RE: Are some people truly better off believing?
May 23, 2015 at 4:45 pm
(This post was last modified: May 23, 2015 at 4:47 pm by Razzle.)
(May 23, 2015 at 3:50 pm)Pyrrho Wrote: That is more complicated than it needs to be. Before you were conceived, you did not exist. Think about the year 1800. Was that a bad year for you? Did you suffer in any way at that time? That is like what 2200 will be for you.
This is not something new, and is a very old idea. Here are the words of Epicurus:
Accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply the capacity for sensation, and death is the privation of all sentience; therefore a correct understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life a limitless time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terrors for him who has thoroughly understood that there are no terrors for him in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.
http://www.epicurus.net/en/menoeceus.html
I agree and mentioned this line of reasoning as another possible means of losing the fear, but as I said, there's also for those so inclined, a much more profound perspective that can liberate you from not just the fear of death, but the fear of ANYTHING in the future, and from regrets of anything in the past. I'm sure the above, simpler concept is also enough to completely comfort at least some people about death, though.
"Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You don't grab hold of the water when you swim, because if you do you will become stiff and tight in the water, and sink. You have to relax, and the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging, and holding on. In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be."
Alan Watts
Alan Watts