People are living longer, healthier, and happier lives due to medical science. People are living long enough now to know their own great grandchildren. In just 160 years the average lifespan of humans has been doubled from what it was:
http://educationstormfront.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/life-expectancy-chart.gif That's something religion with all of it's phony promises of peace and healing powers and eternal life never even approached.
yet mortality still has a success rate of 100% ... which is why I said "once again you are either dumbing down the term or possessed of a state of willful ignorance" ... or even earlier ....
Iow discussing science as somehow being a magical panacea to the problems of material existence requires a dumbed down definition of existence at best or a willful state of ignorance or intellectual immaturity regarding the the nature of suffering in the material world at worst.
IOW talking about improved healthcare as a solution to the problem of death requires a dumbed down definition of existence or a willful state of intellectual immaturity,
The inability and refusal to accept finality is a sign of weakness and fanciful infantilism.
Yet you cite longevity as an attractive feature of existence. I am simply pointing out that it is no real solution
Nothing lasts forever and nothing needs too.
More to the point, there is nothing a gross materialist can do about it despite engineering their lives in such a manner to desperately try to avoid it
Each experience is replaced by a totally new one.
Which explains why the cessation of experience (so-called death) is so problematic
This is the law of life and of all experience. Religion's need to clutch things forever, to never accept change and never embrace the new, is the reason it is a rotting miasma of irrelevant superstitions and trite rituals.
actually if you want to talk about the rotting miasma of irrelevant superstitions and trite rituals you should take a closer look at what people do as a consequence of attachment to things that will shortly cease to exist
Matter is in a constant state of flux. Matter is also charged with tremendous power and energy. Only fools expect permanence in this ever creative and energetic state of physical being. Fools like religionists who deify the past and the obsolete while rejecting the supremacy of the evolving progress of the future.
lol
and how do you propose to evolve and progress (even if its only materially ... which I think we can both agree has an inevitable end game plan that eventually undoes everything) without stability?
IOW its a misconception for a gross materialist to belittle god for not delivering a safe haven for their insignificant desires when he designed the world (a world we inevitably get attached to) for the very reason of highlighting the folly of such desires.
And of course, despite all such belittling discussion by such gross materialists, they inevitably work in the same fashion of trying sustain and maintain such desires despite admitting (at least in their saner moments) the inevitable futility of it
There's not a moment of life that ISN'T involved in some way in the "fulfillment of material propensities".
Then I guess we can automatically dismiss the bravado of being materially indifferent you were alluding to in teh previous paragraph
The attempted fulfillment of any other kind of propensity would simply be immaterial.
depends whether an individual is willing to concede any greater power or beneficiary for their actions than their own limited and short-lived ego
As indeed it is in the case of religion, which so fixates its emaciated and drowsy sheep with visions of otherworldly pastures and devotion to deadbeat shepherds that it saps the very passion for life out of them. As Billy Joel said, "I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints."
which is why the tragedy of the situation is that such individuals get out-performed by pigs, dogs and camels
:shrug:
Why was death a problem to begin with?
you tell me, since you said the nature of it would somehow spoil the notion of eternal existence ....
Why do millions of religious morons long for an endless life when they can't even fill their Sunday afternoons with enough interesting things to do?
If you are not planning to slit your wrists this sunday, you can already answer that question
Religion deludes men with the false dream that if only they never died they'd be happy. Such is not the case at all.
well you have certainly done a full circuit, haven't you?
Initially you extol the glories of existence by saying what a fine thing it is to live long through medicine and now you admit that the quality of material existence is so feeble and insignificant that prolonging it is of no real consequence or value.
:shrug:
Attachments? You mean as in attachments to things that never change--endless living in some orgasmic blissful state, an immortal father figure to fawn and fuss over you, the complacence that nothing will ever happen that will ever catch you offguard again. Religion is all ABOUT attachment--attachment to things that aren't real and that keep us from changing and maturing into our true selves. Cuz when you live a life of lies and fictions, you become a walking lie and a ghostly fiction.
