Because I forgot what it was like
Can’t forget something that doesn’t exist.
It did but you wasn’t aware of it at the time
I have never experienced unending nothingness, only noted the nothingness after it was over
That’s a good point, though I think it’s also fair to say that you won’t experience unending nothingness after death from that perspective, either. I can see how coming to accept that the world existed before our experience began could help one confront the world will continue to exist after our experience has ended.
Because there is no coming back.
We only get one ride in this rollercoaster and half of us want to make the ride living hell for the rest of us.
Half? Try an alarmingly small number and they are damn good at it.
Why are you so sure about this? Believing there is no reincarnation is just a religious dogma of Christianity or rather all abrahamitic religions and therefore deeply engraved in our culture so we don’t even consider other possibilities. Similar to how in buddhist and hinduistic cultures reincarnation is the default way of imagining life before birth and after death.
Believing there is no reincarnation is just a religious dogma of Christianity
I don’t know that that’s true.
We as a society don’t know what happens when we die, conscious-wise. To state “we definitely do come back” or “we definitely don’t” would be incorrect, just like saying “there’s definitely aliens” vs “there definitely are not”.
However, we can use evidence we’ve gathered over thousands of years of existence and make assumptions. Unless I’m mistaken, there’s little evidence that has been accepted by the scientific community (Western or Eastern) to support reincarnation, so to say that “we don’t come back” is a Christian dogma is a little unfair.
To be clear I don’t have a strong opinion on reincarnation. I’ve heard compelling stories that are hard to explain otherwise, but I feel like we’d have been able to gather at least some concrete data on it over the span of our existence.
That’s exactly my point. What’s the concrete data against reincarnation would someone from a buddhist culture ask (probably even when they aren’t religious). I am just saying what we accept as default and for what we demand evidence depends on the cultural background.
I might have formulated it exxagerated. But believing in “YOLO” is as evidence based as believing in reincarnation.
Similar as atheism is a belief as well: believing that there is no god. How do they know? It seems my point of view is more agnostic than most here.
Words like “atheism” or “agnostic” make sense as shorthands for everyday conversations or labelling, but if you want to be rigorous about it, it makes more sense to use 4 categories:
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Gnostic theist: I know there’s a God, I’ve met Him, I feel it, I have faith, etc.
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Agnostic theist: I don’t know if there’s a god or not, but I prefer to believe there’s one
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Agnostic atheist: if we don’t know if there’s a god or not, there’s no reason to believe there’s one. Do you assume there’s an invisible giant teapot orbiting Earth because there’s no proof to the contrary?
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Gnostic atheist: a god can’t possibly exist, the concept of a god is illogical, etc.
I’m agnostic atheist, but maybe there could a firm reasoning for the gnostic atheist position. I don’t know, I would have to read and think about it more.
Interesting categories, but I don’t find myself in any of them: We don’t know if there is a god therefore I neither believe in its existence nor in its non-existence because it doesn’t matter anyway. If god(s) exist they either don’t affect human lives or they do it without letting us know how and why. In both cases there is no reasons to change anything in my life.
I think this view is called apathetic or pragmatic agnosticism.
I don’t know, that seems very similar to agnostic atheism to me. Is there any situation where you would act differently if you’d consider yourself agnostic atheist instead of apathetic agnostic?
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So where do the „extra“ humans come from in these religions? What I mean is the increasing number of people being alive at the same time.
I don’t know but there are probably explanations. One that I could imagine is that there really is only one consciousness or soul that splits itself up in as many parts as it wants to experience the universe and itself.
You could ask questions like that about the belief that there is no reincarnation or soul as well. Where does consciousness come from? What is it? How can electrochemical reactions be the equivalent of tasting a pizza?
I don’t believe in a soul. That is definitely not religious dogma.
The idea that reincarnation is the default and one would have to be indoctrinated against it is… I would say, a very interesting position to take, if I’m being polite.
