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can you live with knowing after death there is nothing

For me, knowing there is nothing after death is pretty much the only way I could live. Thinking about heaven, hell, souls carrying on living... it all sounds pretty tiring and far-fetched to me. I like the fact that, before I was born, I didn't exist, and afterward I will cease to exist as well. It's comforting, and to be honest it's the only way I've found makes it possible for me to wrap my head around the concept of living, of life, at all.
 
^ Fantastic response.

A lack of an afterlife or pre-life actually makes humanity sacred -- our flesh and bones are the physical vessel for our conscious selves, and when they vanish, so do we.
 
Personally, I would answer this question in saying that, yes, being alive and suffering even to the most extreme degree is preferable to death. The claim that nonexistence is preferable to a suffering existence is equivalent to the claim that a suffering existence is actually a destructive presence. Human beings tend to view suffering as destructive, because it is generally correlated with destruction (injury to the body, injury to welfare in general) -- but death is the ultimate injury to body and mind.
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So could you never see yourself wanting euthanasia? I mean, I can certainly see how one's quality of life could deteriorate so far that it would just no longer be worthwhile. For instance, I imagine that if I was being tortured, I might eventually beg for death. Would you honestly rather spend another few days of having your teeth pulled out with pliers and your genitals hooked up to the mains, then being killed, rather than a quick bullet to the temple? I think that, even if you hold this as a philosophical position, in the real situaton you'd change your mind pretty quick.
 
^ I do believe that it's possible for one's quality of life to deteriorate to the point of making existence not worth the resources required to sustain it (hence my thread on the ethics of artificially sustaining the extremely elderly). However, I place some value, be it negligibly tiny or significant, on all life.

And, you're absolutely right -- if I ever found myself forced to choose between a long drawn out torturous death and a quick one, I'd pussy out, in layman's terms. :D In that sort of a situation, philosophical principle tends to go out the window.
 
Hell yeah I can. I hope there is absolutely nothing after death. That sounds like heaven to me. I can't imagine everlasting bliss. I can believe an eternity in hell though. I'd probably get used to hell after a while. Sometimes I feel like I'm in hell.
 
Death is the high cost of living...

Yep, I think it's all ashes to ashes, dust to dust. If there is anything after death, it is that all the information about you will be randomised and the atoms and quanta that make "you" up will become disconnected.

That's just what I believe based on a synthesis of all the scientific evidence out there. <-:
 
I think i have much more to learn here, nothing after death would be to easy.
 
The next thought is: would the consensus of this thread be the same if we had never heard of a thing called 'religion'--all we knew was life...?
 
What would be the point of death if there's something after it?

Kind of melodramatic if that's the case, IMO.

I really can't understand the irrational fear of death that so many people display. It's not some scary boogie-man, its a natural process that happens to every single being that lives.
 
Roger&Me said:
I really can't understand the irrational fear of death that so many people display. It's not some scary boogie-man, its a natural process that happens to every single being that lives.
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i dont think its as much of a fear of death as a fear that they lived it wrong
its a reflection on life, they are scared that they might have devoted their life to following a line that might lead to nowhere but oops too late now its over, cant do it again
 
to me this life as being great and awful, and i see after death as a mystery and i really would not want to live knowing if there is something or nothing afterward
and i think it suck how people want to believe in afterlife or in nothing, cuz then they base their life on what they believe in, and that belief in both case seem to be a closed minded stance to a open ended mystery


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and isnt death suppose to be the greatest mystery of them all ?
and isnt that the greatest thing ?
 
ninjadanslarbretabar said:
to me this life as being great and awful, and i see after death as a mystery and i really would not want to live knowing if there is something or nothing afterward
and i think it suck how people want to believe in afterlife or in nothing, cuz then they base their life on what they believe in, and that belief in both case seem to be a closed minded stance to a open ended mystery


images



and isnt death suppose to be the greatest mystery of them all ?
and isnt that the greatest thing ?
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Like it, new perspective, like living in the now, not planning not believing just allowing things to unfold as it happens with no expectations of sorts.
 
i find it very hard to think that when i die there can just be nothingness. i think its because our brain cant process what nothingness would be and that we find it impossible to think its possible. therefore i believe that something has to happen after death.

to answer your question though, if i knew that there was nothing and we would just go back into the ground and pay back what we owe to the planet for basically giving us life in the first place then tbh that doesn't even sound that bad at all. it makes more sense and seems to have more truth to it than anything else really.
 
ninjadanslarbretabar said:
to me this life as being great and awful, and i see after death as a mystery and i really would not want to live knowing if there is something or nothing afterward
and i think it suck how people want to believe in afterlife or in nothing, cuz then they base their life on what they believe in, and that belief in both case seem to be a closed minded stance to a open ended mystery
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Basing our lives on our deaths has been very prudent for us. Natural selection has randomly plotted out a path for our species. This happened because in death we knew existence wasn't there (or to humor, not the same) so we escape death as much as possible and reproduce as much as possible. To me death has never been a mystery, the animated life ceases to animate for infinity. All the cell rigors all the energy spent, everything that was used to animate now gone. The inner workings of death are clearly visible and I see that nothingness is in the same, as visible.

As I said before, it isn't hard to imagine. Your life cycle as it stands now you've already brushed up with nothingness.

Non-existence, existence, non-existence.
 
Deja said:
You don't KNOW after death there is "nothing". None of us know what happens after death.
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However, it is THIS that I find unacceptable, yet it is this with which I must live. :P

Jamshyd said:
I can only hope for nothing after death. That would be spectacular.
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To try to introduce precision where I necessarily cannot, insofar as death is 'nothing', is it not necessary that it is 'non-being' which lies beyond our ability to conceptualize via negation? That is, isn't this 'nothing' that particular non-thing which is absolutely not a non-"thing"?

ebola
 
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