The promise of life after death is religion's lure. Freedom from religious dogmas originates from acceptance that there is no life after death.
While I do think the fear of death is an important theme, I don't think it explains everything.
I suggest that we have an urge toward objectivity in various forms. We crave a fixed set of rules. We want to resolve cognitive dissonance. We want to know that we are 'clean' or 'innocent' (or 'chosen' or 'elite') with relative certainty. We want to know how to decide whether a statement is true or not, true for everyone.
If I feel like a part of something objective and timeless, then perhaps I can make peace with the death of my individual self. But that's because I've projected my essential self on to the objectivity that doesn't die.
But humans also desire novelty and innovation, so the ideal situation is an objectivity that can be added to and yet not taken from. That way I not only survive in 'god'=objectivity but help to build 'god'=objectivity. I think science, literature, visual art, music, math, politics, and other pursuits have some of this structure.
Finally, (in my view) the religious urge will survive the death of traditional religion if such a death occurs. Humans are almost 'essentially' religious if we generalize the concept of religion as the quest for the deathless that is not necessarily birthless.
CuddlyHedgehogFebruary 18, 2018 at 00:00#1542100 likes
Yes it does:
"And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to reproaches and everlasting abhorrence" [Daniel 12:2]
Yes it does:
"And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to reproaches and everlasting abhorrence" [Daniel 12:2]
You are just reading from the Torah. I'm referring too what religious Jewish people actually believe and many sects gives no account of life after death. You asked the question and now you are getting the answer so just revise your belief. That is the simplest way to go.
CuddlyHedgehogFebruary 18, 2018 at 00:22#1542210 likes
The simplest is not necessarily the right way to go. Now, if I may, I shall remain skeptical of your argument.
Now, if I may, I shall remain skeptical of your argument.
Skepticism is inimical to your position in this situation. You have made two claims in the OP. The skeptical position is to doubt any claim. Your claims remain under a cloud of skeptical doubt unless you can find some convincing evidence to dispel that cloud.
Reply to CuddlyHedgehog It's not an argument, it is information. While religion is closely related to spiritualism, one might normally expect a religion to be interested in the nature of the spirit. In some cases, people get together to discuss the spirit in the here and now, and not to be concerned with the hereafter. Such is the case in some forms of Judaism. Now that you have this information, you can go b it and inquire and revise your beliefs.
CuddlyHedgehogFebruary 18, 2018 at 00:36#1542260 likes
I have seen no convincing evidence that judaism does not believe in some sort of afterlife existence, therefore, I am skeptical about that claim. I have however seen evidence to the contrary which I cited above.
CuddlyHedgehogFebruary 18, 2018 at 00:53#1542310 likes
Information is based on facts, not on mere statements and I am afraid to say that what you are offering in this conversation is self-justifying beliefs that carry no objectivity at all. I take it you encourage people to change their opinions and beliefs so that they match yours quite often. By the way, spirituality infers there is a disconnection between body and spirit, however, science will tell you consciousness originates from electrical activity in the brain and thus cannot be separated from bodily functions and be considered in some sort of metaphysical capacity.
There are no facts. Just information you can collect by your own observations and by talking to people. Do some homework, understand people, and learn about life. Life is quite interesting when one engages with it and learns how different people can be.
CuddlyHedgehogFebruary 18, 2018 at 01:18#1542370 likes
Presumably you are giving yourself that advice. You need it.
Reply to CuddlyHedgehog I do it all the time and I'm constantly reminding myself it is a reasonable way to spend a life. I'm always interested in observing how people react to new information.
I have seen no convincing evidence that judaism does not believe in some sort of afterlife existence, therefore, I am skeptical about that claim.
That relates to a claim about one religion that was made part way down the thread. But you still have your OP sitting there consisting of two unsupported claims, covering all religions, not just one. A reader of this thread is entitled to be skeptical of your claims, and you have done nothing to dispel that skepticism.
CuddlyHedgehogFebruary 18, 2018 at 02:02#1542520 likes
A claim is by definition an assertion that requires no evidence of proof. An opinion if you like.
Reply to CuddlyHedgehog Oh, do you mean the OP is just your opinion? In that case there's nothing to argue about. It would be very presumptuous of anybody to tell you that what you think is your opinion is not really your opinion.
