How to not fear your death: An Epicurean perspective
psyche.co
psyche.co
But the fact that I won't be anymore, FOREVER: that is what literally gives me the chills everytime I think about it.
God, I really hope there's something after death.
There is something, it's the same thing that was before your birth, in that sense so you are very much just returning to your natural state: You have been not born for the longest time and you will be dead for the longest time.
In that context this rather short experience of existence is actually the thing that's out of the ordinary, making it that much more valuable.
It feels so normal to sit there on my couch, writing this message from my smartphone.
But in fact life is just a ridiculously short period at the scale of... Of what, actually?
How long have I not been born, and how long will I be dead? Trying to make sense of it is what makes me anxious.
When I read or think of events on cosmological scale it always gives me feelings of curious bliss.
When I look at these things I'm amazed that I'm part of these scales, or as Carl Sagan put it: "We are made of star stuff".
Once I'm dead, the elements my body consists of will go back into that eternal cycle, making me once again a part of the whole or maybe even part of evolving into something completely new.
While my non-corporeal parts, my consciousness, my character, will hopefully be fondly remembered by family and friends.
At least that's how I found a bit of peace of mind after having suffered from anxiety and existential dread for most of my youth.
The idea that being dead is the same as not being born seems like an elegant conclusion until you consider how much our perception of time varies even while we're alive, and it's actually an observation made after you gained your current consciousness; meaning that you truthfully have no idea what happened before you were born, only your current perception of it. What you're really saying is "I don't remember, and no one else remembers, therefore there was nothing".
Reality is unintuitive. Modern theoretical physics suggests that time itself is an illusion and that every state of the universe is superimposed into one unifying entity: past, present, and future. What does that mean about our perceptions of life and death?
The truth is we don't know much of anything, we can only speculate about it.
I found the experience strangely comforting - basically the closest approximation to what death is like. One second you're there, and the next you're not. It wasn't bad or scary or painful or anything. It was just existence and then nothingness and then the feeling of coming back online realizing what happened.
And when I was coming back online, my thinking was: Well, I'm glad to be back! And if I hadn't come back, would I have even noticed? (The answer is no).
In today's world there is a lot of information about us that has been recorded. In some sense we're not completely forgotten because, at least in modern societies, we have birth records, death records and all manner of other details collected about us... mentions in newspapers, pictures, video clips, etc. But there will be some point in the future where all these details will inevitably be lost and all trace of our personal existence will be unrecoverable. In some ways that's sadder than anything I can think of.
I think of ancestors who were born before the advent of any sort of record keeping now are nothing more than nameless ghosts. Their only record may be some small fragment of DNA, and even then there's no guarantee that any of it was passed on after enough generations.
Epic of Gilgamesh, first human history
And, well, children have wild imaginations and I'm sure it's not unlikely that a small percentage of children in any population would have a wild imagination mixed with maybe a mild level of psychosis or other abnormal behavior. Also mainstream science seems to have ignored these children. So I mostly write these stories off, but I would not be closed to them having some paranormal component to them if some more interesting information presents.
I also typically completely dismiss all paranormal stories as having physical explanations. Although I'm also open to being exposed to these types of events if they present. One day in college I was sitting in my car just waiting for a friend inside. 12 inches from my face, there was a huge explosion of water, as if a balloon exploded, which left my entire car interior drenched. It was a sunny day, windows were closed, no water, bottles, or other water sources were in my vehicle. I wasn't scared, but never have been able to explain what the causality was there. So.. Idk. If anything, that has always left my perfectly rationalizing brain to accept that we might not always know everything.
As for not being there - you still are. You have touched innumerable lives, for better or worse, as you live. You shape those lives by what you do, and you live on in the effects you had.
No more HN or chocolate though. I'll miss chocolate.
Okay, just getting real for a second, that is definitely a trick redefinition of "being there" to something other than what was originally being referred to. Kind of like if I stole a kid's lollypop, and when he complained, I told him that as long as he remembered the lollypop, he would still have it.
That's the key difference to the lollipop. Remembrance is not an observable side effect of lollipops. That tree I planted is. That person whose career I helped improve still has an improved career. Etc.
That's one of the two ways you live. The other one is the experiences you have. Sure, you can optimize for that, but as far as we all know it pretty much stops when you die. So I prefer option 1.
Yes it is, it's manifested in the physical re-arrangement of the kid's neurons.
> But the fact that I won't be anymore,
I think that’s what many people fears about being dead, the not being (alive) anymore aspect of it.
It's all up in the air; some claim there is, others the opposite. And there's no way to prove anything.
The only thing that makes sense to me is to pick the version that makes you happy and run with it.
The fact that those pushing the idea that there is something also depend exclusively on your believing the idea to make a living and gain power and influence over society leads me to believe that the odds are not 50/50.
It's still 50/50, because you have no proof either way.
Not so much of what happens after dying.
