According to the bible death is the last enemy.
My thoughts are life is so uncertain the only time a person can possibly say they had a wonderful life is when they are dead.
As to if death is an enemy that can be defeated I have know idea.
Acolytes
Death ... friend or enemy?
by The Berean 22 Replies latest jw friends
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snowbird
Public Enemy #2.
Sylvia
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BurnTheShips
Since I believe it isn't the end, just a new beginning, it's a friend when it comes at the right time. I want to tarry here for a long time, however. There's just too much cool stuff left to do and see for me.
BTS
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frankiespeakin
According to how evolution works the majority of the human species have evolved with a natural tendency to want to live, and will struggle to keep on living, it is in our genes. It is all based on the principle of the best adapted survive get to replicate more often than those not best adapted, and so we have a long ancestry predominated by those who wanted to live as those who didn't,, didn't get replicate as often. It is that simple to me.
So quite naturally most view death as an enemy with some qualifying reservations of course.
But based on strict logic, devoid of all the religious hokus pokus, cultural indoctrination, I wonder what the answer would be?
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Twitch
Everything that has a beginning, has an end. Whether death is a friend or foe depends on your beliefs. To me, it just is.
I'm not motivated to do stuff before I die, I do what needs to be done, today.
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Paralipomenon
I feel death would only be welcome by the unmotivated.
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frankiespeakin
Here is a quote from Narkissos on the same subject:
If we step back only a little, death is an integral part of the system we call life. The cycle of sex and death determines the living sphere as that of constant renewal. New genes combinations, always unique and diferent. This cycle is what made us, not only biologically but also culturally. Signs, symbols, rituals, language, representations, which gradually made up the "world" on which our individual and collective self-understandings depend have been constructed over generations upon and against this specific biological (mammal) reality. Because of this experience we as a species have learnt to cry, laugh, smile, love and play, relate to each other as well as to past and future generations. Culture gets its structures from the necessity of getting around inevitable death and individual, social limitations through a potentially infinite number of strategies. Our specific representation of time which makes death a "problem" to some is itself dependent on death. Tragedy is the cornerstone of culture -- even though comedy comes right on its footsteps.
Imo it takes more than vanity or self-centeredness -- an incredible amount of ignorance, or lack of reflection about what they are, for individuals to (seriously!) assume they want to live forever. Can one really want his or her combination of genes and family, educational and cultural circumstances to remain forever, rather than the continuation of life through other combinations? And yes it is either/or. Even the WT cheats with this problem by portraying children in its Paradise pictures, obscuring the fact that a deathless mankind would also be a birthless and childless mankind sooner or later. Nothing like mankind actually.
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!). Rather, whether they would really want that given the possibility. And who, or rather what they would be -- or become -- if they did. What monsters of selfish mediocrity would never get tired or bored with themselves and never desire to disappear for the sake of the other...
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frankiespeakin
This subject also raises the question of what is the right view? or Is there any right view of death?
It is a very subjective one clearly depending on one's point of view at any given time subjected to what are one's circumstances at the time.
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frankiespeakin
Borean,
Could it be that death is natures prod and a necessary motivator of life and should be thus celebrated?
I fail to see death as some sort of design by "nature" to prod us towards motivation and thus should be celebrated. It sounds poetic though.
Birth and death are in fact an integral part of why and how we evolved with out the two we would have never come into being, and one may choose to celebrate the process for a various number of reasons perhaps to ease the pain of loss and feel less intimidated by it.
View points vary and we all have our ways of coping with the inevitable, some use God as a sort of pain killer, other use philosophy, some use drugs & alcohol. I think some like Steven Hawkins & Albert Einstein use mathematical problem solving equations to deaden the pain and give there lives some sort of meaning.
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VoidEater
It's always a matter of context and timing. If things were different, they wouldn't be the same - of that we can be sure.