Hi Freud, you're going to have to substantiate those claims, especially in light of this: http://www.newsweek.com/fear-death-atheists-religion-dying-afterlife-believers-575496
The sum of Christianity (the religion I am most familiar with) is not all about dealing with the fear of death.
First, not everyone (Christian or other) is very afraid of dying. Some people are reconciled to the end of their existence at the time of death. Not all Christians believe in in an afterlife, and there can be sharp disagreement about what "afterlife" even means.
For some Christians who take God to be a vindictive torturer of souls, there is is more hazard in a life after death (it might be hell on steroids) than no life after death at all (merely non-existence).
The fear of life after death is, to some extent, part of the package of religion, which posits an afterlife about which you need advice and direction. If Christianity offers a way to avoid hell, a lot of the wide-screen technicolor propaganda on hell came from the church in the first place.
According to Joshia Royce, 19th c American philosopher, paraphrased by Bill Vallicella, the basis of religion is like this.
‘a) There is a paramount end or aim of human life relative to which other aims are vain.
b) Man as he now is, or naturally is, is in danger of missing his highest aim, his highest good.
To hold that man needs salvation is to hold both of (a) and (b). The religious person perceives our present life, or our natural life, as radically deficient, deficient from the root (radix) up, as fundamentally unsatisfactory; he feels it to be, not a mere condition, but a predicament; it strikes him as vain or empty if taken as an end in itself; he sees himself as homo viator, as a wayfarer or pilgrim treading a via dolorosa through a vale that cannot possibly be a final and fitting resting place; he senses or glimpses from time to time the possibility of a Higher Life; he feels himself in danger of missing out on this Higher Life of true happiness. If this doesn't strike a chord in you, then I suggest you do not have a religious disposition. Some people don't, and it cannot be helped. One cannot discuss religion with them, for it cannot be real to them. It is not, for them, what William James in "The Will to Believe" calls a "living option," let alone a "forced" or "momentous" one. 1’
So, it’s not ‘fear of death’ as such, but the feeling that life as ordinarily lived is not a worthwhile or true kind of life, and there is a way of being which could be had, but which we’re at grave risk of not seeing.
The promise of life after death is religion's lure. Freedom from religious dogmas originates from acceptance that there is no life after death.
I believe religion is an fundamental expression of how our minds work. Humans see patterns, project their internal world onto the external one. It is a common human experience to feel an emotional, perceptual attachment to the physical world. I think that represents, generally at an unconscious level, an accurate perception of the nature of reality, what some call "the ground of being."
In my experience, that impulse comes first, the stories come later. Life after death is one of those stories.
Harry HinduFebruary 18, 2018 at 13:57#1543790 likes
Showing that Christians don't fear death actually supports the claim that the belief in the after-life actually alleviates their fear of death. Arguing against the OP would entail providing the names of religions that don't believe in the after-life AND a list of religions that do believe in the after-life but still fear death.
If you don't fear death then what you've done is perform mental gymnastics in order to come up with some idea(s) that changes what death actually is. It would be a wonder why anyone who believes that the afterlife exists AND is better than their life now doesn't just "kill" themselves to get to the next part of their lives?
Personally, I think it is more of the fear of being unimportant, or not having a purpose in life, that provides the catalyst for believing in some religion or another. Thinking that you are immortal is one way to alleviate that fear. But also believing in an ultimate creator with a "divine" plan for you and everything else is another way of easing the fear.
An extremely unfortunate obsession with self indeed!
The Christian and Buddhist understanding is that the only way to realise the higher life is to lose the self altogether, so a fundamental, and probably willful, misinterpretation.
It's interesting to see religious faith as motivating the same sort of acts as secular authenticity. The deficiency of life in terms of its current state is interpreted either towards the potential for a higher relationship with oneself or a higher relationship towards the divine. Strange that the two meet. Very Protestant.
Reply to fdrake Well, Protestantism had a particular perspective on it, based on 'sola scriptura' and the relationship of the believer and Jesus Christ as Saviour. But I can't see how anything to do with religion and spirituality can be divorced from the idea of aspiration - the sense that there is a higher or better or more complete way of life, which is what the religion in question is said to codify. What else could it be? I mean, the OP typically sells it short, but then in a secular world, very few have any grasp of what it is they're purportedly trying to explain away.
