When something is inevitable it does not seem to be a matter of acceptance. Death is horrible and sad for us while we live - while we exist it is almost incomprehensible to contemplate that we cease to exist. A good friend of mine will die very soon, and she is firmly anti-religion and deeply sad that she will soon be gone. But there is a kind of peace in oblivion, she recognises that once she is gone she won't be sad: She'll be gone.

But is it inevitable? Everyone seems to think that as it's always been the usual course of events it always shall be. It's only holding us back.

It's not peace at all to me. It's the non-being. The cessation of all you are and all you care about. I'd rather be sad. I'd rather suffer endlessly than have that which I am, all that I am, become nothing over the course of time.

We put these lesser words around it like "gone" which by itself implies that you can come back. It's not just leaving. It's almost a curse to be as fully cognizant as we are and to realize the blink and you miss it life we have. Some even have less than a blink. I don't know about anyone else but I'm not going to just accept death as inevitable. I might not die with any grace should that day come for me but I sure as hell won't say that it can have me willingly. The only hope I have in my feeble human body is that medical science will allow us to continue expanding our lifespans indefinitely. I say the government should fund progress in that direction, instead of "defense funding".

Nothing about the word "gone" necessarily implies something can come back.

Well, fear of death is exactly the base of most religions. I am not scared of dying myself, it scares me a lot more to see people I love dying, because I wouldn't see them never again.

Elyasis, you say you are not going to accept death as inevitable... what is your plan then? I don't think there will EVER be a way to be immortal and, honestly, I think that would be stupid, harmful and totally destroy the Earth because nature simply can't handle an infinite number of life on its surface.

you could see it that way, or you could break it down to this:

mass is made up of energy. energy cannot be destroyed or broken, only changed. a body will break down, but all of what made that person is still there, in another form....

so technically, nobody really dies. not in the sense most mean it.
though its slightly ridiculous to expect everything to retain one easily recognizable shape forever and ever, exactly as you knew it in your mind to be. if its anything a person can count on, its that change will happen. always. and its easier to cope with those changes when one is aware of and accepting of that fact.

i think people make more drama over death than need be. the only thing we can count on is that we do not know for sure if consciousness is separate from what's physical.

I would add E) that as the time approached a new long term calender would be produced.. It would be a new world in the sense that with the demise of the old calender a New Beginning for the people would start with the new calender.

But that would be a guess with out knowing how the old one was created or in what context. It a guess that in my opinion does show the most common sense approach as to how and why this calender ends and a new one would begin.

Don't most people just mean their body stops functioning to produce life?



That's a bit like saying we do not know that heat is separate from what's physical. Technically it's true, we don't know for certain, but all the evidence we have strongly suggests that the two are inextricably connected.

most people that i know of treat it as if you up and vanish into thin air, never to be seen and/or heard of ever again. or at least, the people ive encountered seem to think you cease to exist altogether. bonus points if they make up that something horrible/utterly awesome has happened to you afterward.


ah, but we never have the full picture, and who knows what exactly we're missing. i wouldnt lean too hard on current information, as that is certain to change with time and further exploration. you can hardly attest that we have all of the tools and techniques to fully explore everything we want to explore, right now. basing a full conclusion on limited information that is subject to change is something that constantly keeps me from becoming religious or atheist.
(as ive said in other places; did oxygen not exist until we proved it existed? or was it always there, always being oxygen before we had the tools to discover it? you can bet there are still things in this world we have yet to develop the tools to discover.)
and i will happily admit right now that i dont know what happens after we die. i will never pretend to know. but its fun to theorize, and i understand that too.

What I meant is your conscious mind ceases to function. All that makes you more than a sack of meat and bones no longer functions or exists.

@Kiwi_Tea: Gone as in, "I've gone to the supermarket." One would expect someone to come back. It's a soft word for a harsh concept.


As for infinite life. I never suggested that or immortality. Simply put, I don't think death due to aging or sickness is inevitable forever. That doesn't take into account murder or suicide. Just the parts we can actually influence with science. Given a stable undying population we can easily also minimize our effect on the environment. The only negative would be a drastically reduced birthrate. Not zero per se because death would probably still occur in a population with the free will to choose their own actions. And so a small amount of births might become necessary. This can all be done. Maybe not in my lifetime or even many lifetimes in the future. But I'm trying my best to see that it happens sometime. Because I love life more than anything.


edit: OMG, I'm a space pony now!

I think it would be far easier to eliminate the violent deaths than it would be to eliminate the deaths due to aging. Our cells periodically get worn out and die, requiring that other cells divide to replace the dead cells. That requires that DNA be replicated. DNA replication is a remarkably accurate process, but it isn't perfect and never will be. When DNA is replicated, not only are there mutations, but the telomeres at the ends of the new chromosomes are shortened because the process of DNA replication is such that the ends of the DNA cannot be replicated. Telomeres are non-coding parts of DNA that allow the coding DNA to be retained when DNA is replicated, but, after so many divisions, it is possible to exhaust the telomeres and begin to lose coding DNA. This does not normally happen within a normal human lifespan, but it could happen if we lived long enough. At that point, we would begin to produce cells that were missing DNA that codes for vital proteins, which would cause the cell to function improperly, and likely die. This would mean that our bodies would be unable to replace those cells that die through simply being worn out, not to mention cells lost due to injury. We would all become frail, sickly creatures.

There is a protein, present in small amounts in some cells, that is able to build/protect telomeres, but the problem is that, when telomerase is introduced in large quantities, it tends to cause cancer. Cancer cells are capable of living forever because they make much use of telomerase, but they also lack sensitivity to signaling that tells the cell that there is no room for the cell to divide, causing masses of cells to form, without the proper vascular tissue. These masses of tissue also it choke off nutrients to other surrounding cells. The only way we know of to achieve immortality of a sorts is to have your cancer cells cultivated and used for science. There is a line of cancerous cells from a woman called Henrietta Lacks that is still in use today, 60 years after her death, but I doubt it is an appreciable sort of immortality.