In summary: just because some people and organizations promote religion for their purposes does not at all wipe away the various religions across time and cultures that DONT fit those criteria you mentioned.
And if there is something, the worry was misplaced in the first place.
In other words, if you were 100% guaranteed to die by instant vaporization at some random time in the last quarter of life with no forewarning, would you still fear death?
To me, that's equally terrifying, in that both are nearly equivalent (you are your mind) and the only difference is that dementia or Alzheimer's might potentially be reversible/repairable.
You seem to be trying to ascribe some sort of ill intent or meaning to my question when there was none.
I've seen a guy in his early 40s afflicted with earl onset dementia and alzheimer and he was loosing it little by little every day and it was terrifying. At some point he stopped knowing who he was and he seemed peaceful. He also could not communicate, care for himself, I don't think he couldn't even feel pain anymore.
Countless people die every day and the rest of us go on. I personally find a lot of comfort in knowing that the world will keep turning just fine without me.
Maybe a therapist would be helpful.
But the other real fear the article mentions which I also agree with is the fear of missing out. Will my significant other wither away in sorrow, or will they move on and find happiness with a new partner? Will my loved ones left behind remain financially stable without me - did I do enough to provide for them in the time that I had? It's easy to say "What do I care what goes on after I'm gone, I'll be dead!", but I have trouble convincing myself of that when it comes to loved ones.
I may be naive but death is change-too-large (change in relationships, change in groups, neighborhoods, change in locations due to work, destruction) and avoiding that is to change accordingly.
Related: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay...
Or it could be out of selfishness because loss is feared even more.
When I am older and I can look back at my life then I think I will be ok with dying. For now though, I want to live the one life I've been given.
Key quote: “In my arrogance, I thought that I could conquer death with logic. But now I know that I only used logic to suppress my fear of death.”
What is horrifying to me that his was the best case scenario - lucid at 97.
How bad is it, being non-lucid for the person experiencing it, vs being lucid, when it's time to face your existence?
But in a similar vein, I find comfort in the more positive stories too, such as the ones about Jesus in the Bible. How death came as a result of sin, and how, for some reason, a sacrifice was required to pay the penalty of sin - something else had to die in your stead, like a pigeon or sheep. But of course, how could that really pay that price? No wonder sacrifices were needed regularly. That is until Jesus’ death - an eternal life could pay for an eternal death, for good and forever. All I need to do is believe in Jesus and share that payment. This is a good story, preferable to the ending of say, 300, or Gladiator, for me at least.
I’m not sure the eternal life to come will eventually be boring either. The story suggests we remain basically the same, and what has been true is that we grow. True, what interested me as a kid doesn’t hold the same power over me now, nor could I as a child really get into fonts or NLP or traveling! So I reckon that eternal life means eternally growing and developing. I can’t picture it, I’ve not lived it yet, there is some fear there, but overall it sounds pretty good.
Along these lines, the ending of "The Last Battle" by CS Lewis which ends the Chronicles of Narnia is so beautiful:
"There was a real railway accident," said Aslan softly. "Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning."
And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
This means condemnation of others and their salvation is up to God, and we are to help others come back to His eternal love.
Many will try everything but the love of Christ (speaking of self again) in existential dread with psychedelics, the temptations of the world (which never seem to fill - whether money, material things, power, or partners), self-actualization, yoga, ego-death as nirvana, gnosticism, energy work - but are drawn away from a 2,000 year history of the teachings from Christ to Apostle to the modern Orthodox Church, based on a previous 5,000+ year history of law which was fulfilled in Christ.
The west (speaking for myself) tends to only be exposed to Protestant and Roman Catholic doctrine, and offshoots of Protestant such as puritanism, Jehova's Witness, LDS/Mormons, etc.
Short video on ethos https://youtu.be/ySgNWCuxjNQ?t=118
This means being humble, no ego of self, thankfulness in all things, charity and honoring thy neighbor, giving to others selflessly (for life is a give from God), and noting continually ones shortcoming, and thus not condemning others their own that we tell ourselves we perceive.
https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/spiritualit... "Every act of a Christian must be a spiritual act. Every thought must be spiritual, every word, every deed, every activity of the body, every action of the person. This means that all that a person thinks, says and does must be inspired and guided by the Holy Spirit so that the will of God the Father might be accomplished as revealed and taught by Jesus Christ the Son of God."
If we take the idea of consciousness as experienced by the mind as it functions in the present moment, the past does not exist at all. It has never existed.
This concept of mind is separate to the biological realities of memories in the brain, it's the unknown bit that transforms the grey goo into me.
I have been annihilated an infinite amount of times since I started writing this message. I have only lived because of my memory of the past presents I experienced.
By which I mean the sensation of being alive and having lived is intimately tied up with memory. For past events I don't remember I was effectively dead. I only lived my life because I'm able to live all of it currently.