It's not an irony, it's a paradox. I's expressed in the verse, for example, 'He who saves his life shall lose it, he that looses his life for My sake will be saved'. That is kind of the central 'koan' of Christianity, perhaps.
Well, Protestantism had a particular perspective on it, based on 'sola scriptura' and the relationship of the believer and Jesus Christ as Saviour. But I can't see how anything to do with religion and spirituality can be divorced from the idea of aspiration - the sense that there is a higher or better or more complete way of life, which is what the religion in question is said to codify. What else could it be? I mean, the OP typically sells it short, but then in a secular world, very few have any grasp of what it is they're purportedly trying to explain away.
As soon as faith takes on a personal character, aspirations take the form of divine grace. The particularity of the relationship with the divine imbues the believer with an orientation towards their own relationship with divinity - which is realised through a person's actions. In the grace of God or in contravariance to it. Personal failures can then be interpreted through the relationship as not just impediments to aspiration in the secular sense - obstacles, square pegs forcing themselves through round holes - but within a mythopoetic narrative of cosmic significance. What is cosmic is also instantiated into the believer as a work in progress - personalised relationships with the divine allow reclaiming the etymology of kosmos as worldly order. In this sense, the meaning of all decisions is enriched in the same manner as secular self-transcendence as returning to what is fundamentally yours.
It's not an irony, it's a paradox. I's expressed in the verse, for example, 'He who saves his life shall lose it, he that looses his life for My sake will be saved'. That is kind of the central 'koan' of Christianity, perhaps.
Perhaps; but my point was that he who "feels himself in danger of missing out on this Higher Life of true happiness" is not the one who "loses his life for My sake" but "he who saves his life" and "shall lose it".
Religion, then, gives the possibility of heroic victory in freedom and solves the problem of human dignity at its highest level. The two ontological motives of the human condition are both met: the need to surrender oneself in full to the rest of nature, to become a part of it by laying down one's whole existence to some higher meaning; and the need to expand oneself as an individual heroic personality. Finally, religion alone gives hope, because it holds open the dimension of the unknown and the unknowable, the fantastic mystery of creation that the human mind cannot even begin to approach, the possibility of a multidimensionality of spheres of existence, of heavens and possible embodiments that make a mockery of earthly logic — and in doing so, it relieves the absurdity of earthly life, all the impossible limitations
and frustrations of living matter. In religious terms, to "see God" is to die, because the creature is too small and finite to be able to bear the higher meanings of creation. Religion takes one's very creatureliness, one's insignificance, and makes it a condition of hope. Full transcendence of the human condition means limitless possibility unimaginable to us.—
CuddlyHedgehogFebruary 19, 2018 at 00:36#1545230 likes
Finally, religion alone gives hope, because it holds open the dimension of the unknown
Not really. One can arrive at many types of spiritual ideas and evidence simply by practicing and studying spirituality. It's like billiards, if you don't practice, you can't learn.
WISDOMfromPO-MOFebruary 19, 2018 at 06:07#1545790 likes
Denying the possibility of an after-life is as equally nonsensical as affirming it.
Think about what could possibly be meant by an "after-life". Aren't we merely imagining another potential within-life experience?
If the human brain is only capable of imagining within-life experiences, then it is impossible for a human brain to deny the existence of an after-life.
And no, the "denial of an after-life" doesn't win by default of the premise being meaningless.
Noble DustFebruary 19, 2018 at 09:10#1546090 likes
CuddlyHedgehogFebruary 19, 2018 at 11:53#1546740 likes
Reply to WISDOMfromPO-MO we don’t know for sure but there are some pretty good indications if we are to believe science and not hocus-pocus.
CuddlyHedgehogFebruary 19, 2018 at 12:03#1546760 likes
Reply to sime the human brain can only function because of the neuron activity inside its circuits. Consciousness is the result of such activity. When we die the brain disintegrates back to its building elements, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon etc that get recycled and reused by nature. The “spirit” cannot exist without matter. This theory makes sense to me and is easily explainable by simple physics and medical science. Everything else is speculative and unfounded wishful thinking, in my opinion.
the human brain can only function because of the neuron activity inside its circuits. Consciousness is the result of such activity. When we die the brain disintegrates back to its building elements, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon etc that get recycled and reused by nature. The “spirit” cannot exist without matter. This theory makes sense to me and is easily explainable by simple physics and medical science. Everything else is speculative and unfounded wishful thinking, in my opinion.
