by Narkissos 86 Replies latest jw friends
Nark
In Pauls (and Calvin's) view they did die, and on the very day they ate.
I didn't know Paul commented on this particular exegetical issue.
Isn't that what your getting out of Paul, in Romans 5:12 to the end of the chapter and Ephesians 2, Being "dead in your trespasses and sins"
Narkissos,
The reason I asked is because your/our/my present view should be/is relevant to your question.
If "life goes on", then how can it be your, or anyone's foe, assuming it is a path to a superior life.
Now, what if, on that other plane, you found that things were similar to this one, or better yet, what if it was inferior to this one?
Unfortunately, or depending on how you see it, fortunately, there is only one way to find out.
Judge Dread
> I'm not discussing whether human individuals can or will (technically, for instance) reach the point where they are able to live forever (God forbid!).
Sometime around 2030 ~ 2050 humans will have the technical ability to become "immortal". At the same time we will also be vastly more intelligent as a result of augmenting our minds and bodies (Imagine having the collective knowledge and intelligence of every human on earth... and then some.). I'm not worried.
I see aging as a chronic disease that needs to be cured. To put things into perspective, should no anti-aging advancements be made, over the next 100 years 6 Billion people will be killed by the aging process.
Judge
The urge to keep on living is one of the primordial forces in evolution. If it wasn't, extinction would be practically assured. In humans, it just takes more complex forms. Secondly, it could be that the purpose of coming here is the same thing that pushes people to keep on. Conversely, and also somewhat theoretically, it may be that those who have fulfilled their purpose do pass off the scene. If so, they could know this subconsciously. Consciously accepting it is another matter. Like an actor on the stage, who discovers that they love the attention, they may need to be dragged off.
S
DD: I meant on the "day" thing. And I generally don't include Ephesians (for the notion of 'spiritually' dead/alive) in "Paul". ;)
JD: What I meant (and tried to explain) by "life goes on" doesn't require any "other plane" (nor does it rule it out, of course). And (yet?) I don't see it as a foe -- that's the point of my op.
Now your comment about the 'other plane' reminds me of Svidrigailov's in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment:
"I don't believe in a future life," said Raskolnikov.
Svidrigailov sat lost in thought.
"And what if there are only spiders there, or something of that
sort," he said suddenly.
"He is a madman," thought Raskolnikov.
"We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception,
something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that,
what if it's one little room, like a bathhouse in the country, black
and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is? I
sometimes fancy it like that."
"Can it be you can imagine nothing juster and more comforting than
that?" Raskolnikov cried, with a feeling of anguish.
"Juster? And how can we tell, perhaps that is just, and do you
know it's what I would certainly have made it," answered Svidrigailov,
with a vague smile.
Elsewhere: for some reason -- I may be wrong -- I picture most anti-aging enthusiastic posters here (you, slimboyfat, BTS on another thread, leavingwt maybe) as relatively young men (not so many young women, apparently), at a stage in life where the desire to live forever can be just another expression of the desire to live (period). I find it very natural actually, certainly not "monstrous". An older person's approach to death may be different. Bergman's movie Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries) illustrates that beautifully. Or -- more illustrative of individual differences, more cruel too -- Imamura's Narayama bushi-ko (The Ballad of Narayama).
Aging kills -- of course. Living kills, too. From this perspective, everything mankind has ever achieved it has done with a 100 % mortality rate (diachronically as you presentt it). As I tried to point out in my op, every bit of human culture (including what you call "knowledge" and "intelligence") is part of a collective strategy to get around certain and never-too-remote individual death. My bet (or sci-fi scenario) fwiw is opposite to yours: remove danger, risk, fear, urgency, necessity, fatality out of man's existence, just feed him and entertain him without a deadline and you will get the worst, the dumbest, the ugliest out of him. Remember Harry Lime's line in The Third Man? "Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." (No offence to the Swiss ;))
Satanus: Cf. Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, about Todestrieb or "drive to death". In his Ecrits Lacan reworks this notion in a less biological and more "structuralist" way, and links it with a famous quote from Petronius: "Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Sibulla, ti theleis; respondebat illa: apothanein thelo." (For with my own eyes I saw the Sibyl hanging in a jar at Cumae, and when the boys said to her, 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she replied, 'I want to die.) Somewhere Nietzsche corrects the notion of "instinct of self-preservation" with the slightly different idea that what a living being actually wants is actualisation of its potentiality, wasting itself as it realises itself.
Just found the Nietzsche passage I was thinking of (Beyond Good and Evil, I, 13):
Psychologists should bethink themselves before putting down
the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an
organic being. A living thing seeks above all to DISCHARGE its
strength--life itself is WILL TO POWER; self-preservation is only
one of the indirect and most frequent RESULTS thereof. In short,
here, as everywhere else, let us beware of SUPERFLUOUS
teleological principles!--one of which is the instinct of self-
preservation (we owe it to Spinoza's inconsistency). It is thus,
in effect, that method ordains, which must be essentially economy
of principles.
Cf. Zarathustra, LVI, 6:
"I love those who do not wish to preserve themselves, the down-going ones do I love with mine entire love: for they go beyond."
has anyone here seen the film Surrogates. It depicts a futuristic world in which humans live in isolation and interact through their robots. It is based on Issac Asimov's I, Robot. In the film humans are too embarrassed to go out as themselves. The robots can be as beautiful and pristine reps of onself as one wants.
Mate....you are such a ROBOT! Wait till your time comes to "un-plug".....I'm sure you will be filled with emotion.
I was just thinking about how we mark time. Isn't it by means of all the different things that happen to us and the world we live in. When each day runs into the other with hardly any differences, then, imo we tend to lose track of time.
hope that makes sense
I picture most anti-aging enthusiastic posters here (you, slimboyfat, BTS on another thread
What thread? I am missing part of the picture here.
I wouldn't call myself an anti-aging enthusiast. I just saw a comedy programme on the BBC with Aubrey de Grey the other day and mentioned him casually in this thread.
http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/watchtower/bible/183083/1/Good-Watchtower-Study-today
Personally I think it would be great if scientists managed to extend life even further, and more importantly prevent and cure horrible diseases, but I am not all that optimistic about humans achieving the dramatic sort of breakthrough de Grey predicts, I have to say, and even less so about my own chances of making it. But it's a worthy goal I reckon. Imagine if Jehovah's Witnesses were to give up the idea of 'standing still and seeing the salvation of Jehovah' and decided that human salvation is in our own hands. Then they could be an interesting movement indeed.
Why are you down on older people who don't fancy death and decay? Not all old people who want to keep living are like the geezers in Cacoon, or Seinfeld's parents in Florida you know. What about the great thinkers cut down in old age with no hint of running out of ideas?