Rather than life being a column of infinitely small slices of time building up they're all occurring in the present moment. While I'm lying in bed writing this I'm also at school, at swim classes, on work experience, at university, at my first job interview, etc because they are events I know to have happened and experienced because I don't just replay them, in order for my brain to have knowledge of them they're happening concurrently. If I don't remember these did they ever actually happen? From my perspective of the person I currently consider to be me?
What happens after a catastrophic brain injury or during a disease like Alzheimers? I don't think this makes any life worth less but from the perspective of current you it doesn't take the end of life for the death of your current 'life', the impression of an unbroken chain of having lived that forms you, in the snapshot of the present. During temporary short term memory loss do you effectively die?
I know it all sounds very confused but the nature of memory, existence and death freaks me out.
As a counterpoint during Alzheimers a patient will experience bursts of lucidity so obviously there's a solid state backup of the past, distinct from the present, but I get positively vertiginous thinking it over.
The ego is all about self preservation, survival, which is probably a big part of how we got this far.
eons passed before you were born...
you'll live maybe a handful of decades...
... and eons will pass after you're gone.
Most people aren't freaked out by the "before", so why not take a similar attitude towards the "after"?
This only relates to existential dread per se (vs eg entirely rational concern for the well-being of your surviving dependents, for example), but I like it.
Because unlike the before the after means the permanent loss of current, living experience.
"I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state."
Assuming that whatever comes after death will be a lot like whatever came before we were born helped me deal with my own anxiety around the inevitability of death. If one assumes these two states are equivalent, then we've already experienced death, or at least a death-like state. Whether that's something to be feared or not is up to the individual, and is a separate question.
Source- https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/go-gentle-into-that-g...
Death does seem scary. But having to live for quintillions of years would certainly be worse.
You have no evidence from which to argue that as a certainty. Let's gather such evidence; you could always make a more informed decision at a much later time.
Leads me to another point. What are the odds of waking up? I think it's with 100% certainty that you become conscious.
Your memories are 100% physical though so that definitely evaporates. Perhaps if you find consciousness again it's as if you awoke from a dream you cannot remember, a new blank slate. You flash forward to the next time you find consciousness.
I'm not sure what you mean here, can you explain what you mean by "you"? What remains to be "you" if your atoms are spread out (happens in life too), your memories are gone and your consciousness is also temporarily gone? Isn't it more like just random parts of the universe coming to life and turning into someone? In what way could it be "you"?
As a result, if you choose to believe you will one day exist again after you die, in order to make a connection between one or more consciousnesses or lives, you would need to invent something to explain it. Like a soul.
You could make thinking about all this even more wild by thinking about how time is involved in all of this. We are assuming if that you exist again it must be some time after you cease to exist. What if you exist "again," but at the same time you exist now? Are you also another person somewhere else? Is there another universe with another you? When you die do you then relive the same existence again? The questions are as limitless as our imaginations because we have no answers.
But I tend to lean toward believing we are more than ephemeral. I think this because I am often left wondering why I am me and you are you. Why didn't I become you or you become me? Why am I experiencing life? Why is my body not just some physical machine moving through the universe? Why do I even have a consciousness? And we are only human. As much as we think we know about the universe, there's so much we don't know, and probably never will know.
So based on this, while the universe changes, it is static in nature, think of it like a ledger where each previous state is recorded and that record is time. Distance is just what we physically take notice of, because it separates us from that reality.
Now for a little back story on me, for years I was agnostic and pretty much summed up any thoughts of an afterlife as wishful thinking, but something always troubled me about the universe and what we know about it, and that is the damn thing really looks like it was designed, there are so many open questions that I had like:
Why can we explain everything we know with Math, if we met another intelligent species when would most likely be able to communicate with them via math. Math seems to exist beyond humans, we seem to have discovered math and not invented it.
Why when we get to sub-atomic does it really start to look like data-storage. To the extent that we now believe that the universe is 2D data-store and we experience the data thru 3D projection, not unlike the data on our computers are on a flat 2D disk, but we experience said data via projection via our monitors and speakers.
Why are there programming languages embedded in nature (e.g DNA, Chemistry).
So with all this I went from probably a 50/50 position, defaulting to skeptical to probably a 70/30 that the system has a design and that designer has to be intelligent and supernatural i.e exist outside of it's creation, and eternal as it is not bound by the time slices recording of the universe.
I am fairly confident the system has a builder, I will refrain from using the word God as that title because it is loaded with a lot of baggage.
Now the question becomes are we an ant farm or are we important to that creator. This becomes difficult to answer and I would say it's a 50/50 shot on that one. But if we are important then it leaves open the question why do we not receive communication from this creator.
Which becomes really interesting because now we are in the realm of religion. Either this entity left a manuscript for life or it made us and got board. Well if it left a manuscript then it should provide some information as to why the creator is absent.
TLDR from here, I am going to delve into religion, I am not going to try to save your soul but if it is not your bag just skip the rest.
