Posts by Narkissos

86

Death: Friend or Foe?

by Narkissos in

jw
friends

the jw and the (pseudo?

)scientific "hopes" of individual "everlasting life" (which have been connected on a couple of recent threads) have at least something in common: they all seem to take for granted that death is a bad thing.. as amazing as it may be to you, this amazes me so much that i don't know even where to start.

of course death hurts in reality when you lose people you love, or in imagination when you anticipate your own extinction.

Narkissos

Earnest,

Interesting indeed. Did he refer to that himself, or is it JW insiders' knowledge? (I understand from your post it is more than rumour) -- which might imply some interest from the JW community in his theories.

Goldensky,

I replied to your pm days ago! Check the envelope icon on the top right corner of the screen, and refresh the page if it doesn't appear right away (the current pm system doesn't work very well).

I believe it takes exactly a lifetime -- long or short -- to really come to terms with the prospect of dying. But even starting to think about it makes a difference. And this is exactly what dreams of everlasting life prevent you from doing.

***

There is a social and political dimension to this issue as well as a purely private psychological one imo. The thought of aging and death is one of the most consistently avoided, and often forcefully repressed, in today's culture (from education to commercials). It doesn't cease to exist but becomes invisible, confined to secrecy and loneliness. It becomes shameful, to the point of not even arising to consciousness in some cases. Even aging people are pressured not to look old, not to think old, and never to speak about death, to behave in every way as if they should be living forever. They have to sound unchanged, intact, otherwise they get embarrassing to everyone (i.e., everyone's sense of unchanging identity and integrity).

Now I believe there is an obvious, simple, straightforward relationship between freedom and the acceptance of death. The more people have consciously integrated and embraced their mortality, the less carrots and sticks of all kinds work on them. The more dangerously free they are. On the other hand, a flock of "unique" and "irreplaceable" individuals who do not want to die, think they may not have to and depend on a medical, technical, social, economic, political system to postpone death or avoid it altogether would be very easy to control, and its individual members all the more alike and replaceable.

86

Death: Friend or Foe?

by Narkissos in

jw
friends

the jw and the (pseudo?

)scientific "hopes" of individual "everlasting life" (which have been connected on a couple of recent threads) have at least something in common: they all seem to take for granted that death is a bad thing.. as amazing as it may be to you, this amazes me so much that i don't know even where to start.

of course death hurts in reality when you lose people you love, or in imagination when you anticipate your own extinction.

Narkissos

sbf,

Sorry for the ambiguity: I just meant I seemed to recall BurnTheShips, who hasn't commented here so far, had also made some enthusiastic comments on the prospect of defeating aging on another thread (don't remember where). Maybe he'll weigh in -- I'm sort of curious how this fits into a Catholic perspective, among other things.

One indication of "enthusiasm" to me is jumping from a "might happen" to a "will happen". Another -- less endearing to me -- is attacking the morality of people who question whether it "should happen" -- were it possible. (Btw DeGrey may be a brilliant scientist, but he comes across as a great mind manipulator as well.)

You made an interesting point earlier about how suppressing the notion of natural death from old age would bring accidental death to front stage. This meets a thought I have often had, on how the medical advances in general have made some kinds of death (infant or confinement mortality, for instance) exceptional but also more difficult to cope with when they do happen. Again, my bet is this would make society even more obsessed with safety than it is, repressing the unconscious longing for death which I believes has a part in the individual psychè.

w007,

Wait till your time comes to "un-plug".....I'm sure you will be filled with emotion.

You're kind of making my point. Facing death in a not too remote way is what makes us "human". I haven't seen Surrogates (thanks for the tip ql) but the motif of human-like creatures (robots, androids, as in Blade Runner, or even materialised phantasms like in Solaris) growing a soul as they face extinction is quite a topos in sci-fi.

44

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. From the Nov 1 WT

by life is to short in

jw
friends

the november 1st public wt has an article on "do you need to learn hebrew and greek?

" funny is it not that they feel we do not need too.

anywho on page 21 of said wt.

Narkissos

TD

I first read the 1995 article on this board, not so long ago, and the general survey of hè genea autè in the Synoptics struck me as better than what they had made of it before -- and later. Of course the enormous flaw was taking the temporal implication of the word out of it where the context made it explicit (the Olivet discourse), under the pretext that is was not that explicit elsewhere... but that's where they had to land at that point, whatever the path they would follow to get there. Playing the pejorative connotation of hè genea autè against its temporal meaning (although they are absolutely not incompatible) was clever if disingenuous. I wondered if that was basically F.W. Franz's posthumous work -- in that case, not exactly the misunderstanding from "a little knowledge".

86

Death: Friend or Foe?

by Narkissos in

jw
friends

the jw and the (pseudo?

)scientific "hopes" of individual "everlasting life" (which have been connected on a couple of recent threads) have at least something in common: they all seem to take for granted that death is a bad thing.. as amazing as it may be to you, this amazes me so much that i don't know even where to start.

of course death hurts in reality when you lose people you love, or in imagination when you anticipate your own extinction.

Narkissos

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."

86

Death: Friend or Foe?

by Narkissos in

jw
friends

the jw and the (pseudo?

)scientific "hopes" of individual "everlasting life" (which have been connected on a couple of recent threads) have at least something in common: they all seem to take for granted that death is a bad thing.. as amazing as it may be to you, this amazes me so much that i don't know even where to start.

of course death hurts in reality when you lose people you love, or in imagination when you anticipate your own extinction.

Narkissos

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.

86

Death: Friend or Foe?

by Narkissos in

jw
friends

the jw and the (pseudo?

