For further context to the question, see the following quote; whether you agree or disagree with its general assessment, notice the aesthetically pleasing manner in which the author carefully chooses and arranges his words:

"This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Its significance and framing give it the chief part of its value. Let it be known to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy, its glow and gilding vanish. The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of death and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness.

The lustre of the present hour is always borrowed from the background of possibilities it goes with. Let our common experiences be enveloped in an eternal moral order; let our suffering have an immortal significance; let Heaven smile upon the earth, and deities pay their visits; let faith and hope be the atmosphere which man breathes in; — and his days pass by with zest; they stir with prospects, they thrill with remoter values. Place round them on the contrary the curdling cold and gloom and absence of all permanent meaning which for pure naturalism and the popular science evolutionism of our time are all that is visible ultimately, and the thrill stops short, or turns rather to an anxious trembling.

For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature’s portion. The merrier the skating, the warmer and more sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of the total situation."

- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902 (bold mine)

Disagree'd, probably because I'm a young, cocksure punk with no old age or wisdom at all. I can only hope I go out happily or unexpectedly.

Alternatively, I'd settle for a time-slip where I end up on a Middle Ages battlefield, sword and buckler in hand.

As an old fart I agree completely.

(August 20, 2014 at 8:01 pm)Minimalist Wrote: As an old fart I agree completely.

You mean being an old fart doesn't bring you enough joy?

Disagreed.

I hope that by the time I'm dying, I will approach my end with no regrets, knowing that I changed the world for the better, surrounded by my family.

(August 20, 2014 at 8:04 pm)Chuck Wrote:

(August 20, 2014 at 8:01 pm)Minimalist Wrote: As an old fart I agree completely.

You mean being an old fart doesn't bring you enough joy?

Wait until you learn about aching knees and backs.

And us old bastards use our dicks for pissing with these days!

It's just the standard theistic appeal to consequences.

"Oh, those poor fatalistic atheists! They don't pretend to have the same eternal better thing that we pretend to have, how can they possibly be happy without pretending they've got something better than other people!"

And as usual, in accusing others a much richer picture is painted of the accuser, a man for whom life has no joy or meaning if it doesn't go on forever. A man who can't see the pleasure in simply living, but only the satisfaction of the idea that it'll keep on happening. This isn't a person who values life, it's a person who's afraid of endings. The thing he values is eternity, in any form at all, regardless of the quality of the life it's attached to, if he truly can't see any good in a finite existence.

All it is, is this desperate need to pretend that the next day will be exactly like today, and it's fucking sad on its own.

I'm no old fuck, so I leave it to someone far wiser in that department
George Carlin on Death - RIP: http://youtu.be/3PiZSFIVFiU

(August 21, 2014 at 2:08 am)Esquilax Wrote: It's just the standard theistic appeal to consequences.

"Oh, those poor fatalistic atheists! They don't pretend to have the same eternal better thing that we pretend to have, how can they possibly be happy without pretending they've got something better than other people!"

And as usual, in accusing others a much richer picture is painted of the accuser, a man for whom life has no joy or meaning if it doesn't go on forever.

Though a man whose melancholia about life's hardships and brevity arguably represents the mindset that has, throughout written history, plagued the greater part of our species.

Quote: A man who can't see the pleasure in simply living, but only the satisfaction of the idea that it'll keep on happening. This isn't a person who values life, it's a person who's afraid of endings. The thing he values is eternity, in any form at all, regardless of the quality of the life it's attached to, if he truly can't see any good in a finite existence.

All it is, is this desperate need to pretend that the next day will be exactly like today, and it's fucking sad on its own.

Not that the next day will be exactly like today; that the next day will be. Period. I think it's superficial to regard the apparent nothingness that envelopes material existence for all but the brief moment we are given to experience as irrelevant to the here and now of that experience. For myself anyway, it creates a situation that is far more pessimistic, if not wholly absurd.