OK so following my trail, it seemed logical to me that if a manuscript was left the creator would have ensured that it was widely available. Which lead me to my next jump which was 3 of the major world religions base their foundation off of the same manuscript and that is the old testament or the TORA.
In it it talks about the fall of man and sin, and how sin much like a virus has infected reality. To the extent that once introduce Adam and Eve saw reality very differently and the veil of heaven was placed. That they no longer had access, visibility or the capability to experience that reality.
This was interesting to me, as it is a possible explanation for why we don't have any indication of this creator.
It goes on to explain that now that sin is introduced, death is the only way to cleanse it, to the extent that heaven and earth will have to finally be destroyed to cleanse it of sin and end death forever. But in that a book of life will be retained, going back to the universe as a disk or data, it is plausibly that if what is written is true, that, that disk of data is that record of life.
What I find interesting is the simplicity of the document which can be summed up as, people don't want a creator that has to be the supreme ruler, that the creator basically allowed them (and us) to experience what it will be like without a creator guiding us and that by doing so it will answer for all time the need for the creators guidance. That at present we are abandoned to our free will and the only way to sever the veil and experience a re-connection with heaven is via prayer. This act circumvents the free-will covenant and allows for the restoration of experiencing pieces of re-connection to the creator.
As I said, I have my moments in doubt, and the religious stuff is just interesting to me but it's plausible. I certainly cannot get over the fact that everywhere in nature we find design.
You mention the old testament and the Torah. What draws you to the scripts of religions that are monotheistic?
What do you think about older religions that are not monotheistic? For instance, Greek mythology and the Greek pantheon is an interesting case in which there are many deities, in particular because those deities, among others, are all very human in their nature. They experience love, hubris, envy, and hatred. The full spectrum of human emotion and behavior. Much of religion is human-centric, and I think what that truly reveals is the hubris of humankind. I think that's the main reason I tend to look toward philosophy and religion more for the values they espouse and the interesting contemplation they inspire, and less for worship. In relation to our universe and any possible god or gods, I believe that humans are dust in the wind.
I don't discount the fact that it could indeed be a race of creators, the issue then becomes if there are more than one, who created them. In my mind it would still turtle down to a singularity where all power and creation came from a single source of energy if you will.
I took the time to study a handful of religions when I had my moment in doubt in agnosticism. I actually took interest in eastern ones first such a Buddhism, Taoism, and Jainism while I think they are great works for humanity to better themselves they tend to be more philosophical than religious in their nature. Many American Indian religious beliefs parallel eastern thinking like this. Hinduism would be the one exception from the eastern regions. In portions of it's teachings it leans towards strong and supernatural gods but then tends to fable and saga them. Kind of the equivalent of modern day superheros. The stories read more like that to me, as stories about gods and not as god instructing people on why they where made, why we are in the position we are in, and what to expect.
This is the same reason I tended to discount, relatively dead religions such as Odinism, Greek Gods, Roman Gods as they tend to be Sagas about the gods to tell fanciful stories and moral tales that inspire people. I think they are great works, but in my mind I don't think they would be the types of work that a creator would leave as an instruction manual.
The Baháʼí Faith was interesting and I really liked it, but I found it inconsistent in trying to tie all of the world regions into a single path.
Funny enough I had an unrealized bias against the Bible due to the fact that I was raised in a Judeo-Christan country. Being immersed in the culture and seeing the hypocrisy had cemented in my mind that people did not practice what they preach. The problem was up until this point I had never really read the Bible (Old Testament) myself, and was taking other peoples words for what it said at face value. I was under the impression that the entire religion was about hating other people, the Muslims hate the Jews, the Christians hate the Muslims, the Jews hate the Muslims, the Christians hate everyone who is not like them. What I failed to realize that this is a cultural anomaly and not a religious one.
Funny enough I was at an American football game, and watched one guy hit and hospitalize another guy with a baseball bat, literally over the fact that his team lost at the other guy was wearing the wrong jersey in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was that incident that made me face my bias and realize people will hate people in the out group no matter how trivial the division is. It's human nature.
So anyways I read the old testament and was really surprised at the message, it was not a bunch of kill gay people, hate this other guy. Don't get me wrong God instructed the Jews to conquer people and other unsavory stuff, but there where justifications for doing so. What I found was a message of universal love, a promise of restoration and examples of no matter how we as humans try or barter for a different system we will fail due to human nature. Because if there is no god, a human is going to try to fill that spot and we see that all the time. Humans trying to play god.
I find it interesting that originally power of god resided in the tabernacle with the people, the argument was basically this is too hard with you right here we need a human proxy that understand us. To which the Kings where appointed culminating in David the best among his people followed by his son Solomon the wisest among his people. David fell short in Killing his friend by sending him into Battle because his ulterior motive was to bed his friends wife Bathsheba. Solomon was a fool when it came to women and was led into bad decisions.
Finally a messiah was promised that would be the sacrifice to take the blame of all sin (punishment for sin is death). What this set up was the final in a trifecta of lessons, as with a messiah every man became accountable for himself and was directly in charge of their spiritual path.
