Could you suggest an alternative that does not require me to surrender my integrity?
Discussing religion is literally a waste of time and energy
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Could you suggest an alternative that does not require me to surrender my integrity?
If one's integrity is dictated by sensual enjoyment and mundane appearances, I would suggest its a poor use of the word ... much less any concern about having surrendered it to a dubious proposition ...
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Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
I see. So because science has only made life longer and healthier and happier for the vast majority of humans but hasn't granted us immortality, it isn't any better than religion that has in fact never done either? Why is avoiding death so important for you? Are you afraid 80 years of healthy life in the 21st century isn't enough time to accomplish all you want to? Or is it something else? Maybe the dread of seeing everything you desperately cling to disappear forever?
That death is a "problem" is your assumption not mine. Frankly I find the prospect of eternal rest quite appealing.
Living longer happier and healthier lives is a solution to the problem of living shorter less happy and disease ridden lives. That we eventually die isn't part of that problem. In fact it's part of the solution.
A gross materialist is trying to avoid dying? In what sense? Why would he want to permanently avoid death if he as a materialist fully accepts the limitations of his physical body? It is the religionist who lives in craven terror of permanently dying and so losing all the things he has come to habitually rely on.
The cessation of experience in death isn't problematic except in your own mind.
Noone does that better than the religious..
Reason and knowledge provides a solid basis of information on which to pivot towards new evolutionary possibilities. Religion provides none of this. It is a wastebin of old defunct concepts and childish myths than no longer have place in this world.
And yet a whole world that thrives on progress and material improvement contradicts you. People are happier than they have ever been, and that's certainly not due to any of the insanity religion has spread for over 3000 years.
I don't see any futility in material pleasure. In fact I have a hard time conceiving of any other kind.
I affirmed materiality as a creative flux. It is glorious and wondrous and energetic. There's not a thing about material reality I would change despite your religious need to demonize it.
You seem inordinately impressed by the activities of animals. What's the fascination? Do you really have such little respect for the lives of your fellow humans?
How is spoiling the notion of eternal existence a problem? Everyone dies. We need to face and accept that. Deluding ourselves with dreams of heaven and eternity might well be a form of mental masturbation for the self-deprived.
I have to be immortal not to want to commit suicide? How ridiculous..
I only acknowledged the feeble pseudolife of religion, which presents a quagmire of fictions and fantasies that drains the spirit of all energy and motivation to better itself. Material living remains exactly what I said it was--an adventure full of energy and possibilities and joys far beyond anything promised in scriptures.
Actually existence is all about letting go and being open to what comes next. As I already clearly stated.
And 99% of all Christians' understanding of such matters as well..
Given? Where is less disease and poverty causing more instead of less suffering?
Citations please..
I am? How would you know something like that?
That's certainly part of my life. But its not the end all and be all of my whole existence. I have many activities that I enjoy. None of which fixate me to the monstrous barbarisms of a religion that continues to thrive on fear and hatred and guilt.
I don't need to "pursue the sensual." It's right here, as far from my eyes as light itself or from my ears as music itself. We are awash with sensuality and feeling. It drives our whole sense of being alive and real. Taste, smell, touch. All is right here available to us at all times. It flows thru our veins and our nerves. It is who we are, religious delusions of some gaseous soul notwithstanding.
That's what I said. Embrace and let go. Everywhere this rhythm is the same. Receive and release. Affirm and detach. The whole universe vibrates with this chord. We would do well to learn it.
Embrace and let go. Just like I said..
But then I'm not the one defending the claim of an invisible magical skydaddy who will make me live forever because I'm scared of permanent loss am I?
Nope. My teeth are in fine shape. Sorry to disappoint...
Even your much touted heaven relies on projections of sensory experiences. Visions of golden streets. Trees of magical fruit. Streams of refreshing crystal water. 99 virgins awaiting every Islamic martyr. There is simply no pleasure apart from the senses. Religion is nothing if not the tragic history of all failed attempts at finding one.
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err .. no
I am simply pointing out how the innate problems of material existence have not been touched by so-called advancements in science.
It was you who was trying to put forward the case that this isn't so on the strength of medicine.
yet for some funny reason not appealing enough to take it up right now (and probably only would seriously contemplate it when your body is at the tail end of its predictable course)
Incorrect
the fact that you die, probably after passing through the phases of old age (with its concomitant state of disease) is something you cannot solve, period.
If death wasn't such a problem, you wouldn't be making such a song and dance about medicine, trying to puff it up in a manner that it obviously isn't
Not just them.
Every living entity.
Its kind of the cornerstone of sanity.
but they don't fully accept it. That's the point.
