Uncertainty 

Tuesday, June 17, 2003

Death(19)

immortality

In my last post I quoted a very emphatic quote about immortality as a start to write more
on this topic in a way that effects the question of death directly.
Issue of death is so closely related to the concept of immortality. Human’s instinct to
avoid death is in a sense a desire for immortality. People either believe in life after death
or not, and this belief can vary over a spectrum with one extreme ending in a frail notion
gained for no obvious reason , reaching next to intellectual or cognitive belief, getting
stronger and stronger as certainly, conviction, certitude and then reaching to affective
experiences like trance, vision, or the luminous. Those who don’t believe in it, can be
troubled to varying degrees from the thought of death and those who do believe in it may
enjoy the advantage of minifying this fear or based on their idea of what that afterlife has
to offer even anticipate it with different degrees of impatience. Of course there are some
who cannot be placed in any of these two categories, and that’s why I took the caution of
expressing them more in a tentative rather than definitive term with using “can be” and
“may”. We cannot put those who are bored with life or the burden of it has become
insufferable to them and decide to end it but also don’t believe in an afterlife in one of
these categories. But apart from this and some other exceptions which constitute a small
minority, I think that this is the general state of the matter that belief in an afterlife puts the
person’s mind much more in ease with death. I will have posts on some examples about
this particular case later, but now I mainly intend to focus on defining the terminology of
immortality itself as a firm basis for what I will write later. Since this post has gotten too big
already, I defer it to the next one.

(posted by Farid)


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