Yes. I am merely following that logic even further. If the thoughts of a person are reducible to their memories and their current environmental stimulus, then this must also be the case for a person's thoughts concerning an "after-life". Hence what is being referred to by talk of "an after-life" cannot be of anything transcendent of memory and the immediate environment.
For a behaviourist, the only meaningful reaction to a person asking "is there an after-life" is to understand the physical circumstances that provoked their question. For example, perhaps on further investigation it is determined that the questioner is recalling a scene from a movie they have seen and are wondering if they might find themselves in a similar scene in the future after having witnessed a funeral held in their name. In which case the answer might be " it is potentially possible that you witness a reconstruction of this movie scene in the future having witnessed a funeral held in your name".
What the behaviourist cannot say is "no, there isn't an after-life" under the pseudo-scientific assumption that the person is literally referring to a transcendental idea that isn't reducible to their current state of mind and physical circumstances.
If we understand all metaphysical ideas as being reducible to our current state of mind and interactions with the world, then questions about an after-life should dissolve, rather than being answered in the affirmative or the negative.
CuddlyHedgehogFebruary 19, 2018 at 12:33#1546840 likes
Reply to sime May I remind you of the definition of metaphysics? “abstract theory with no basis in reality.”
With regards to your statement “under the pseudo-scientific assumption”, they’re not assumptions, they’re facts based on physics, anatomy and physiology.
May I remind you of the definition of metaphysics? “abstract theory with no basis in reality.”
With regards to your statement “under the pseudo-scientific assumption”, they’re not assumptions, they’re facts based on physics, anatomy and physiology.
if the meaning of the word "metaphysics" really is "an abstraction with no basis in reality", then how is it possible that you uttered this sentence?
I think you misunderstand me. For the behaviourist, any verbal utterance of a so-called "metaphysical principle" is reducible to stimulus-response usage. To think anything else is to assume the falsity of behaviourism, and hence to assume the falsity of physics, anatomy and physiology.
It is certainly pseudo-scientific to assume that either a believer in the after-life, or non-believer in the after-life, can literally reference their self non-existence.
Imagine two people Bob and Alice discussing life after death; Bob has a definite understanding of what it means to say that the world continues to exist after the destruction of Alice. And likewise, Alice has a definite understanding of what it means to say that the world continues to exist after the destruction of Bob. Yet this doesn't imply that Bob can meaningfully say of himself that the world continues to exist after the destruction of Bob, or that Alice can meaningfully assert of herself that the world continues to exist after the destruction of Alice.
CuddlyHedgehogFebruary 19, 2018 at 13:47#1547070 likes
Reply to sime There'd be less risk of misunderstanding you if you abandoned the use of pompous, self-asserting, idiosyncratic deductions, for the sake of clarity.
TheMadFoolFebruary 20, 2018 at 07:33#1550340 likes
Yes, Fear of Death is only one of the reasons Religion is around. Justice is another reason. The horrible things that happen in this life will be justified in the life to come.
CuddlyHedgehogFebruary 20, 2018 at 14:54#1551380 likes
Reply to matt There'd be no such chance if there was no "life to come". Another supporting idea that the absence of afterlife would negate the need for religion.
Reply to CuddlyHedgehog Correct, IF there is no afterlife, no Justice. You're stating there is no afterlife. Do you feel you have sufficient evidence to make this claim? Wouldn't it be fairer to say we don't know what happens after we die?
Religion also helps people that have a Fear of Life.
CuddlyHedgehogFebruary 20, 2018 at 15:27#1551550 likes
Reply to matt There is no way to show "evidence" for something like this, either in support or against. It can only be a conclusion one arrives at after considering the logic behind the assumptions. We don't have concrete evidence that pigs are not capable of singing, however, we have a pretty good idea that this might be the case. The absence of evidence to the contrary indicates that they probably can't sing.
The promise of life after death is religion's lure. Freedom from religious dogmas originates from acceptance that there is no life after death.