They may accept it as inevitable but that certainly does nothing to stem the tide of activities that a gross materialist performs in order to postpone (or forget) the inevitable
On the contrary, the gross materialist habitually relies on things that will fail them - the most prime example being of course their fallible body.
and yours too if you have better plans this sunday aside from slitting your wrists
actually its the forte of the hopelessly materially attached ... regardless whether they take an appearance of the religious or boldly atheistic
And thats the point : take all this so-called solid basis of knowledge for so-called "new" evolutionary possibilities and it can't compare to a mere paragraph of scripture. IOW it offers nothing but hopeless attachment to things that will shortly cease to exist in a pattern of chewing what is already being chewed.
I mean you may think you are better than a dog because you do your business on four wheels rather than four legs ... but if the business is exactly the same than the dog has it better since they don't have to work to make car repayments.
When you think about it, you wouldn't even have to be a dog owned by a very rich person to enjoy a life that is 10 times more materially enjoyable than your current one.
You keep falling back to the same tired arguments.
You continually say the standard problems of material existence are solved by such so-called progress yet all you can talk about is dumbing down the definition ("look how medicine has solved the problem of death!") or attempting to sustain a state of willful ignorance ("death is not a problem for me and it actually solves all the problems .... even though I am obviously not stupid enough to follow my own inane ideas which are obviously nothing but bluff and bravado")
:shrug:
If you think the key to material happiness lies in the pursuit of sensual enjoyment its simply due to insanity
This is why dogs and pigs out-perform you
which obviously isn't the creativity and wonder of ceasing to exist (or even having things one is attached to ceasing to exist)
which is why the inevitable march of disease and death or even the three fold nature of suffering (suffering caused by natural phenomena, other living entities and even one's own body) effectively curtail life's plans into a battle strategy as opposed to a delightful stroll down the yellow brick road
I'm actually speaking the truth.
What to speak of being explicitly my religious take on it, its practically impossible to find any sort of philosophical take on the subject, atheistic or otherwise, that entertains the hallucinatitive dribble you are going on with.
IOW, philosophically speaking, to talk of being simultaneously readily engaged in material enjoyment and also establishing a sort of detachment from the inevitable short comings of it is not the sort of thing you hear from any sort of credible philosophical school.
I am just delineating the tragedy of the situation.
Sparrows don't need to take sleeping pills at night.
Or work in a factory.
Obviously you don't have the resources to entertain alternatives but my actual question was why do you find dying to be some sort of hold up for the question of eternal life.
Earlier you said words to the effect that god offers eternal life but the joke of this is that you have to die.
My question if you have eternal life, how is "dying" going to ruin the game plan?
It seems to me, the only problem with that proposal is that it would involve having to detach from one's already established (material) position ... which of course is the fundamental problem for the gross materialist in practically every one of their 24 hours
If death is such an apparent non-issue for you and even an important solution to the problem of existence itself (at least IYHO), the question remains why it always remains low on your priority list.
Of course the obvious answer is that existence - even if its the dreadful sort that sees us take second place to dogs - is preferable in a million and one different ways that non-existence is not
since the energy is limited, so are the possibilities ... which in turn provides limited resources to what effectively becomes a dog eat dog world .... and to make matters worse, the nature of being attached to a world of limited things that will shortly cease to exist engineers a whole bevvy of aspirations and anxiety that are so constant in their afflictions that people commonly attribute a happiness to the mere ability to not suffer at the current moment (just like you said earlier : I have eaten and I have a working heater so I am happy - basically you are just saying you have temporarily solved your problem of hunger and heating).
IOW what you call happiness is of such a low grade it is actually categorized as suffering in scripture. All you can talk about is the so-called adventure of establishing temporary solutions to problems that will, due to the superior nature of material, eventually engulf you.
Call it dynamic or energetic, but if you call it happiness you are simply trying to stabilize on an unsatisfactory level of performance.
This is why animals always out-perform humans in material affairs since the human form, with its facilities of superior intelligence, simply cannot hope to be happy simply by eating food in a heated apartment.
yet no one wants to "let go" right now because they are bound by attachment.
IOW, as far as engineering a life plan/outlook goes, we only entertain "new possibilities" from the established plateau of our attachments ( a plateau that eventually falls away despite our most ardent desires and endeavours).
Of course at this point you may like to inject "but this is simply the way things are" but given that people operate their lives to avoid or postpone such an inevitability, it clearly shows that this is more a problem that they cannot solve as opposed to a mere non-problem.
But that statement is moot since it would draw from your already existing knowledge base on the subject ... which you already explained when you talked about how the bible is portrayed
practically everywhere.
