How do people deal with their inevitable death?

kedge said:
If sexual reproduction in plants, animals, and humans is a result of evolutionary sequences, an unbelievable series of chance events must have occurred at each stage.
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I could only be bothered to read this far, so really... less believably than the idea that some form of even more complex life created us and everything we see from nothing? Please.

You'd better get used to it, sunshine. Because believe it or not, it actually happened.
 
Davepen said:
That's the thing that gets me about religion, it tries to discount evolution.
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Fundamentalist Abrahamics (Christians, Muslims, Jews) might do that, but most other religions don't. Early Christianity was starkly different to that practiced today (look up Gnosticism/Gnostic gospels and Augustine of Hippo), holding that Jesus was simply an example to follow in our reunification with the source/Godhead (i.e. we're co-creators not subjects of the divine).

It also taught reincarnation and early theologians encouraged the embracing of newly discovered knowledge in opposition to older scripture. In other words, science trumps the bible. Castiel could tell you a lot more about this should he be so inclined, or you can read some of his older posts.

Likewise, most other world religions embrace science - and by extension, evolution - without issue.
 
Rainmaker said:
Just lolz.
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The fact that there are so many different NDEs is enough to bring doubt into the legitamacy of those experiences. While of course by my own admission that after death is unknown and could very well consist of a variety of different states of being, you can't know that. And how can you measure that "afterlife", how do you know it's not just brain synapses firing, and the release of chemicals into the brain? Of course it's possible that they are actually in the afterlife but from a general religious point of view (as most of the main religions tend to agree that the afterlife is some sort of paradise) it would be a little disturbing to their own assertions considering that some people experience nothing at all. Or is that just their kind of paradise?

Could you please post some of this evidence that you say exists? As I've never seen it.
 
LeJosh said:
I know old age is inevitable.

What I sometimes worry about is dying earlier than my time though.
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This.

I am starting to become really terrified of lorries when I'm out driving. When they come flying around a corner on an NSL road, and all it would take is something small to go wrong and that's it, game over. It genuinely does worry me.
 
Castiel said:
That is blind faith. Faith requires evidence, it is just that some people are under the misconception that scientific evidence is the only kind.
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Science is the study of how everything works if the thing you wish to prove doesn't fit in with scientific theory there's one of three possibilities.

A. Scientific theory and practice is fundamentally flawed and as such our understanding of everything is wrong. - Doubtful at best

B. The thing you wish to prove doesn't exist. - Most Likely Hypothesis based on what we know atm

C. We havn't reached a level of understanding that could prove it exists one way or the other. - Another possibility


either way theory doesn't count for **** until practice confirms it!
 
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Rainmaker said:
Even when the patient is under full general anaesthetic, has had their head drained of all blood in preparation for brain surgery, has been clinically dead and super-cooled for about an hour at the time, and has no heartbeat or ECG/EKG readouts and brainstem tests are flatline?... :p

I've covered this before, but suffice to say the accredited evidence out there (doctors, surgeons, neurologists) is much harder to explain away than 'dying fantasy' or 'drugs'.
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Some people are not interested in any evidence to suggest there is something after death. They are only interested in anything that confirms what they already believe, which is death is the absolute end. Hence you will hear bizarre theories explaining why someone experienced a NDE and possible causes. An interesting one was a lady who was born blind, and has never ever seen anything, who actually SAW for the first time when she had a NDE. She was able to describe things in the room eg. instruments the doctors were using on her etc. Some people will say she was lying and making it up, but if she did actually see then it indicates that our physical eyes are not the only thing that give us the ability of sight.
 
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There's no reason to fear being in the state of death (obviously), as you're not going to know that you're dead. In much the same way that you weren't aware of your non-existence, before you were born. That being said, one could still fear no longer being here, and I think that's the scariest thing about dying, knowing that the party is going to continue in your absence.

Regarding the thread title, most people deal with it by either pretending that it isn't inevitable (i.e. religious claims of an afterlife or reincarnation) or simply accepting it for what it is, absolutely inevitable. I personally want my death to be instantaneous, and at a time before I would naturally die of old age, so I won't be expecting it. That way, I literally have nothing to fear about it, as dying itself won't be painful, and I won't know it's coming (as such), and I will finally discover whether conciousness is somehow separate to the functioning of our brains. :p
 
Capn' $qu!ff said:
Science is the study of how everything works if the thing you wish to prove doesn't fit in with scientific theory there's one of three possibilities.
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Of course, in Science you don't go into anything wanting to prove something. I remember a story where a student completely disproved a theory their professor had been working on for most of their life, and you know what the professor did? Thanked them.
 
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