"[i]Man becomes aware of the sacred because it itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane. To designate the act of manifestation of the sacred, we have proposed the term hierophany. It is a fitting term, because it does not imply further; it expresses no more than is implicit in its etymological content, i.e., that something sacred shows itself to us. It could be said that the history of religions - from the most primitive to the most highly developed - is constituted by a great number of hierophanies, by manifestations of sacred realities. From the most elementary hierophany - e.g., manifestation of the sacred in some ordinary object, a stone or a tree-to the supreme hierophany (which, for a Christian, is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ) there is no solution of continuity. In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act - the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural "profane" world.
The modem Occidental experiences a certain uneasiness before many manifestations of the sacred. He finds it difficult to accept the fact that, for many human beings, the sacred can be manifested in stones or trees, for example. But as we shall soon see, what is involved is not a veneration of the stone in itself, a cult of the tree in itself. The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adored as stone or tree; they are worshipped precisely because they are hierophies, because they show some thing that is no longer stone or tree but the sacred, the ganz andere.
It is impossible to overemphasize the paradox represented by every hierophany, even the most elementary. By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu. A sacred stone remains a stone; apparently (or, more precisely, from the profane point of view), nothing distinguishes it from all other stones. But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality. The cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany.
The man of the archaic societies tends to live as much as possible in the sacred or in close proximity to consecrated objects. The tendency is perfectly understandable, because, for primitives as for the man of all pre modem societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and, in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with being. Sacred power means reality and at the same time enduringness and efficacity.The polarity sacred-profane is often expressed as an opposition between real and unreal or pseudoreal. (Naturally, we must not expect to find the archaic languages in possession of this philosophical terminology, real-unreal, etc.; but we find the thing.) Thus it is easy to understand that religious man deeply desires to be, to participate in reality, to be saturated with power.[/i]"
-Mircea Eliade, "The Sacred and the Profane", p. 11 - 13.
"For our purpose it is enough to observe that desacralization pervades the entire experience of the nonreligious man of modem societies and that, in consequence, he finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies."
Ibid. p. 13.
The logical/factual irrationality of most religions would still be an irresistibly emotivated dysfunctionally functional psychological crutch to many as long as any fear(s) at all could be "felt", individually proportional to degrees of 'feeliness' and ignorant rationalization in those susceptible, vs practiced informed rationality.
The promise of life after death is religion's lure. Freedom from religious dogmas originates from acceptance that there is no life after death.
I am given to understand that religion also provides a context for social interaction. though the same can be achieved with pop music and football team supporting.
I was talking to an ex-patriot Welshman the other day who was talking about how the local Capels had been taken over for property development and turned into houses.
In his 'village', there is now one Church (C of E) still opening every Sunday to a small audience and 19 ex-Capels - all now converted into housing. Villages are small, so to have 20 religious buildings in a village meant that every Sunday only the sick or infirm stayed home.
The Capel was a place for gossip and socialisation.
It would seem that TV and other entertainments have taken the place of that particular "religious" function.
The promise of life after death is religion's lure. Freedom from religious dogmas originates from acceptance that there is no life after death.
Topic Title: Would there be a need for atheism if there was no fear of responsibility & accountability?
The promise of the end of life with the coming of death is atheism's lure. Freedom from responsibility & accountability is achieved through the acceptance that there is no life after death.
Topic Title: Would there be a need for atheism if there was no fear of responsibility & accountability?
Atheism does not absolve anyone from responsibility or accountability .
Atheists are good without the promise of an afterlife, or the threat of eternal punishment.
Atheism does not absolve anyone from responsibility or accountability .
Atheists are good without the promise of an afterlife, or the threat of eternal punishment.
So what happens if you commit serious immoralities and then commit suicide? Don't you escape punishment according to the atheist view?
So what happens if you commit serious immoralities and then commit suicide? Don't you escape punishment according to the atheist view?
No more or less than a religious person. Break the law and risk getting caught. Behave badly and risk the censure of the public.
Suicide is painless, and an answer to some problems. Why mention it?
Comments (57)
For some adherents of some religions, sure. But for all adherents of all religions? I doubt it.
Judiasm has no central position on afterlife.
While I do think the fear of death is an important theme, I don't think it explains everything.
I suggest that we have an urge toward objectivity in various forms. We crave a fixed set of rules. We want to resolve cognitive dissonance. We want to know that we are 'clean' or 'innocent' (or 'chosen' or 'elite') with relative certainty. We want to know how to decide whether a statement is true or not, true for everyone.
