Death

[DennisK]

i fear death, i don't understand it. i would love nothing more than to have a god that looked after me and i would live on for eternity in heaven, sadly, this is not the case. i suppose as i grow older, i will be able to grasp what happens when you die a little bit better. but for the time being, i do fear death.

What I fear about death is not the dying or the nothingness.  I fear not being relevant.  Not that I view myself as being all that relevant now.  I believe I have a good deal of potential energy built up that could be harnessed into relevance and death would ground that energy forever.  As I'm writing, I am seeing how sad it is to have good intentions you may never use.

[rlrose328]

I may fear dying (actually the pain associated with it) but I don't fear death itself.  What's to fear?  It's nothingness.  And I can't do anything about what happens after I'm dead, either in the world or about my memory or what I left behind, so I refused to worry about it at all.

I do scrapbooking... I put photos and paper and other stuff on pages and I write down how I feel, the stories of what's going on in my life.  I would hope that someday, someone will care enough to thumb through it and get to know me... maybe my grandchildren or my daughter-in-law.  Realistically, however, I know no one anywhere or at any time, will give a rat's ass about my scrapbooks.  They are irrelevant even now, while I'm alive (I'm the only one who pulls them off the shelf to look at).

We are here... and then we are not, in the blink of an eye.  And to be concerned about any of that when there are so many more important issues at hand makes no sense to me.

[Asmodean]

What I fear about death is not the dying or the nothingness.  I fear not being relevant.  Not that I view myself as being all that relevant now.  I believe I have a good deal of potential energy built up that could be harnessed into relevance and death would ground that energy forever.  As I'm writing, I am seeing how sad it is to have good intentions you may never use.

Eh... If you ask me, hatefully remembered is better than greatfully forgotten. But I'm a megalomaniac. (*looks at avatar*)

[DeathSShead1488]

Death is nothing.

Go visit any concentration camp or holocaust museum and come back.

You'll be thinking of death and either hate Hitler of adore him. I can't stop thinking about death, and how fascinating it is. I am alive, and they are dead. I am dominant. Death is crazy. Life is chance, and death is cheap.

[Kyuuketsuki]

You'll be thinking of death and either hate Hitler of adore him. I can't stop thinking about death, and how fascinating it is. I am alive, and they are dead. I am dominant. Death is crazy. Life is chance, and death is cheap.

And you're an idiot.

Kyu

[Asmodean]

Death is nothing.

If it was nothing, it would not have existed

Go visit any concentration camp or holocaust museum and come back.

Why?

You'll be thinking of death and either hate Hitler of adore him.

You forgot the choice number three - MY choice. You see, I don't give a flying duck about Hitler, Holocaust or the WW2. It happened before my time and before my parents' time so I don't care and I don't want to care. If I want to see death up close, I'll go be a health care worker in Darfur or a merc in Palestine.

I can't stop thinking about death, and how fascinating it is. I am alive, and they are dead. I am dominant. Death is crazy. Life is chance, and death is cheap.

They being who, exacly? And how are you the dominant one unless you are the one who killed "them"? "Cheap" and "Crazy" are very relative terms. Cheap and crazy are very relative terms. I would say that life is cheap and crazy, not death. MY life, that is - I'm in no position to assign a value or to someone else's.

[Moosader]

I was just having another thought, though I don't see a reason to post a new thread for it.
Let's see, how do I phrase it.

My family basically believe at some point, you have to stop fighting nature and just die.  They were talking about how 50% of all Medicaid or Medicare funds go to the last six months of peoples' lives, just prolonging things with expensive procedures.
They were also talking about how my stepdad's mom is declaring bankruptcy, and also has a lot of health problems.
My parents talk about at what point they'd end it, such as when they're not able to take care of themselves anymore or have a bad disease and such.

They, and even I, think at some point there's not much use to continue to waste resources, especially if someone is so frail they can't help anyone else.  If I were diagnosed with a terminal disease, I'd at least try to volunteer and help people my last years/months/days.

What do you guys think?  Do you think you should keep grasping to life as long as possible, or is it honorable to let yourself die for the sake of others, or something else?
And if Christians believe they're going somewhere, and my parents don't, why do my parents accept death so much easier? ;P

I'd be alright with dying as long as I didn't realize it or it were really quick.  I'm young, so I'd be pissed if I knew I'd never get to program all the things I want!

