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Comment by Dewie3 | Hacker News Reader

> In a tragically comic way, this was a depressing realization when I was considering blowing my head off or getting run over. Damnation! No guarantees. Death and taxes, yes, but not a breezy afterlife.

Well if the afterlife is terrible, you're going to end up there at some point anyway. So unless your religion says that suicides are punished, I don't quite see the argument.

Pascal's Wager can be used as an argument against any practice that some religion frowns upon, for that matter. If you accept his argument (I stopped doing that many years ago).

EDIT: and though we, in this realm, have no definite knowledge of what the Afterlife (if any) is, there is no guarantee in the Afterlife. So maybe you'll end up betting on Pascal's Wager through all such realities, indefinitely. And who's to say that, even if you have a wider and "higher" perspective, that you can ever be sure of the true nature of reality, and that there is nothing "above"?

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The argument is that a breezy afterlife is not guaranteed, so killing yourself isn't necessarily an escape from pain.

Pascal's Wager would also imply you may as well invent as many religions as you please each requiring the thing you want to do as its dogma. Since each such religion has an equal probability of being right in his formula, in this way you can quickly overcome any inconvenience an established religion presents to what it was you wanted to do.

> So unless your religion says that suicides are punished

Most of them do in one form or another, especially the Abrahamic tree.

At least religions like Buddhism don't punish you for an eternal afterlife. At worst it's just "bad karma".

No, but there are hell realms in Buddhist mythology, which can be the result of 'bad karma'. They're not eternal, but they don't sound particularly pleasant either.

Buddhists bet their horse in one particular lifetime on eventually escaping suffering by following Buddhist teaching/philosophy. Some suicidal people bet their horse on escaping a more immediate suffering. Other than the immediacy of the suffering, their both existential "bets" from the perspective of the author, and so I don't see a great distinction between either strategy.

> Buddhists bet their horse in one particular lifetime on eventually escaping suffering by following Buddhist teaching/philosophy.

Not actually true, otherwise all Buddhists would become monastics, which they don't.

Buddhists believe that positive karma is accumulated over many lifetimes, and negative karma is extinguished after periods of suffering.

In Buddhist thought, it's often enough to simply live a reasonably 'good' life, then you'll be reincarnated into a heavenly realm, or possibly another human body, etc... There are degrees of everything, and very few Buddhists (if any) believe they're going to achieve liberation after only a single lifetime. Even the Buddha was thought to have lived hundreds of lives, eventually culminating with his miraculous (by traditional accounts) life 2500 years ago...

Is any of that supposed to contradict any of what I said? I don't see it.

Though what you've written here doesn't contradict my current mental model of Buddhism, I might have been wrong in assessing Buddhist's motivation as universally being about eventually ending suffering. Maybe some are content with a good, pleasurable existence, and not necessarily Nirvana? Though the fact that not all Buddhists are monastic doesn't in itself imply that - even if being monastic leads to more quickly achieving Nirvana, maybe some Buddhists don't feel that they are in such a rush, at least in their particular lifetime?

> There are degrees of everything, and very few Buddhists (if any) believe they're going to achieve liberation after only a single lifetime.

That's why I wrote """eventually escaping suffering"""!! I said nothing about escaping suffering in the span of one lifetime. Only that they choose to devote their life to the goal of eventually achieving this "escape". Note that I contrasted this goal with people who commit suicide; people who commit suicide - because of depression and suicidal thoughts - do it to escape suffering in one particular lifetime. Hence, why I contrasted this with Buddhism as "a more immediate suffering". I thought my choice of words, to deliberately contrast these two kinds of sufferings, would be enough to get the point across to someone who understands Buddhism (probably better than me). But I guess you were in a lecturing mood. Good for you, buddy; we've all got to have hobbies. And web forums are as good a place as any to do that.

> But I guess you were in a lecturing mood. Good for you, buddy

Please follow the Hacker News guidelines and refrain from personal rudeness when posting here.

When you reincarnate, it's your karma that determines the form you take. If you have bad karma, you can come back as a tapeworm or worse (some Buddhists believe in hell realms-- which are not eternal, but still quite awful-- and some don't).

Buddhism doesn't categorically outlaw suicide but it's against violent or angry suicide and it definitely proscribes suicide as a way out. The bad karma you were trying to escape, plus possibly more, will be waiting for you on the other side. The self-immolating monk, Thích Quảng Đức, might turn out OK if he had compassionate intentions; but in general, suicide is still very bad.

What on Earth is your point? You agree with my point that punishment is not eternal in Buddhism, and then go on to write about how karma works. Is your assumption that I don't know any of this, and that I need to know in this context?

The people that I mostly have in mind are people that bet on Pascal's Wager. People that are not necessarily Buddhists, or even religious to begin with. From their standpoint, it might not be that crucial to bet on Buddhism, since it they're wrong they won't have to pay for it for ever and ever.

(Gotta say that I was surprised to see M. O'Church talking about Buddism, btw.)

I was trying to de-trivialize "bad karma". It's true that Buddhism doesn't have an eternal hell. It's not accurate to say that there aren't severe, terrifying consequences of living a bad life that are considered possible in the afterlife.

At any rate, I don't think humans are capable of comprehending eternity, so I'm not sure how meaningful Pascal's Wager really is. While there's objectively a huge difference between 10^14 years of torment and an eternity of it, I can't say that I can begin to fathom either one.

> don't punish you for an eternal afterlife

Judaism doesn't either. That's a Christian thing, not an Abrahamic thing.

It's pretty obvious why they have to: "Don't worry about your shitty life now, if you believe in my religion, you will live in paradise for eternity when you die". And then the loophole: "So if I die now, I'll be in a better place? I'm going to kill myself". "No, in that case, you will go to hell for eternity"

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