I am rather saying it is nothing we can prove or disprove and both views ar equally legit. It just seems to us one view is more legit because of our cultural background.
Sure? Christianity? Nah, atheism. I just don’t walk around believing stuff just because other people believe it. And if reincarnation is real I don’t see it as coming back, you’re a different person after all.
Because, now that i aquired conciusness, i dont want to lose it. i dont want to re experience nothingness. ffs id rather suffer for eternity than not live at all.
if religion wasnt so unbelievable id probably be religious. but alas i just have to hope that i am wrong in my understanding that there is no afterlife
You didn’t acquire consciousness, you acquired a human life.
I’m not afraid, I’m annoyed. I’ll never get to finish my unfinished books. >:(
We live and we die, but we don’t start or stop existing. Everything that is us is still here. And in time, what was us becomes something new and different.
The miracle of life is a rare and magical opportunity for a bit of our grand panoply of matter to direct its own future. And, I believe, the horror of death is in that return to idleness and loss of control. We don’t want to return to the sidelines, to be put back on the shelf. We don’t want to become mere stuff again. We want to keep playing the game.
I’m not afraid of death. I’m afraid of dying
Came to say the same thing. Dying sounds painful, even in most of the best case scenarios
If I knew for a fact that I was going to die instantly, without even knowing it happened, I’d be worried about how my loved ones would feel, but okay with it as far as I’m concerned.
Afraid? Hardly. More like
Nothingless void is as believable as afterlife. From scientific point of view neither make sense, it’s like we’re giving ourseleves some metaphysical distinctiveness from the rest of universe but are merely physical bodies inside of it according to our scientific knowledge. And according to that we precisely know what’s after death: we rot in grave, and that’s it. But that answer is not satisfying for us, because what we call our consciousness will stop existing at some point, and we try to find logical state of us, when there is no longer us. I don’t really think it’s possible to describe how’s that like at all.
Nothingness void is just another phrase for "irreversible loss of consciousness. Which is orders of magnitudes more believable than afterlife.
But why call it void if there’s no void at all? Or nothingness. There’s only void and nothingness when universe ends (according to facts about our universe). Yet people still think about it as a state of our consciousness, when there is no really any ‘state’ after we die. It’s like
NULLvsUNDEFINEDor uninitialized variable in programming, or at least I see this that way.The universe ending is not actually fact. It’s just a theory.
I wasn’t burdened by the curse that is awareness before I was born, and hence now as a result of this awareness, I am scared.
We are not cursed to know, we are blessed! We are a fantastic arrangement of atoms that so happen to be arranged into people instead of rocks!
We are, at the end of the day, infinitely small chunks of the Universe able to see, experince, know, and look back into ourselves!
I may be hammered, and the world is in an especially frightening place at the moment, but damn is it good to have my atoms arranged into a person instead of a tree
I did not choose to be here and I resent that there are expectations put upon me when I wasn’t the reason I am here now.
I also resent that I was born just to die one day.
It is also fundamentally horrifying that so many people are born into painful awful experiences and then die, with that being more or less mostly all they knew while alive. And that some people live happy lives on its own doesn’t justify the horror in my eyes at all.
That said, I wish I could be drunk right now but I’m at work.
Tbf nobody has ever experienced either because experience is exclusive to being alive and conscious
The After is not what we fear. It is the pain of the transition
Having grown up with the concept of an eternal hell hammered into my head since day 1, I spent many years fearing the after much more than the transition.
Ah well, Religion does that for you.
The key is to accept that the end of consciousness is a feature of existence, and not a bug.
Cope harder meatbag
It’s not the death part that scares me. It’s the transition between living and dead that’s going to suck.
But then I had a really terrible November 2024 and am still suffering a high-suicidality psychotic break, so my opinion might be biased.
Well for what it’s worth I’m glad you’re still around to contribute to the conversation :)
This strangely made me feel a better about the concept of death.
Sometimes I think about it and fall in a few seconds of existential dread. But this kinda…makes it make sense?
It brought me some comfort too.