It's interesting because the original issue at hand was that their was a rebellion of thought that basically went like this: "You don't have the right to create us, give us free will and then demand that we serve and worship you" Once a question like that is asked there is really only one way to answer it, without any doubt and that is to let those with rebellious hearts, participate in their rebellion and see the results. The part that I find interesting is that it follows a very logical path of when it fails to materialize we as humans tend to make excuses and change the goal posts. Which is exactly what happened, first there was the tabernacle for direct guidance, then there was a proxy in the kings and then every wo/man was made the king of their own destiny. The reason for this is clearly articulated that it is to show after restoration that there is only one path and to answer the question for all times.
2 of the religions that rely on that text do not believe that messiahs has come, 1 does. The books they all 3 agree on, clearly point to a coming messiah so the question becomes did Christ fulfill the prophecies as laid out in the books that they all agree on. In my personal opinion he did which is interesting because the old testament really focused on the why the things the way they are. While the teachings of Jesus focused on what is to come and how we should view the world with love. I was surprised at how strong the message of love was given my experience growing up in a "Christian" culture. Reading his parables they where directed at people exactly like that, time and time highlighting how a hooker is more righteous than the people that would not help. Or how the beggar who prays next to the priest and says lord make me an upright man like the priest here and the priest prays lord tank you for exalting me and not allowing me to be lowly like that beggar.
Funny enough after reading the works I walked away going no wonder they killed him, the guy was an anarchist of the mind. I have no doubt if he where her today, he would eat dinner with gay people he would rightful tell them, it is not the way we where designed but that the world is infected and he loves them in-spite of their particular sinful nature. See I always though you, accept Christ, renounce you sin, and then you never ever sin again. So it was striking to me that his message was you are infected with sin, you are going to do bad things every day, I am going to provide cover for that, but try to love other people and use my words as a guide to try and stay on the best life path you can. If the New Testament is true, there are going to be a lot of gay people in paradise along with a lot of murderers, thieves, adulterers etc. That's the thing when people tell you what is in the bible they tell you about the sins called out. But when you actually read his words he minimizes them because he did not want his message of love to be drowned out.
In reading his words for myself, I felt like the Old and the New Testament flow well into an explanation of why we are in the situation we are in, what we should do while we are in this situation and what is to come next.
There are a lot of stories and parables but to me the flow of the reason is fairly simple and fairly clear. There are a lot of people with hateful agendas that blur the simple lessons that are to be learned.
I accept the possibility that it could be wrong and a work of fiction, created by hopeful thinking but I also think there is enough there to have faith that it could be right. Finally I came to the conclusion no matter what, Jesus was a really awesome, kind, loving and wise man, even if he was just a crazy guy, he is a pretty good person to strive to be like. So that's how I ended up where I am at on my thoughts on god.
> they are great works for humanity to better themselves they tend to be more philosophical than religious in their nature.
Right now, that's what resonates with me the most, and the closest I can envision myself to becoming spiritual. At least, at this point in time. As a result, I can't say there's a lot more I knowledgeable enough to respond to with regards to Judaism, Islam, Christianity (and its various offshoots). I've read a few stories from pieces of the Bible in high school, but I can't remember which ones specifically, and we approached them from a literary perspective rather than a religious one. I actually remember being unreasonably disgruntled at having religious texts assigned for reading. I like to think I've become much more open-minded since then, and hope to continue to develop in that positive direction.
I was going to say something about understanding why people believe in god or God, and why that is, but I realized it actually sounded condescending when I don't mean to be. All I can really say is, I have a very hard time taking leaps of faith, and with respect to God, I'm not ready now and not sure I ever will be. But I really appreciate your taking the time to say so much about the path you took to get to where you are with your beliefs today. I also really love your perspective on Jesus. Thank you!
It never mentions hell, it is extremely clear that the punishment for sin is death and that the dead know nothing. It talks about a lake of eternal fire in revelations, but every single reference to eternal fire in the entirety of the books when referring to eternal fire refers to something that has been burnt up and will never return. I became interested in where the doctrine of hell came from and it was introduced in the early dark ages, by Catholicism. Early Christians did not believe in a place of eternal torment for sinners, which would be logically inconsistent with the overarching message of the entirety of the books which is restoration with no sin in creation, hell would be a part of creation thus a pocket of sin would remain. The doctrine has been thoroughly refuted as inconsistent and not supported by the texts but it is still a major doctrine point of many of the organized christian religions. This was my absolute #1 issue that caused me severe bias against Biblical religious, before I took the time to read the book. How could a loving creator be such a sociopath to torment people forever. I was really surprised to find that there was no support for this doctrine.
