you understand this important distinction. I shall not sally forth into the great void, because I am necessarily confined to this life. Without life, my body is nothing more than a nondescript pile of organic and inorganic chemicals. As the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius was fond of saying, “Thou art but a little soul bearing about a corpse.” And as I’ve recently quoted in another post, Vladimir Nabokov wrote, “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” You might then suppose that this life of ours is all we have any assurance of having. Unfortunately, it’s worse than that. We aren’t even assured of a long life. Alright then, this day is all we are assured of. No, not even that. In fact, it is only this very moment we are assured of having. We are the soldier waiting in his trench at Verdun. At any moment the whistle will blow and we shall have to stand up and run against a hail of bullets. To remain in the trench means death, to run forward means death, to run away means death. All we have is this very moment. Life is the art of finding happiness within the span of a moment. Michael
Well we born at the first place, we can born again. It is very possible when we die here we will re born at some other world....................Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Hello Markx, Fair enough. I don't discount such a possibility out-of-hand. In fact the number of such scenarios aren't even limited to those you and I might rationally posit. To use quantum physics as an example, we've seen that the universe is not constrained to function in accordance with our "common sense" notions of it. As Frank Wilczek, professor of physics at MIT put it: "...we have no warrant to expect that naive intuitions about what is weird or unlikely provide reliable guidance for constructing models of fundamental structure in the microworld, because these intuitions derive from an entirely different realm of phenomena." Even within the confines of our everyday world, our knowledge of things is second-hand at best. Tor Norretranders summed up our inability to know the true essence of things with his assertion, "We sense, simulate, and then experience." Of all that apparently exists in this world, the only thing that I may know the essence of is myself. In choosing to take the next breath I have a hand in the moment-by-moment creation of my own life. Seneca spoke of a young man taken captive as a slave by the Romans. As this man was being led in chains to Rome he kept repeating aloud, "I shall never be a slave." Upon his arrival, the chains were removed so that he could take up his work as a slave. Thereupon he immediately rushed headlong into a wall, both splattering his brains and proving the truth of his words. Since I provide the essence to my existence, no pronouncement I make about this universe may be as certain as one I make about myself. Everything we know of the external world is in some way suspect; it is information open to question. However, since we provide the very essence to our existence, we are exactly what we think we are. If I think myself happy, then I am happy. If I refuse to live as a slave, then I shall never be a slave. I can't tell you with any certainty what lies beyond this world. However, what I know about my own life in this world is intrinsically valid. What we know of ourselves constitute the most perfect "truths" that we shall ever know. Changing gears... It's possible that I'm simultaneously living in an infinite number of identical duplicate universes. Though possible, what practical difference would it make? That my nose itches at this moment, is of vastly more significance than when I scratch it, an infinity of "mirror" copies scratch as well. Such redundancy matters naught. There is a similar possibility that I might coexist in any number of other universes (read for example, Just Six Numbers by the British Astrophysicist, Martin Rees), and while some may be identical to this universe, others might be different. Some versions of me might live-on in these other universes long after I am dead in this one. Other versions of me might not be born yet for some thousands of years to come. Some versions of me might be prone to diabolical behavior, other versions might be of a heroic disposition. The particulars matter little. What matters most is that all these various hypothetical versions of me are not me at all. Unless the universe in question is an exact duplicate (in which case it becomes redundant, as I've commented above), there will always be an element of "otherness" to these other versions of me. I am the product of my history in this particular world. It doesn't matter that an infinite number of versions of me might have lived in the past or might forever live in the future. In this world my life is constrained to occur between the span of my birth and death. Imagine a man such that his entire memory is erased at the stroke of midnight on the last day of each and every year. He'd have no chance to accrue a personal history outside the limits of these successive one year intervals. This man awakens each New Year's morning to find himself in unfamiliar surroundings. Soon he will come to (re)familiarize himself with this strange new world. He will begin to form an individual personality, and accumulate both pleasant and sad memories. In short, he will become a person; until midnight on the last day of the year that is. Year after year, this same man undergoes the same process of loss and discovery. He's the same man year after year, yet I would ask you if he is the same person? As soon as I regain my consciousness each morning, I have to "reboot" my system. Perhaps you do the same? Taking only a few seconds, I have to remember not only where I am, but who and what I am as well. Furthermore, I've an idea that we do this not only each time we waken, we do this to a lesser degree, moment-by-moment throughout our lives. Aided by the memory of what we've been, we produce what we are. It's the memory of our past that allows us to produce a continuous flow of conscious life. If my memory should be deleted entirely, the unique person that was me would die as well. Suppose I might one day suffer from advanced Alzheimer's disease? What if I should "pass over" to the next world at the completion of my life not able to even remember my own wife's face? You might suggest that the gods are smart enough to take the earlier healthy version of me instead. But what if a man had repeated bouts of mental illness and memory loss throughout his life? How would the gods decide which version of the man to carry over to the next world? The very idea reminds me of the post office's arbitrarily decision to issue a stamp of Elvis-the- young-stud, rather than Elvis-the-obese. Unless an extension of my life could retain my old memories, then whatever might continue to live-on would be something other than me. And the fact that I've no recollections prior to my own birth tells me that I'm not descended as the same person from an earlier life. You might object that you occasionally have fuzzy memories of having perhaps lived through the Irish potato famine, or the French Revolution. I'd reply that I don't move from moment to moment in my life with only indistinct memories of who I am. Vague or fuzzy memories don't cut it. Now that I've established that I'm neither a reincarnation, nor an extension of myself from an earlier time, what of the thought that I might be standing at the start of an eternal life? If this were true it is suspicious that I find myself to be living in this unique period of myr eternal life. Eternity is a very long time. Wouldn't it be far more likely that I'd find myself at nearly any other time within this eternity other than at the very beginning? Statistically, this ought to sound alarm bells in my head. Of course a mortal would always find himself to be living within his "first" (and only) life. With Ockham's "razor" in mind, I'll accept the more simple explanation, at least until better evidence comes my way. Well, immortal or not, I'm falling asleep here. Thanks for the reply, Michael