Actually existence is all about attachment. It doesn't matter whether you are Billy Joel, a 5 year old or someone with terminal cancer.
Death spells the end of such attachment which explains why it is such a confounding kink in the plans of those who's vision is prohibited from extending beyond such things.
In other words 99% of all the religious.
well you are the one who portrayed the bible as establishing such things. Obviously you belong (or at least used to belong) to the category, so it probably explains 99% of your undertstanding of such matters
A life of LESS disease and poverty and more recreational opportunities ISN'T less miserable?
given the perennial nature of suffering in places with less disease and poverty its difficult to say how it is.
There are even studies that show material opulence, after one has utilized it to put a roof over one's head and food in one's stomach, doesn't play such a great role in establishing personal happiness. Its simply a delusion of the gross materialist to work harder than an ass for material benefits that are more easily available as a pig or dog.
Who wants to be delivered from material existence?
anyone who doesn't hesitate to see a doctor when in difficulty or even look both ways before crossing a busy street for that matter
I just had a wonderful lunch of material proteins and sugars. Serotonin and norepinephrine flow thru my neurons maximizing cognitive creativity. And my heater just kicked on warming the material atoms of air in my chilly apt. All my pleasures and aspirations and visions I owe to the materials around me and in my body. Your delusion of immaterial otherworldly bliss is a pipe dream, a fantastical compensation for having failed so miserably to find happiness in this life.
yet you are completely unsatisfied with merely eating food and paying the energy bills to reap the benefits of owning a room heater ... which is why your field of activities expand to many complex social interactions and aspirations which is the real network of your existence of attachment (and of course aversion) .
No doubt you will try and deny this by speaking some trite nonsense about renunciation that you don't understand and cannot perform .... but you should understand that one cannot simultaneously "pursue the sensual" (as you explain in the paragraph below) and hope to be free from the network of entanglement as explained in this scriptural paragraph.
One only gets stuck in that trap by fixating--fixations of fear, of hope, of guilt, and of longing. Learning to embrace and then to let go, we find our lives an open door to endless possibilities and surprises. This is what truly physical life is like since the universe is one flowing river of metamorphic energetic matter. We must embrace the sensual that is in us. To deny it is to deny the source of life itself.
death, especially as it is traveled to via old age, is not an open door to endless possibilities ... what to speak of the innumerable complex reactions that arise from the pursuit of material desire. I mean sure, embracing the sensual is something very appealing ... but its the inevitable consequences from it that are FORCED upon us that causes the problem. This is why material life is a strange dichotomy of the pursuit of things we are strongly attached to followed by the repugnant (and doomed) attempt to renounce the consequences from such pursuits. So there is a hard work to pursue the sensual followed by a hard work to avoid the consequences ... with predictable results
IOW you are big on the propaganda of embracing the sensual, but its the very nature of material existence that by doing so you will find yourself being embraced by many things you will have to work ten times as hard to try and avoid.
This is basically what this verse is saying :
BG 2.62: While contemplating the objects of the senses, a person develops attachment for them, and from such attachment lust develops, and from lust anger arises.
BG 2.63: From anger, complete delusion arises, and from delusion bewilderment of memory. When memory is bewildered, intelligence is lost, and when intelligence is lost one falls down again into the material pool.
I go to the dentist every six months, a privilege I am often grateful to science for. My molars are most definitely not rotting.
You're deluded.
Your molars definitely are rotting ... and when they are finally useless (assuming that you actually live to such an age) your dentist (who will no doubt be younger than you and naturally embody the health and vigor that has since passed and is unattainable to you) will be able to provide you with another solution (provided of course you can afford it) and say something like "these will make it look just like new, and charm the young girls at the store when you smile at them" (even though you are buying colostomy bag replacements).
and so and so.
IOW the very nature of material existence challenges the adage of making the best use of a bad bargain for as long as one is dictated by a quality of existence that has no greater sphere than sensual enjoyment and mundane appearances.