If I feel like a part of something objective and timeless, then perhaps I can make peace with the death of my individual self. But that's because I've projected my essential self on to the objectivity that doesn't die.
But humans also desire novelty and innovation, so the ideal situation is an objectivity that can be added to and yet not taken from. That way I not only survive in 'god'=objectivity but help to build 'god'=objectivity. I think science, literature, visual art, music, math, politics, and other pursuits have some of this structure.
Finally, (in my view) the religious urge will survive the death of traditional religion if such a death occurs. Humans are almost 'essentially' religious if we generalize the concept of religion as the quest for the deathless that is not necessarily birthless.
"And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to reproaches and everlasting abhorrence" [Daniel 12:2]
You are just reading from the Torah. I'm referring too what religious Jewish people actually believe and many sects gives no account of life after death. You asked the question and now you are getting the answer so just revise your belief. That is the simplest way to go.
Skepticism is inimical to your position in this situation. You have made two claims in the OP. The skeptical position is to doubt any claim. Your claims remain under a cloud of skeptical doubt unless you can find some convincing evidence to dispel that cloud.
There are no facts. Just information you can collect by your own observations and by talking to people. Do some homework, understand people, and learn about life. Life is quite interesting when one engages with it and learns how different people can be.
That relates to a claim about one religion that was made part way down the thread. But you still have your OP sitting there consisting of two unsupported claims, covering all religions, not just one. A reader of this thread is entitled to be skeptical of your claims, and you have done nothing to dispel that skepticism.
Daniel wasn't in the Pentateuch (Torah), the last time I checked.
Would there be a need for philosophy if there weas no fear of death?
The sum of Christianity (the religion I am most familiar with) is not all about dealing with the fear of death.
First, not everyone (Christian or other) is very afraid of dying. Some people are reconciled to the end of their existence at the time of death. Not all Christians believe in in an afterlife, and there can be sharp disagreement about what "afterlife" even means.
For some Christians who take God to be a vindictive torturer of souls, there is is more hazard in a life after death (it might be hell on steroids) than no life after death at all (merely non-existence).
The fear of life after death is, to some extent, part of the package of religion, which posits an afterlife about which you need advice and direction. If Christianity offers a way to avoid hell, a lot of the wide-screen technicolor propaganda on hell came from the church in the first place.
‘a) There is a paramount end or aim of human life relative to which other aims are vain.
b) Man as he now is, or naturally is, is in danger of missing his highest aim, his highest good.
To hold that man needs salvation is to hold both of (a) and (b). The religious person perceives our present life, or our natural life, as radically deficient, deficient from the root (radix) up, as fundamentally unsatisfactory; he feels it to be, not a mere condition, but a predicament; it strikes him as vain or empty if taken as an end in itself; he sees himself as homo viator, as a wayfarer or pilgrim treading a via dolorosa through a vale that cannot possibly be a final and fitting resting place; he senses or glimpses from time to time the possibility of a Higher Life; he feels himself in danger of missing out on this Higher Life of true happiness. If this doesn't strike a chord in you, then I suggest you do not have a religious disposition. Some people don't, and it cannot be helped. One cannot discuss religion with them, for it cannot be real to them. It is not, for them, what William James in "The Will to Believe" calls a "living option," let alone a "forced" or "momentous" one. 1’
So, it’s not ‘fear of death’ as such, but the feeling that life as ordinarily lived is not a worthwhile or true kind of life, and there is a way of being which could be had, but which we’re at grave risk of not seeing.
I believe religion is an fundamental expression of how our minds work. Humans see patterns, project their internal world onto the external one. It is a common human experience to feel an emotional, perceptual attachment to the physical world. I think that represents, generally at an unconscious level, an accurate perception of the nature of reality, what some call "the ground of being."
In my experience, that impulse comes first, the stories come later. Life after death is one of those stories.
If you don't fear death then what you've done is perform mental gymnastics in order to come up with some idea(s) that changes what death actually is. It would be a wonder why anyone who believes that the afterlife exists AND is better than their life now doesn't just "kill" themselves to get to the next part of their lives?