Yes, yes due to the hayflick limit. However, that doesn't mean it's impossible. Particularly since we already produce cells in which the telomeres are repaired.

"This limit has been found to correlate with the length of the telomere region at the end of a strand of DNA. During the process of DNA replication, small segments of DNA at each end of the DNA strand (telomeres) are unable to be copied and are lost after each time DNA is duplicated.[7] The telomere region of DNA does not code for any protein; it is simply a repeated code on the end region of DNA that is lost. After many divisions, the telomeres become depleted and the cell begins apoptosis. This is a mechanism that prevents replication error that would cause mutations in DNA. According to Alexey Olovnikov, once the telomeres are depleted due to the cell dividing many times, the cell will no longer divide and the Hayflick limit has been reached.[8][9]

This process errs in cancer cells. Cancer cells turn on an enzyme called telomerase which is able to restore telomere length. Thus the telomere of cancer cells is never shortened, giving these cells infinite replicative potential.[10] A proposed treatment for cancer is a telomerase inhibitor that would prevent the restoration of the telomere, allowing the cell to die like other body cells.[11] On the other hand, telomerase activators might repair or perhaps extend the telomeres, thus extending the Hayflick limit of healthy cells. This might strengthen the telomeres of immune system cells enough to prevent cancerous cells from developing from cells with very short telomeres.

Carnosine can increase the Hayflick limit in human fibroblasts,[12] and also appears to reduce the rate of telomere shortening.[13]"

EDIT: Notice how it says the process errs in cancer cells. Telomerase doesn't make cancer. It just enables cancer to be a lot worse. However, figuring out the way to cure cancer can only be a good thing and may even extend our lifespan significantly. That's all I ever suggested. Better health for longer for everyone is somehow a bad thing? Why am I getting disagrees on this?

It seems this thread hasn't gotten any love in a whole month. Shame. Here's a question:

How should religions, and their sects be organized? It seems that Catholicism does not fall under Christianity. While Islam includes Sunni and Shia, two groups that split off due to political and not theological reasons.

Catholicism does fall under Christianity, but I think there are some Protestants that don't like to include it. Most sects of Christianity like to think of themselves as the one true religion and every other sect as false. There is a particularly big divide between Catholics and Protestants.

I understand that Catholicism is part of Christianity, but in some countries you have to pick on over the other instead of say checking off Christianity, followed by Catholicism. It seems a little ignorant, for lack of a better term.

Christian comes from the word Christ. Any religion that claims to be followers of Christ Jesus thus is considered a Christian religion.

However, Christ only started 1 religion. Wikipedia says there are 38,000 that consider themselves Christian.

Protestant and Catholic are both Christian but that does not mean that they're very similar. There are extreme differences in theology between all branches but in general protestant vs. catholic are the greatest (ie. Catholics believe Jesus died on the cross, Protestants believe he rose again; Catholics believe that Priests have special "powers", Protestants don't believe in anything like that). Your religion can be the specific one that you belong to (Mormon, Methodist, Roman Catholic, Baptist, etc.) or in general (Christian, Buddhist, Muslim). They're both correct.

Just one thing - I think all Christians believe in the resurrection of Christ.

Edit: Now I have to research more - because my husband just said he doesn't think Unitarians, Society of Friends or Gnostic Christians believe in the resurrection. But Catholics do. (The Society of Friends does believe in the resurrection, but '(m)ost Unitarians would doubt the literal veracity of the Gospel resurrection accounts'. I'm not going to bother checking gnostic christians - I didn't even know they existed anymore.

Sorry, I was mistaken about that. This website gives a good overview of Catholic vs. Protestant beliefs (a little biased though).

Here is the Unitarian website where their seven principles are listed. Being Christian is not required to be Unitarian, but at the same time Christian members are fully accepted.

Thanks for clarifying - my husband is a Zen Buddhist, and he also goes to a Unitarian church, but I never knew what their deal was.

To come back to the death topic, I'll quote Mark Twain: “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” This is exactly my sentiment on the issue.

As far as the Christian question; I'm really interested in the points that have been brought up. Apparently I knew/know less about the main religions [particularly the Christian overarching religious identity, even though I was technically raised as one] than I thought...

You know, I wonder if being religious, but not having a set of specific beliefs related to a type of religion means? I just don't relate to any of the doctorates of the main religions, and it's kind of frustrating.

It means that you are a Deist, but not a Theist.

Not necessarily. Theism and Deism refer more to specific beliefs about a creator than they do to doctrinal commitments.

Theistic religions believe a god(s) is the creator and ruler of the universe, and they believe in divine revelation - so they believe god(s) makes its will known through human emotions, etc. It's the conduit for making one's ego into the centre of the universe.

Deistic religions still tend to believe there is a creator god(s), but they don't believe it cares about us/it communicates with us. Deists also often claim that the design of the universe suggests a creator, and silly things like that, but mostly they tend to be much more grounded than theists.

The term you're looking for is probably something like "Spiritual but not religious", but don't use that because it's nonsense. Spirituality is religious.

The best way of finding a term that suits you is to explain what you specific things you believe (and perhaps why you believe them).

I think you meant doctrines as doctorates is another thing entirely.

And, as kiwi_tea suggested, just try enumerating your beliefs in some detail until you can identify a best fit for yourself. If that isn't in any organized religion then perhaps some of the organizations where they accept people of any religion would be acceptable to you?

I'm not advocating anyone to try to fit into the mold by any means.