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novapsycheJesus is dead.
I hate to break this to some people, but the truth must be told. The man died. He is no more. His body is so much dust in the desert.
I am a Christian. However, I am not the type to believe in a third-party God. (I consider myself to be a Christian mystic.) The Judeo-Christian God is just a flawed as any human being. I do not believe in a transcendent God; I believe that the universe is transcendent in itself.
I do not believe in reincarnation, because that seems like a bright idea proposed by leading thinkers several thousand years ago who had no idea of what the human body was composed of. Those people had no idea what entropy means, or metabolism, or simple brain processes. It was a best guess at the time.
The "soul" (I don't believe in such things) is not imprisoned in one's flesh. The spirit is a marriage of flesh and consciousness. At the same time, I believe that consciousness itself is predicated--necessarily--upon pre-existing form. The cell had to exist before it could fashion an awareness of itself.
Death is an end in awareness. I firmly believe that when we die, that's it. The fight against entropy is over, and our component parts degrade into earth. Religions that fight this natural order of things are misguided, in my opinion. Christianity, coupled with general Western philosophy, encourages the thought that we have divine dominion over the natural earth, and this dominion extends into the belief that we can escape death. (This leads to a devaluation of the aged in our communities and a perverse predilection on youthfulness and suppleness.)
It never ceases to startle me that there are people who honestly believe that deceased people are simply "sleeping in the earth," until Judgment Day. Those people, like Jesus, are dead. There is no second awakening for them.
However, being a believer in mysticism, I do believe that people can reach such an awakening while alive, through contemplation, wisdom, and self-knowledge. It's similar to "being saved" or "being reborn" in Christian terminology, but in my own experience it was much more immediate and long-lasting than being saved was.
*shrug* To answer the question, "What is death?" one must first find an answer to the question, "What is life?" Years ago, I came to the conclusion that life is. It just simply is. Similarly, death simply is. They are part of the same process, and we would be wise to reconcile ourselves to that process and live accordingly. (For me, that means not engaging in wishful thinking, like Judgment Day or reincarnation, things of which we have no evidence and which go against all forms of sense, common or otherwise.)
I hate to break this to some people, but the truth must be told. The man died. He is no more. His body is so much dust in the desert.
I am a Christian. However, I am not the type to believe in a third-party God. (I consider myself to be a Christian mystic.) The Judeo-Christian God is just a flawed as any human being. I do not believe in a transcendent God; I believe that the universe is transcendent in itself.
I do not believe in reincarnation, because that seems like a bright idea proposed by leading thinkers several thousand years ago who had no idea of what the human body was composed of. Those people had no idea what entropy means, or metabolism, or simple brain processes. It was a best guess at the time.
The "soul" (I don't believe in such things) is not imprisoned in one's flesh. The spirit is a marriage of flesh and consciousness. At the same time, I believe that consciousness itself is predicated--necessarily--upon pre-existing form. The cell had to exist before it could fashion an awareness of itself.
Death is an end in awareness. I firmly believe that when we die, that's it. The fight against entropy is over, and our component parts degrade into earth. Religions that fight this natural order of things are misguided, in my opinion. Christianity, coupled with general Western philosophy, encourages the thought that we have divine dominion over the natural earth, and this dominion extends into the belief that we can escape death. (This leads to a devaluation of the aged in our communities and a perverse predilection on youthfulness and suppleness.)
It never ceases to startle me that there are people who honestly believe that deceased people are simply "sleeping in the earth," until Judgment Day. Those people, like Jesus, are dead. There is no second awakening for them.
However, being a believer in mysticism, I do believe that people can reach such an awakening while alive, through contemplation, wisdom, and self-knowledge. It's similar to "being saved" or "being reborn" in Christian terminology, but in my own experience it was much more immediate and long-lasting than being saved was.
*shrug* To answer the question, "What is death?" one must first find an answer to the question, "What is life?" Years ago, I came to the conclusion that life is. It just simply is. Similarly, death simply is. They are part of the same process, and we would be wise to reconcile ourselves to that process and live accordingly. (For me, that means not engaging in wishful thinking, like Judgment Day or reincarnation, things of which we have no evidence and which go against all forms of sense, common or otherwise.)
(no subject)
Date: 2002-01-15 09:10 am (UTC)Do I think a soul exists separate of the flesh or the intellect? No. The soul is a function of sufficiently advanced biology, in my opinion. It's a sort of spiritual software that runs on and is written by our bodies. An imergent divine and magickal property. I don't think that negates its reality, however, nor its importance.
As for the whole afterlife issue, I am vehemently non-committal. There is literally no way to know. As soon as I get there, I'll see if I can figure out a way back and let you know.
As for what is life, I was always fond of Douglas Adams' definition from the Hitchhikers' radio plays: Life is that quality you lose when you fall 14 miles from a large marble cave floating in the middle of the sky. Of course, he points out that this could just as easily describe, say, one's glasses. Thus it's not terribly useful.