Personally, I think it is more of the fear of being unimportant, or not having a purpose in life, that provides the catalyst for believing in some religion or another. Thinking that you are immortal is one way to alleviate that fear. But also believing in an ultimate creator with a "divine" plan for you and everything else is another way of easing the fear.
An extremely unfortunate obsession with self indeed!
As to the OP; religion can be as much, and more rightly I think, concerned with suffering in this life as with an imagined afterlife.
The Christian and Buddhist understanding is that the only way to realise the higher life is to lose the self altogether, so a fundamental, and probably willful, misinterpretation.
It's interesting to see religious faith as motivating the same sort of acts as secular authenticity. The deficiency of life in terms of its current state is interpreted either towards the potential for a higher relationship with oneself or a higher relationship towards the divine. Strange that the two meet. Very Protestant.
And right there lives the greatest of ironies.
Quoting Janus
It's not an irony, it's a paradox. I's expressed in the verse, for example, 'He who saves his life shall lose it, he that looses his life for My sake will be saved'. That is kind of the central 'koan' of Christianity, perhaps.
As soon as faith takes on a personal character, aspirations take the form of divine grace. The particularity of the relationship with the divine imbues the believer with an orientation towards their own relationship with divinity - which is realised through a person's actions. In the grace of God or in contravariance to it. Personal failures can then be interpreted through the relationship as not just impediments to aspiration in the secular sense - obstacles, square pegs forcing themselves through round holes - but within a mythopoetic narrative of cosmic significance. What is cosmic is also instantiated into the believer as a work in progress - personalised relationships with the divine allow reclaiming the etymology of kosmos as worldly order. In this sense, the meaning of all decisions is enriched in the same manner as secular self-transcendence as returning to what is fundamentally yours.
Perhaps; but my point was that he who "feels himself in danger of missing out on this Higher Life of true happiness" is not the one who "loses his life for My sake" but "he who saves his life" and "shall lose it".
I like Becker's analysis in his Denial of Death:
Not really. One can arrive at many types of spiritual ideas and evidence simply by practicing and studying spirituality. It's like billiards, if you don't practice, you can't learn.
Actually, it is transhumanism that is promising the conquest of death.
Quoting CuddlyHedgehog
Freedom from dogma would mean accepting reality.
This is reality: none of us knows for sure what happens to us after we die.
Think about what could possibly be meant by an "after-life". Aren't we merely imagining another potential within-life experience?
If the human brain is only capable of imagining within-life experiences, then it is impossible for a human brain to deny the existence of an after-life.
And no, the "denial of an after-life" doesn't win by default of the premise being meaningless.
:100:
(sorry, I do agree, just sampling the new wares)
Yes. I am merely following that logic even further. If the thoughts of a person are reducible to their memories and their current environmental stimulus, then this must also be the case for a person's thoughts concerning an "after-life". Hence what is being referred to by talk of "an after-life" cannot be of anything transcendent of memory and the immediate environment.
For a behaviourist, the only meaningful reaction to a person asking "is there an after-life" is to understand the physical circumstances that provoked their question. For example, perhaps on further investigation it is determined that the questioner is recalling a scene from a movie they have seen and are wondering if they might find themselves in a similar scene in the future after having witnessed a funeral held in their name. In which case the answer might be " it is potentially possible that you witness a reconstruction of this movie scene in the future having witnessed a funeral held in your name".
What the behaviourist cannot say is "no, there isn't an after-life" under the pseudo-scientific assumption that the person is literally referring to a transcendental idea that isn't reducible to their current state of mind and physical circumstances.
If we understand all metaphysical ideas as being reducible to our current state of mind and interactions with the world, then questions about an after-life should dissolve, rather than being answered in the affirmative or the negative.
With regards to your statement “under the pseudo-scientific assumption”, they’re not assumptions, they’re facts based on physics, anatomy and physiology.
if the meaning of the word "metaphysics" really is "an abstraction with no basis in reality", then how is it possible that you uttered this sentence?
I think you misunderstand me. For the behaviourist, any verbal utterance of a so-called "metaphysical principle" is reducible to stimulus-response usage. To think anything else is to assume the falsity of behaviourism, and hence to assume the falsity of physics, anatomy and physiology.
It is certainly pseudo-scientific to assume that either a believer in the after-life, or non-believer in the after-life, can literally reference their self non-existence.