The second was that humans where created/evolved/whathaveyou on earth to be shepherds and care-tenders of the earth. This has always been the plan, the bible does not state that we as humans go to heaven, it says we die until judgment, if we do not accept that the only way forward is to work inside of the framework of gods plan, we receive a second death at that time, where we are erased from history, literally like we never existed. I don't think the intention here is cruel but I look at it like a system with a malfunction, you fix the malfunction or you remove and replace the part entirely. After this, heaven and earth are destroyed, the human body is restored back to what Adam and Eve where free from genetic defects and are returned to a restored earth, which was the original plan and rebellion did not change that plan. there is some debate about how long we have to accept submission to god, but my personal belief in reading Christ's actions is that forgiveness is available to the very last minute, possibly even at judgment. I think this was the point of when crucified the thief Gestas asked Jesus to remember him when he enters his kingdom and Jesus responds that he will be with him in paradise. I believe the symbolism of this is that redemption is available to the very last moment and is broadly available.
These two things really contrasted with my experience of being told you are all sinners and going to hell. Both are completely opposite of what the texts actually say.
I am not going to try to convert you, or save you, but you seem genuinely interested in positive messages about life so won't just say read the bible and all will be reviled (or some other hocus pocus), I encourage you to explore the offerings of religion that I did (especially Buddhism I think it has a lot of level up as a human value), but I would urge you to read the parables that Jesus told, these where stories he would tell to help people see right and wrong, and are more philosophical in nature than they are religious, they are really powerful and they give a really good overview of how Jesus loved and was a devout pacifist. They require little biblical context and honestly the less context you have to more clear they are as you will tend to read them and not infer other context into them.
My personal favorites are:
Parable of the Prodigal Son, which is a great story about the fact that no one is beyond redemption, but human nature is to judge and insist that others are not worthy of redemption. Basically the human nature of I am good, they are not.
Parable of the Good Samaritan, In context Samaritan where disdained and looked down on. That part is not clear without other context from other texts.
Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, this one has to be hands down my favorite. It highlights how we can be forgiven, but we will hold others to a higher standard than we ourselves believe we should be forgiven for.
Parable of the Two Debtors, another really good one that contrast the importance of love over everything else.
Again, not trying to force anything on you or turn this conversation into a get saved message, I just know how the parables helped me see things differently. I think these stories are profound and give the best insight into what a man of peace Jesus was. If anything I think people should see him from his own words and not the actions of some of the people that claim his name. He is like the Free Hugs guy X 1000.
I totally understand on leaps of faith, I am a evidence based person for the most part so I totally understand that you can't make the connection with faith. I 100% get that. I still have my issues with it and I abandon it from time to time, but then I get right back in the same circle of this damn thing is designed, who designed it. So my only resolution is to keep as much faith that is possible for me personally. Even doubting Tomas (a disciple of Jesus) had doubts in faith and Jesus talked to this extensively. He also experienced it when god had to abandon him at crucifixion to pour out the grapes of wrath on him. I think if it is true, then our creator can completely understand that us being disconnected from him makes it hard to make leaps to faith and I think this is why doubt in faith was highlighted among many of the disciples. Peter is also highlighted here as when he takes his eyes of Jesus and experience fear he falls into the water and I think these stories are there to let us know that if even the people that walked with, ate with and communed with Jesus had doubts from time to time, that it is perfectly reasonable for us to have them.
Finally, for anyone that might find the discussion of religious doctrine offensive, I apologize it was not my intent. I find the subject interesting and enjoy the what-if scenarios of it. My intent is to highlight those what-if's and not serve as a sermon or an attempt at conversion.
Also LSD or mushroom trips for terminally ill patients are very promising in accepting death. I'll retort to that if it will be possible.
But I guess that's where various religion and philosophy come in, the ones that eschew desire. Maybe you will still have pain, but if you try to limit desire, you also limit your regret, or other suffering that desire can cause.
Life is difficult, but can also be filled with happiness. When you die you will no longer suffer, but you will also cease to be able to experience happiness. That is why death is such a conundrum. Depending on how you experience life, it can be a source of dread, or something in which to seek solace. Many times it is both.
So, anyway, hopefully, in the near future, dying won't be compulsory.
Pretty much misses the point when the fear of death is frequently not about what comes after, and much more about the big "nothingness" thing.
I find it comforting to realize that I once wasn't and now I am. I will once again cease to be. We often think death is final, but if we already made the transition from not being to being, who's to say that, in some form, we might once again become something from "nothing."
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10538...
[2]: https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...
> For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands.
I suppose I also meditate on christ's suffering. It seems to say that while the end is never pretty for the one who is enduring it, it is intrinsically meaningful and sacred.
But getting there certainly can be. "I will die" is not the same as "I will be dead".
If you take strong verificationism seriously, that is. I can't give the entire theory here, but there are strong arguments for it, and also critiques that I personally don't find compelling.
Some have likened the experience of death to what it's like when you black out (true loss of consciousness) or, to a lesser extent, when you go to sleep at night. One moment you're there, the next moment you're coming back from not being there. (Give me some leeway on the sleep thing - I know that when you're actively dreaming or tossing and turning it's not quite a jump cut).