Its not like the newspapers are thinner in such places because they have no subject matter.
just try google on "statistics on happiness"
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q...orrelate-with-happiness-after-a-certain-level
I assumed that a person who extols the variety and energy and opportunities of material existence had recourse to grander experiences and aspirations than eating a sandwich in front of a room heater
Fear, hatred and guilt are but a few simply sub-categories of attachment and aversion.
yet the more complex consequence of such a reality is that you are more than just an instrument amassing information from your environment - you are also a sentient being with aspirations that seeks out to shape the environment and interact with others in a host of different relationships (which in turn, provides another complex level of information assessment and aspiration).
IOW you have a life dictated by attachment and aversion and its the pursuit of such values that dictate your psychological complexity (or simplicity for that matter .... if you have no aspiration beyond eating a sandwich in front of a room heater in winter)
But its not like that all since the only moment people tend to let go is when they eventually find themselves in scenarios they have desperately tried to avoid and it is pulled away from them.
lol
but thats the problem of material existence - its not dictated by your powers of embracing (hence the position of unfulfilled desire) or your powers of letting go (try tell the bank that you have renounced the bank loan you took out from them 3 years ago).
At this point you might try and palm this all off with bravado and try and play yourself like some sort of androgynous automaton or self realized yogi in complete control of their senses that is untouched by the psychological phenomena that is so prevalent in contemporary society ("I don't care if the bank freezes my assets/ my children get molested by the police/ the next door neighbor runs over my dog/ I get diagnosed with leukemia/ yada yada) but the fact remains that this so called life outlook of embrace and let go, at the very best, is simply an ideal that faces many practical difficulties since the very nature of the individual doing the embracing or letting go is in a wider environment/society that is vastly more powerful and influential and lays the pieces on the game board.
instead you are advocating the idea of engaging whole heartedly in sensual pursuits with no real awareness of the wider environment which will dictate consequences requiring you to work ten times harder to escape
congratulations on owning eternal teeth
yes .. on it goes
Time waits for man ... so they say.
:scratchin:
A comfortable lifestyle tends to prevents people from even just contemplating the consequences of a whole season of crops failing (due to cold temperatures, floods, droughts and disease).
For comparison and more detailed data, see the Irish Potato Famine, for example.
Then they'd probably nuked eachother out a few centuries earlier.
Then why place the blame on the Catholic Church?
Because they already know they're going to a bad place in the afterlife, so they may as well get their insults in now while they still can.
I don't think you get it. Atheists don't believe in your "bad place in the afterlife", so it doesn't worry them one bit.
Then why place the blame on the Catholic Church?
Why, on the one hand, acknowledge the versatility of factors involved in social change, but then, on the other hand, nevertheless place the whole blame on only one?
Why favor the Theory of Evolution - but resent when one ends up on the losing end of it?
Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
Less suffering due to vaccinations, cures, surgery, and a healthier lifestyle isn't touching the innate problems of material existence? Not having to physically exert ourselves as much in our work and our traveling isn't solving the problem of life's exhausting drudgery. The suffering of millions caused by mental disorders and addictions isn't being alleviated by medications and therapies designed to enhance recovery? Science is constantly facilitating all sorts of solutions to the "innate problems of material existence". To deny this is just delusional.
To everything there is a season, a time to live and a time to die. That's from your own Bible btw.
The fact that I die solves the problem of suffering in a diseased aged body and mind. It isn't part of the problem. It is the solution.
Medical science alleviates suffering, disease, mental illness, addiction, pain, and the suffering of disabilities. It improves the quality of our lives immensely and continues to do so at an exciting pace. The fact that it doesn't keep us from permanently dying one day is irrelevant to all this.
Yet billions of living entities are leading happy and engaging lives even though they will die someday. How do you explain that?
Living a long healthy life is just common sense. Trying to avoid ever having to die is something else. A sick and twisted ambition of the religious to compensate for never having the courage to live a fulfilling life.
People rely on all sorts of things that eventually will fail. Cars, computers, bridges, the stock market. The amount of success they gain from these things far outweighs the inconvenience of having it break down some day. And that includes our bodies as well.
and yours too if you have better plans this sunday aside from slitting your wrists
Why would I slit my wrists?
There's so many new things coming out of the chute of the future, possibilities we haven't even anticipated, that the need to hold onto any one of them is becoming increasingly impractical. Learning and discovering new things, we are delivered from the compensating fears and attachments to our past. We move on to bigger and better things. That is the nature of evolutionary progress. And dispensing with the myths and superstitions of religion is prime example of this natural trend.