Imagine two people Bob and Alice discussing life after death; Bob has a definite understanding of what it means to say that the world continues to exist after the destruction of Alice. And likewise, Alice has a definite understanding of what it means to say that the world continues to exist after the destruction of Bob. Yet this doesn't imply that Bob can meaningfully say of himself that the world continues to exist after the destruction of Bob, or that Alice can meaningfully assert of herself that the world continues to exist after the destruction of Alice.
I'm confused on this issue.
On one hand it appears as though religion feeds off of our deepest fears (meaninglessness) and hopes (meaning/purpose).
On the other hand there's truth. We're all born with a thirst for truth and may be, just may be, the afterlife is a truth.
So, while present knowledge doesn't accomodate an afterlife it also doesn't preclude it in any way. Does it?
Yes, Fear of Death is only one of the reasons Religion is around. Justice is another reason. The horrible things that happen in this life will be justified in the life to come.
Religion also helps people that have a Fear of Life.
"[i]Man becomes aware of the sacred because it itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane. To designate the act of manifestation of the sacred, we have proposed the term hierophany. It is a fitting term, because it does not imply further; it expresses no more than is implicit in its etymological content, i.e., that something sacred shows itself to us. It could be said that the history of religions - from the most primitive to the most highly developed - is constituted by a great number of hierophanies, by manifestations of sacred realities. From the most elementary hierophany - e.g., manifestation of the sacred in some ordinary object, a stone or a tree-to the supreme hierophany (which, for a Christian, is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ) there is no solution of continuity. In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act - the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural "profane" world.
The modem Occidental experiences a certain uneasiness before many manifestations of the sacred. He finds it difficult to accept the fact that, for many human beings, the sacred can be manifested in stones or trees, for example. But as we shall soon see, what is involved is not a veneration of the stone in itself, a cult of the tree in itself. The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adored as stone or tree; they are worshipped precisely because they are hierophies, because they show some thing that is no longer stone or tree but the sacred, the ganz andere.
It is impossible to overemphasize the paradox represented by every hierophany, even the most elementary. By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu. A sacred stone remains a stone; apparently (or, more precisely, from the profane point of view), nothing distinguishes it from all other stones. But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality. The cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany.
The man of the archaic societies tends to live as much as possible in the sacred or in close proximity to consecrated objects. The tendency is perfectly understandable, because, for primitives as for the man of all pre modem societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and, in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with being. Sacred power means reality and at the same time enduringness and efficacity.The polarity sacred-profane is often expressed as an opposition between real and unreal or pseudoreal. (Naturally, we must not expect to find the archaic languages in possession of this philosophical terminology, real-unreal, etc.; but we find the thing.) Thus it is easy to understand that religious man deeply desires to be, to participate in reality, to be saturated with power.[/i]"
-Mircea Eliade, "The Sacred and the Profane", p. 11 - 13.
"For our purpose it is enough to observe that desacralization pervades the entire experience of the nonreligious man of modem societies and that, in consequence, he finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies."
Ibid. p. 13.
"Plenty"??? Name three!
I am given to understand that religion also provides a context for social interaction. though the same can be achieved with pop music and football team supporting.
I was talking to an ex-patriot Welshman the other day who was talking about how the local Capels had been taken over for property development and turned into houses.
In his 'village', there is now one Church (C of E) still opening every Sunday to a small audience and 19 ex-Capels - all now converted into housing. Villages are small, so to have 20 religious buildings in a village meant that every Sunday only the sick or infirm stayed home.
The Capel was a place for gossip and socialisation.
It would seem that TV and other entertainments have taken the place of that particular "religious" function.
Topic Title: Would there be a need for atheism if there was no fear of responsibility & accountability?
The promise of the end of life with the coming of death is atheism's lure. Freedom from responsibility & accountability is achieved through the acceptance that there is no life after death.
:snicker: :kiss: :fire: :rofl: :lol: :100: :ok:
Reading this thread honestly made my day.
Atheism does not absolve anyone from responsibility or accountability .
Atheists are good without the promise of an afterlife, or the threat of eternal punishment.
So what happens if you commit serious immoralities and then commit suicide? Don't you escape punishment according to the atheist view?
No more or less than a religious person. Break the law and risk getting caught. Behave badly and risk the censure of the public.
Suicide is painless, and an answer to some problems. Why mention it?