savethedreams
Active Member
How can you define death, if there is an afterlife? and/or conscience still 'alive' or 'around' after your body has been pronounced dead by a doctor?
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What is death? If there is an afterlife?
- Thread starter savethedreams
- Start date
Skwim
Veteran Member
I suppose you could define it as when "your body has been pronounced dead by a doctor."
jarofthoughts
Empirical Curmudgeon
There is absolutely no reason to think that there is any form of afterlife, heaven, hell, ghosts, spirits, reincarnation or anything similar.
There you go.
Sorted.
james2ko
Well-Known Member
Death is the absence of consciousness. It's described in our literature as "sleep".
horizon_mj1
Well-Known Member
Death is the separation from physicality; energies in which once were used to sustain life in the physical altar to a higher, purer form of energy. Energy can not be destroyed, only manipulated into something else (electricity lighting a light bulb is an example); maybe the beliefs from different religions are the many avenues in which the post life energy alteration can take.
horizon_mj1
Well-Known Member
Did you ever consider that "sleep" is nothing more than the physical body no longer functioning yet the consciousness being fully aware? Why is it that simplicity is sought in something so complex as the Divine? Is the universe and all life in it so simple that the one in which created it is just as simplistic, or can the complexity be seen for what it is and appreciated?
TheKnight
Guardian of Life
It's relatively easy if you believe that life is more than just your body.
If you believe that your life is a conglomerate between your body and your soul and that the body and soul both have unique experiences and also have shared experiences, and that death is nothing more than a shared experience of separation wherein the body spends some time in the ground and the soul spends some time somewhere else, and that all of this is a part of your "life", which continues on even after death and eventually when your body and soul rejoin one another, then it really isn't that hard.
james2ko
Well-Known Member
Hmmm...
"Sleep is a naturally recurring state characterized by reduced or absent consciousness...."
Sleep - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Perhaps you should consider editing the wiki article
In a sense, there is "afterlife" where there never really was "life", which is to say that you can't lose what you never had. Death cannot "take you" where there never was a concrete "you" to take. (This is the idea of eternal life.)
That that we call "life" resides in thought. It is a narrative, a series of stories that are told and retold (to make one long story), spoken quietly or screamed loudly, written with a "pen" called recognition on "paper" called memory. It has chapters, verses, and sometimes even poetic lyrics. It has a starring character. It's a story with an ending, but one that is written long before anything happens. And, if it's re-cognized that way, it can be a never-ending story.
"Death" is a story written long before it happens. If we recognize that our explanation for how consciousness, residing in memory, arises is also a story --that all our explanations of the world are stories --if we recognize "the world" as that very story that is "our life", we can reconstruct the story-telling world so as to see the story-telling as foundational. The story-telling tells us that there is a story-teller, a story, a beginning and an end.
chinu
chinu
Last enemy which one have to conqur,
Yes, till then there .....iiiiiiiiiisss afterlife
_/\_
Chinu
Looncall
Well-Known Member
The point is that fire is a process, not a substance, just as life is a process.
You might like to reflect that energy is not a substance, but a condition of some thing. For example, a stone in a high place has potential energy; when it falls, it gains kinetic energy and loses potential energy.
This new-agey talk of energy as if it were a substance is nonsense.
St Giordano Bruno
Well-Known Member
Death is part of the life cycle and integral to the balance of nature. Organisms are born organisms die to make way, just as new leaves sprout and older leaves fall off or the tree will be overcrowded with them.
jarofthoughts
Empirical Curmudgeon
The idea of vitalism is nonsense.
Also, do you have evidence that there is anything that is not physical?
Just goes to show what happens when people didn't quite understand elementary school physics...
jarofthoughts
Empirical Curmudgeon
Great.
Now all you have to do is provide evidence that there is such a thing as a soul.
BruceDLimber
Well-Known Member
Death is the transition to the Next Life, which lasts forever!
Peace,
Bruce
Peace,
Bruce
TheKnight
Guardian of Life
Great.
Now all you have to do is provide evidence that there is such a thing as a soul.
Actually, I don't. The OP is not asking for some sort of validation of the idea an afterlife. I don't even have to believe if there is an afterlife to answer the OP. In fact, no one in this thread has to believe in an afterlife to answer the question.
The question was if one were to, hypothetically speaking, believe in an afterlife then how would one define death in light of that?
All it takes is for me to have the imagining capacity to conceive how one would define death in the case of belief in an afterlife.
I presented a hypothetical situation in which a person could integrate the idea of death into a belief about the afterlife and thus answered the question.
Nice try, though.
Or symbolism.
jarofthoughts
Empirical Curmudgeon
jarofthoughts
Empirical Curmudgeon
And therefore not in any practical way related to reality.
Still, when some new-age dinkie goes on about the "positive energy" in his crystal I throw up a little... :sarcastic
There is no such thing.
I see, you're one of those people who don't bother stopping at traffic lights.