I don't compare myself like that to dogs. I am simply a different being from them. Why do you idealize the experiences of animals? Is your life so miserable that dog's laying around doing nothing is the best option you can imagine for yourself?
If dogs have a happy life, what is that to me? I'm not a dog. Why would I hold them up a standard for what I desire?
Where did I say medicine solved the problem of death? Where did I say that eventually dying someday is even a problem? Medical science increases the longevity and quality of our lives. It even facilitates a comfortable and natural way of dying called hospice and euthanasia. Only a moron would claim that a longer life of less suffering and disease is not improved because we don't live forever. Once again, why do you want to live forever? How does that make life here and now any better than it is now?
It's not the key to anything. It's simply the law of life itself. Insanity is actually the attempt to avoid sensual pleasures for some pie in the sky afterlife. A kind of collective insanity we call religion.
Out perform me how?
Every moment is a cessation of one experience and the beginning of another one. The passing away of what is into what is no longer and the birth of what is new and full of promise. We should all be used to ceasing to exist by now. It is the law of life itself, to dispense with the past and to embrace the future. Religion is the refusal to do this. It is the fixation on the same old traditions and ideas of thousands of years. That's why it is irrelevant. Because it closes itself from the future.
You can certainly sit around and mope all day about all the things that aren't happening in your life and how a lazy well fed dog is a state preferrable to your own. Or you can go out and take charge of your life and make good things happen that fill your life with excitement and pleasure and joy. The choice is yours.
So what? What need do I have a philosophical schools to lend authority to the firsthandedly learned truths of my life? I have learned purely from experience. Only the religious must fall back on abstractions and formulae for living a life they are too scared to actively live out.
Sparrows die of disease, frost bite and predatory hunters all the time. I wouldn't be so ready to idealize their lives as some sort paradisical state of perfect leisure and pleasure.
It doesn't ruin the game plan for me because I'm not religious. It only ruins the game plan of those who have to believe they will live forever in a state of perfect leisure and bliss. Death is only a problem for the delusionally pious who are so unhappy in this life it actually takes belief in an eternity in heaven to make them happy. Newflash: if you haven't mastered the art of sensual pleasure in this life then a whole eternity in paradise won't do you any good at all.
Every moment we detach from a past material position to a new material position. Like I said, matter is in constant flux and transforming itself all the time. The lesson of material existence is simple: embrace, let go, and re-embrace the new. We're doing this all the time without thinking about it.
The fact that I accept my passage from the present moment every second is the reason I have no problem with eventually dying someday. I accept the inevitability of this fate. And it gives my life a value and importance it would not normally have if I thought I was going to live forever.
I haven't temporarily solved the problem of hunger and heating. I have permanently solved it. My life is far better thanks to my access to material perks and convenience. You'd have to be one pessimistic fool not to recognize this in your own life.
I'm going die of hunger or freeze to death someday? How so? And frankly, I don't care what the Bible calls suffering--a book responsible for more misery and guilt and fear than any other book ever published.
And yet here I am quite happy with my material comforts and pleasures. I'm a living refutation of your whole cynical outlook that man can never be happy without immortality. I'm doing quite well without that delusion thank you.
Openness to the future, seen for what it is, gives us more and better things that outweigh the momentary sadness of saying goodbye to the same ole same ole. Detaching ourselves from the past, we are ready for discovery and creativity. This is the law of the universe.
Wanting to live a long healthy and happy life is the same as wanting to never die? That doesn't follow at all.
Only bad news gets printed. There are far more good things happening that we never hear about.
Eating and being warm aren't parts of the ongoing pleasure of material existence? Since when?
All phantoms generated by religious delusion, fostering the unnatural need for an afterlife where all these phantoms it causes will allegedly no longer exist.
I'm fine just living my life as I do. I don't need to aspire to greatness or fame or any of the things you apparently ascribe great value too. Simplicity is accepting the everyday materiality of being as just what it is and nothing else. Totally satisfying and totally fulfilling.
Then they let it go and move on. No problema..
Sure it is. Material things only have the value I give them. I can as easily remove that value in favor of new and different things and experience. We do this all the time everyday. It's called growing as a person.
It works for me. Don't knock something unless you've tried it.
Only in your imaginary demon haunted universe. When difficulties arise, I simply do as I always do. Let them go and move on. Nothing could be simpler or more self-evident.
Teeth that aren't rotting aren't necessarily eternal. When I die they will rot. But not before then.
Greatest I am
Valued Senior Member
Sorry to burst your bubble.
[video=youtube;jbkSRLYSojo]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo[/video]
Regards
DL