(July 21, 2017 at 10:08 am)LadyForCamus Wrote: I wonder sometimes if any religious folk out there harbor a secret fear of their promised-land. Trying to imagine what the experience of being with god is like must be as futile an exercise as trying to imagine non-existence. They, themselves, often purport that god's greatness is too powerful for our mere mortal brains to comprehend, so I have to think there must be at least some degree of anxiety attached to the notion that when you die, you're leaving what you know, and are familiar with, and crossing into the unknowable.If there's something "out there," and it involves immortality, it's unlikely to involve our status in the well-meaning struggle of hairless monkeys. I cant imagine how sex would be reconciled-- you gonna show up in heaven and have Gramps at 20 years old, packing wood in his 1940's vogue golf pants? Is Tomb Raider-era Angelina Jolie going to be okay with me trying to rub baby oil on her 24/7?
Nah, you have to be 100% right on this. Whatever might be there, it's not what's here, and whoever that dude is, if it's human, it's not me. Soul or no soul, experience or no experience, bennyboy has to metamorphose into something radically different at best, or just disappear.
Quote:I think it's reasonably fair to assume that even if suicide wasn't a sin, most theists wouldn't be leaping off bridges left and right in their unbridled anticipation of heaven. Evolution via natural selection has grounded us all firmly here, philosophical positions notwithstanding.My view of the idea of sins is that they are the animal instincts gone too far for well-being-- gluttony, sex obsession, etc. They represent a loss of control of consciousness over the unconscious impulses. Suicide, unless it's done in a chemically-imbalanced depressive state, can't be that-- it is an overcoming of animal fear on a philosophical or social basis. Life and death, like almost anything else, look very different the more you zoom in or out on them, and even some of those moral issues with family and so on really look more and more like emotional reactions on the chimp-brain level than ration arguments for struggling on.
That being said, I'm a little worried when threads like this come up. I don't want to be an enabler for an actual act of suicide, because I believe for the most part those clever enough to seriously consider philosophical implications at that level are the kind of people I need to stick around for my own interest's sake, and are smart enough that their loss represents more than disappointment of a few family members, but potentially a net loss for humanity.