)scientific "hopes" of individual "everlasting life" (which have been connected on a couple of recent threads) have at least something in common: they all seem to take for granted that death is a bad thing.. as amazing as it may be to you, this amazes me so much that i don't know even where to start.

of course death hurts in reality when you lose people you love, or in imagination when you anticipate your own extinction.

Narkissos

But, as you say, your "self" is not a static thing: you can change it as a matter of will, and it is also necessarily changed regardless of our will.

As I see it, it has a limited potential for change. Satanus expressed that very well above. Limited and variable flexibility, which decreases with time and realisation -- I for one do not think reed is "good" and oak is "bad," even though the reed survives the storm and the oak doesn't. Reminds me again of the last scene in Bertolucci's 1900. The two old characters, weary of their old discussions, playing their children game of laying on the railroad as the train approaches -- to death this time, and the kids get up and laugh. Nothing like real children to see the world with children's eyes.

86

Death: Friend or Foe?

by Narkissos in

jw
friends

the jw and the (pseudo?

)scientific "hopes" of individual "everlasting life" (which have been connected on a couple of recent threads) have at least something in common: they all seem to take for granted that death is a bad thing.. as amazing as it may be to you, this amazes me so much that i don't know even where to start.

of course death hurts in reality when you lose people you love, or in imagination when you anticipate your own extinction.

Narkissos

JudgeDread

Can you please enlighten me about what your view is concerning life after death.

Do you believe it ends here, or is there something after?

That's a bit off-topic, but in two words (or three): life goes on. "I" am, "I" will have been one of its many forms in space-time. This is no less a "religious" belief than soul survival, resurrection or reincarnation, just the one I can express at this point.

86

Death: Friend or Foe?

by Narkissos in

jw
friends

the jw and the (pseudo?

)scientific "hopes" of individual "everlasting life" (which have been connected on a couple of recent threads) have at least something in common: they all seem to take for granted that death is a bad thing.. as amazing as it may be to you, this amazes me so much that i don't know even where to start.

of course death hurts in reality when you lose people you love, or in imagination when you anticipate your own extinction.

Narkissos

If you don't want to extend life dramatically in the way he envisages I suppose you have to explain exactly what sorts of debilitating and degenrative illnesses you would rather keep even when the technology arrives to prevent and reverse them.

It seems just as certain as "millions now living will never die"...

Well, maybe the global ecosystem will find its own way to maintain balance if Jehovah is not quick enough to prevent Adam from reaching the tree of life this time. We might see interesting wars between the young, poor, low-life-expectancy populations and the old, rich immortals -- desire against power in sum; suicide epidemies among the latter (that will be forbidden of course, but all the more attractive). Either that, or the "last generation" will have the privilege of staring at each other down to the end of the solar system, and perhaps find some new ways to further their unique set of genes and multi-lifted faces in the meantime.

I think your contempt for "risk averse" old people only reveals your own bias, and dare I say, lack of empathy for people who presumably do not view their attempts at longer life as pointless.

At least you don't want me to live forever, do you?

86

Death: Friend or Foe?

by Narkissos in

jw
friends

the jw and the (pseudo?

)scientific "hopes" of individual "everlasting life" (which have been connected on a couple of recent threads) have at least something in common: they all seem to take for granted that death is a bad thing.. as amazing as it may be to you, this amazes me so much that i don't know even where to start.

of course death hurts in reality when you lose people you love, or in imagination when you anticipate your own extinction.

Narkissos

DD

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.

What about the verses about the ressurection I included in my quote 50-55?

I think Paul's view evolved with time and circumstances. In 1 Corinthians 15 he defends (in a not completely satisfying way imo) the general idea of resurrection (although giving it his own spin) before a Greek audience to whom the concept is basically redundant and meaningless. His wording here comes closer to the perspective of individual destiny (especially with the unique use of sômata pneumatika, "spiritual bodies,"plural). Still the notion of change is central: what is sown (flesh and blood, in death) is not what is raised up. Death is not denied. The perspective in Romans and Philippians is different. More Christological than individual. More centered on the eternal mystery of death and life in which Christians already share than on what happens to individuals at death.

PS

One wonders what Christianities view of death would have been if Revelation was NOT accepted as Canon.

I'm not sure what Revelation changes on this topic. What do you think?

86

Death: Friend or Foe?

by Narkissos in

jw
friends

the jw and the (pseudo?

)scientific "hopes" of individual "everlasting life" (which have been connected on a couple of recent threads) have at least something in common: they all seem to take for granted that death is a bad thing.. as amazing as it may be to you, this amazes me so much that i don't know even where to start.

of course death hurts in reality when you lose people you love, or in imagination when you anticipate your own extinction.

Narkissos

To blueblades (not a reply ;)):

"Why did I not die at birth,
come forth from the womb and expire?
Why were there knees to receive me,
or breasts for me to suck?
Now I would be lying down and quiet;
I would be asleep; then I would be at rest
with kings and counselors of the earth
who rebuild ruins for themselves,
or with princes who have gold,
who fill their houses with silver.
Or why was I not buried like a stillborn child,
like an infant that never sees the light?
There the wicked cease from troubling,
and there the weary are at rest.
There the prisoners are at ease together;
they do not hear the voice of the taskmaster.
The small and the great are there,
and the slaves are free from their masters.
"Why is light given to one in misery,
and life to the bitter in soul,
who long for death, but it does not come,
and dig for it more than for hidden treasures;
who rejoice exceedingly,
and are glad when they find the grave?
Why is light given to one who cannot see the way,
whom God has fenced in?

Job 3:10ff.