So in that moment when you're coming back to consciousness from a state of previous unconsciousness, what's to say you're the same "you" that was beforehand? Sure, you remember a whole life, but then there's this gap in continuity. Maybe you were someone else and then all of a sudden, you're now "you" with all those memories in that mushy brain of yours.
But if that's the case, why is the gap of consciousness needed to separate "you"? What's to say that from any given instant to any other given instant the "you" is continuous, other than for this stream of memories coming from your meat brain. Maybe "you" jumps around all the time.
But then - what is "you" anyway? If we're just a collection of meat brain memories, maybe there's no core identifying "you" in the first place, and we're all just part of a big collective pool? Like a piece of code running in an overall shared memory space. The complexity forms (your program / you), and then the function exits and the memory goes back to the collective pool.
So then - what if life and existence is all about perspective? I'm me because, well, I'm me. I expeierience this life and remember these memories. And you're you because you experience your life and remember your memories. Is there really a difference from a third-party observer?
Maybe life is simply in the eye of the beholder. As long as there is ANY conscious life, then life is being experienced. And so maybe death really is nothing to worry about -- you'll get a chance to experience another life as someone else.
But then - why does it even need to be linear? Maybe we ARE experiencing life as someone else -- as evidenced by all the someone elses experiencing life right now :). Just because we can't experience it (hardware limitations - sorry. Brain can't handle multiple sets of inputs ;) doesn't mean it's not happening.
Maybe we're all experiencing consciousness in our own ways as part of one big system. That leopard in the zoo is experiencing it. I'm experiencing it. You reading this are experiencing it. Maybe our meat brains and linear single-track memories are just a nice little lie, and we're really just all temporary functions running as part of a bigger computing system. Function runs, exits, memory goes back to the shared pool. New function runs, exits, memory goes back to the shared pool. Many functions run simultaneously - each doing only what it was programmed to do, then each exits and the memory gets released again....
This really gets wild when you start thinking about clone experiments (or teleportation). Make a perfect clone of yourself right now, down to the neuron, and assemble it in across the room. You'll experience nothing other than to see a clone appear 10 feet away from you. Your clone will have the experience of being you one instant, and then waking up across the room looking at you "Holy cow! Cloning and teleportation worked! They're real!" Then your clone will go on with life, doing the same things you want to do, remembering the same things you remember.
Then think about whether there's REALLY any difference between that clone of you and any other person on earth....
Your comparison to computing, functions, and shared memory is very good at describing that. But to go even further, since computers as we know them still run in a linear fashion with regards to time (forward), what if all consciousness across all time and space is just one "thing?"
And you're right - it starts to get really wild when you remove the linear constraint. Or even the singular universe constraint. Think about a multiverse, where not only are there other people in this one timeline experiencing things, maybe there are multiple (infinite) simultaneous timelines. Or, as you said, not even timelines. Multiple infinite states of being.
I think perhaps the most comforting part of trying to "figure it all out" is the realization that we're, in all likelihood, woefully incapable of really ever figuring it all out, especially if "reality" (whatever that is) looks nothing like the tiny, single-brained, single-universed, linear timeline perspective that we have.
What I think is scarier than the concept of non-existence though is the possibility that our universe might be cyclical; i.e., that its evolution would repeat over and over again an infinite number of times. Imagine all of the suffering that you’ve ever experienced happening again, indefinitely. Or the Holocaust repeating. Or slavery. Just thinking about the idea of an endless, cyclical universe is almost sickening. I much prefer the other theories of how the universe might end.
> ”There is something about the core of this experience that opens people up to the great mystery of what it is that we don’t know.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psilocybin-a-jour...
> ”Of the participants who received the high dose in the second study, 83% reported feeling significantly less depression and 58% reported less anxiety after 7 weeks. Only 14% of those who received niacin reported less anxiety and less depression.”
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/12/hallucinogenic-drugs...
That joke and singing along to Monty Python's Bright Side of Life is usually enough to snap me out of the occasional melancholy resulting from contemplating the inevitable.
Ok, but seriously, yeah, I'm terrified.
> No doubt you don’t fear your prenatal existence and logically speaking, given their equivalence, it follows that you should fear death the exact same amount, as in not at all.
Prenatal existence is not symmetrical to death, in my opinion. First off, even if they were, neither can be conceived, which makes the symmetry unknowable. But more importantly I don't fear things that have happened, I fear things that are impending - a pretty key distinction here, which I feel fundamentally breaks the symmetry (ie: time is not symmetrical).
> doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing that one can reasonably be fearful of because it isn’t anything.
Earlier it was described as the greatest deprivation. Of course that's something. This is like saying "why fear starvation? It is only the absence of something - food". It is the absence, the nothingness, that drives that very fear.
This is like saying "Why fear loneliness? It is not something that is done to you, it is only the absence of love".