[Wechtlein Uns]

My feelings on death are a little strange, seeing as how I don't feel I have a permanent soul. I view myself as interacting with phenomena in a subject object relationship, and that's it. I believe that while a single body experiences things, experience itself is... well... eternal, I guess. You continue to experience for as long as their is something to experience, even if it's not your body and mind that is experiencing things. Kind of like reincarnation, but not really. I don't go into the one body, one reincarnation, thing. I just think that there is interaction, the universe is interaction, and there is awareness of that interacation. Both are everlasting, so while I don't think I, as Wechtlein Uns will live forever, I feel I as a bundle of relationships will transcend death, so long as things interact.

pretty strange huh? It's like believing in eternal life and not believing in it at the same time. Weird, huh?

[wheels5894]

I also agree with most of what has been posted. I hope that my death will help others - either by organ donation or  a medical school having my body for teaching purposes. After all, I will have no other use for it!

Someone once put death as like go under with an anaesthetic - the world fading to black. The only difference is that you can only know afterwards that the world went black with the anaesthetic whereas with death you will no know anything else so, of course, not even know you have died.

[curiosityandthecat]

Thanatology. A very interesting field. There's a class offered on it here, though I've never had the opportunity to take it.

Note: not to be confused with Thanatos.  

[Kylyssa]

Outliving people sucks.  Dying also sucks - it's painful, undignified and messy.  Death is, well, death.  I admit to some fear of it, both the dying part and the ceasing to exist part, but mostly the painful, undignified and messy dying part.  

Seriously, we evolved to be afraid of death.  It helped our ancestors survive.

[Kyuuketsuki]

Outliving people sucks.  Dying also sucks - it's painful, undignified and messy.  Death is, well, death.  I admit to some fear of it, both the dying part and the ceasing to exist part, but mostly the painful, undignified and messy dying part.  Seriously, we evolved to be afraid of death.  It helped our ancestors survive.

It (outliving) doesn't!!!! I mean yeah, it does but I'm game :banna:

Kyu

[Wechtlein Uns]

I want to go out the same way I came in: Bloody, screaming, and in love.  

[Zarathustra]

Outliving people sucks.  Dying also sucks - it's painful, undignified and messy.  Death is, well, death.  I admit to some fear of it, both the dying part and the ceasing to exist part, but mostly the painful, undignified and messy dying part.  Seriously, we evolved to be afraid of death.  It helped our ancestors survive.

It (outliving) doesn't!!!! I mean yeah, it does but I'm game :banna:
Kyu

I know how you feel. I am in love with life! And I simply don't want it to end, ever! There is still so much to learn, so many places to see, so much progress to experience and so on.   And there is a - admittedly infinately small - chance that I could be picked up by Aliens in a couple of hundred thousand years. If they are able to revive me: Awesome. If not: I'll be an object in an Alien museum.

2) I know I am gonna die very soon, but I do not feel like withering in a bed. I want to die in a spectacular way so I get one amazing last experience, and will be remembered in my family for generations to come. ("Do you remember the story about your great-great-great-granpa. The one that got eaten by a shark?" or "Remember uncle? He went down Niagara falls in a barrell.") I would of course take plenty of morphine before. If you have tried morphine, you know that any kind of fracture or damage to your body, simply appears funny and peculiar.

[Elvis Priestly]

Personally, I fear the way the religions use the human survival instinct (a.k.a. fear of death) to manipulate people.

Throughout history religions have used the lure of a pleasant afterlife to get people (mostly young men) to throw their lives away on a battlefield for causes that the religion supports (often its own expansionism). Aren't the radical Islamic suicide bombers supposed to get a hundred virgins in the afterlife, or was it a thousand? Can you say jihad? I thought you could.

Many theists seem to have this strange idea that without the threat of eternal suffering, people will be fundamentally evil or at least completely amoral. I don't get that at all. Maybe theists are fundamentally evil, and religion with its threat of eternal suffering gives them the incentive they need to function normally in civilized society. They assume that everyone else is just like them.

If there are no atheists in foxholes, it's probably because they were smart enough not to go there in the first place.