Perhaps death is 'nothing', whatever that means. Why is 'nothing' a special 'thing' that I can not fear? It seems just as reasonable to fear 'nothing' as anything else.
IDK, I don't find any of it compelling. Fix death please, that's a good way to prevent the fear.
The line has to be drawn somewhere, otherwise logically speaking we ought to force everyone into permanent suspended animation on life support machines. But clearly that would be a very bad thing to do.
If I said "we should cure the flu" would you say "Well sure but we can't just cure the flu by murdering everyone" ? Like yes, I guess there's a line there?
But we already are, in the sense that medical and safety research is constantly being conducted and there are professionals whose job is to rescue people from fires and similar disasters. There's always trade-offs though. A lot of death could be prevented by banning motor vehicles, should we do that? Of course not. In some ways, it could be argued that we're already going too far to prevent death, for example by banning doctor-assisted suicide.
> Your demise is inevitable. I hope that doesn’t come as too much of a shock.
There's a lot less work going into increasing our maximum lifespan that there is going into increasing our average lifespan.
I see what you mean. What is it about death you fear? I think for these things, like starvation, loneliness, and dying, I don't fear them inherently, I fear their effects. I will feel physical pain while starving; I will feel emotional pain while lonely; I might feel pain while dying. But while living, I don't fear being dead because principally, I fear pain, and I won't be experiencing pain when I am dead. I understand not everyone will feel the same way about being dead, though.
> As the philosopher Thomas Nagel observed, death is the great deprivation.
That really resonates with me. Death deprives me of all things that I love and want.
hackernews: "here's some more reasons to fear death"
me: man chgrp
At the tail end there is only so much energy available and I am pessimistic that basic physics, like heat death of the universe, can be overcome.
However, we don’t even need to reach this tail end. Extreme events happen all the time and on a long enough time scale they become certainty. Maybe we can conquer aging but we are still physical bodies, which will forever be fragile (on the cosmic scale of supernovae and formation of compact objects, but really even on the scale of planetary calamities like sufficiently energetic asteroids or super volcanoes).
Heck, even if we spread everywhere in space, without ftl travel, which I am somewhat comfortable will never happen, we are stuck with the destiny of Milky Way, and that’s a very finite destiny.
Even if you were able to postpone your non-existence to some late stage of the Universe, it's all but assured you will have to end eventually in light of postulated Cosmological denouements. In other words, you will not exist forever due to physics.
That being said it would be nice to know it's possible to get at least a few hundred years of healthy and happy living in. Yet, would the fear of the end grow even greater then?
Anyway, this is going all scifi and silly. My point is really that death sucks, trying to say "oh but you can't fear death because it's not a thing" doesn't seem helpful, and we can probably do massively better than a ~125 year max lifespan.
Why is time not symmetrical? I don’t mean from your subjective point of view but in terms of objective physical reality. The answer is: entropy increases over time. Which is the same reason that death is inevitable. Perhaps one day people will live for ten thousand years and perhaps that would be nice, but death will still find us all eventually.
1. I think there's a big difference between 100 years and quadrillions of years.
2. I think that in quadrillions of years our interpretation of life and the value we derive from it, and our knowledge of the physical universe, may shift enough that "death" is not actually inevitable.
3. I'm no physicist but it seems a bit extreme to believe that we can predict quadrillions of years into the future based on an extremely limited view of the existing world and past. Is heat death inevitable? I don't know.
Maybe so. Or maybe this is a defense mechanism borne from denial and the urge to put off the inevitable. You’re talking about outliving the stars themselves when we can barely get piles of rocks to survive a few millennia.
> I think that in quadrillions of years our interpretation of life and the value we derive from it, and our knowledge of the physical universe, may shift enough that "death" is not actually inevitable.
But it was already thousands of years ago that our interpretation of life and the value we derive from it reached the understanding that death was not to be feared in the first place.
Sure, could be.
> You’re talking about outliving the stars themselves when we can barely get piles of rocks to survive a few millennia.
Maybe so. I won't pretend to understand what would go into such a thing. I don't personally believe our understanding of the universe is sufficient to rule it out.
> But it was already thousands of years ago that our interpretation of life and the value we derive from it reached the understanding that death was not to be feared in the first place.
I guess I missed that! I mostly see a lot of mental gymnastics or denial in the form of believe in an after-life.
I guess I don’t see the big distinction between some science-fiction fantasy of living for a quadrillion years and disproving the second law of thermodynamics and just believing in an afterlife. The alternative to either approach is discussed in OP :)
The fear of death was seriously bothering me and I thought: " You can either try to achieve immortality or try to loose your fear of death within your lifetime."
The second one is a solvable problem, the first one, for me personally, not. It gives a strange comfort that one day I might be free of the fear of death even if I know that still I will die.
How many of those do actually experience the fear of death so deep in their bones that they actually live life to their fullest?
(I'm not claiming I'm one of those).
I don't think actually "living life to their fullest" necessarily follows fearing death.