Monthly Archives: January 2012
Death is not the Enemy
We humans instinctively fear death, driven to avoid it by our need for self-preservation, sometimes resorting to extreme measures to do this.
We sometimes wonder if this life is all there is, and speculate on the possibility of something after it, something “more” to it all to assuage our fears of personal extinction.
This is one of the main purposes of religion, not only to explain the world around us through mythological doctrines and scripture, but to serve the double goals of comfort and control by catering to our fears of death, our hopes for something beyond it, by telling us that conformance to religious beliefs, rules, and rites will allow us to achieve bliss, or rebirth as a higher being, and allow us to avoid pain or perhaps reincarnation as an amoeba or a cockroach.
Many religions, particularly Christianity, treat death as a sort of thing bad in and of itself, a great final enemy to be conquered, destroyed, or subdued on Judgment day, an aberration brought into the world through sin and folly, not a part of nature, not a necessary if unfortunate component of the cycles of life.
I think that this is wrongheaded, and I’ll say why…
I do not believe that death is either intrinsically good or bad, though the means of achieving it can be.
After my accident in 2007,(I’d been struck by a car at a crosswalk, obviously surviving the impact, but needing and luckily getting months of therapy to recover.) I had done much thinking on the topic, for I could well have been killed then — game over dude — and I discovered as I lay on the gurney that the fear of impending death really didn’t bother me that much.
Looking the Reaper in his bony eye-sockets, or maybe DC Comics’ more comely feminine version of Death, (I recommend Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” series…) was thoroughly unscary, and that unscariness stuck with me.
“Not now. Maybe later dude (or dudette)…”
I realized that the loss coming from death can be tragic and saddening to those who survive the deceased, especially “before one’s time,” I came to recognize that it’s the events and acts that cause it that can truly be tragic and senseless, especially when they are unpleasant, degrading and even horrific, but not death itself.
When life becomes unbearable despite our attempts at bravery and perseverance, death can be a release.
In 2006 a gaming friend I’d known for years succumbed to a virulent cancer after battling it most of his later years in life. The nurses in his ward, not realizing the futility of keeping him alive with the suffering he was going through, tried to encourage…I’d say pestered him…to stay alive despite the obviously terminal nature of his condition — the cancer had long before metastasized — but he had given up. He had enough of life, and quietly, finally, released his hold on it. He just let go.
I’d venture to say that death didn’t bother him one iota, just those of us he left behind.
Life needs death to carry out its processes. A world of finite resources can only sustain a finite number of creatures, especially the Earth with a population of 7 billion+ human beings hugging its surface.
Everything living must feed, and even plants need resources, with some, like the Venus’ Flytrap actively digesting small creatures like insects while living in nutrient-poor soil. Animal life cannot live without eating, and cannot eat without killing, even the countless billions of embryonic grain plants killed to make flour for bread. Herbivores must eat plants, carnivores must hunt the herbivores, and carnivores themselves are eventually eaten by scavengers, other predators, and reducing organisms like fungi or bacteria.
Life as we know it absolutely depends on death to happen. This is neither good nor evil, neither right nor wrong, it is simply a fact about the world and things that populate it. We humans are dependent upon the deaths of countless plants, animals, and microbes, to feed ourselves and our children.
If death was not a part of nature, nothing would ever need to eat anything else, but that’s not what we see in nature. Living things do eat living things, and the act of eating, or preparation for eating, requires what is eaten to die.
So death to me is not some horrific thing that is wrong with the world, though I’m in no hurry to reach it. Life means a lot to me, despite what anti-atheists claim. As far as I have any reason to think, nothing but a deep, dreamless sleep from which there will be no awakening, and the final dissolution of my body’s elements into the fabric of the world from which I was born, awaits me when I die.
No heaven, no hell, and no karmic wheel of death and rebirth, just oblivion, which I never complained of before I was born, and won’t worry myself about upon and after my end.
Like this:
Skepticism is hard — And your point is?..
Skepticism is hard work, and being a skeptic 24/7 is no bed of roses. This is because skepticism requires more effort than leaping to a quick shortcut by invoking the paranormal instead of conventional explanations for seemingly weird events.
It’s easy to believe in the supernatural, since it suffuses almost all cultures and is often uncritically promoted and reinforced by the media outlets we watch, listen to, and unfortunately, unthinkingly trust to reliably inform us on matters of fact.
It’s no stretch to say that claims of the supernatural are heavily advocated through childhood indoctrination by the world’s religious institutions, especially those with theistic doctrines, and most of those without as well.
Because of the ubiquity of such claims, drilled into many of us as we grow up, and because of the perfectly normal functioning of our magnificent brains, we find it a simple matter to use whatever first comes to mind when strange things happen, and dismiss all other alternatives as unnecessary or too complex, or too time-consuming, or perhaps as too counter-intuitive.
But reality IS complex, AND counter-intuitive, so understanding it more accurately takes time not all of us have, and more effort than we often find convenient.
That’s the availability heuristic at work, a particular rule of thumb our brains use, a, otherwise reliable shortcut for drawing inferences about our experiences, using what data is most easily at hand in our storehouses of knowledge and can be most easily recalled.
We are, even the smartest of us, cognitive misers if we aren’t careful.
During seemingly odd happenings this cognitive miserliness can lead us astray. Seriously astray, and sometimes dangerously so, when ignoring the possibility of a better explanation in favor of what we want to believe can get us poorer in the purse, sicker, injured, or killed.
Conventional explanations are different.
Few where supernatural beliefs are commonly held as part of the culture are well-acquainted with them, save the scientifically literate, and even they must take care in applying possible explanations and weighing them against each other and the world.
To those ordinarily accustomed to resorting to paranormal explanations, figuring out conventional explanations without having them at the front of one’s mind requires the skilled use of a remarkable trait humans possess: our imaginations, a trait often claimed by believers as exclusive to them.
It doesn’t necessarily require delusional mental illness or clueless gullibility to be fooled by strangeness and the lack of an immediate explanation, otherwise professional conjurors would have been out of a job long ago.
That’s why heuristics can be at once so useful, but when we are out of our depth so deceptive.
An active imagination is essential in explaining the world, especially in science, since one must spin as many different hypotheses as one can, compare them for testability, and then weigh them against that most harsh of taskmasters, reality, whether by experiment, observational comparison, or data convergence from many different fields all leading to the same conclusion.
And any idea that fails these tests should rightly be rejected, not considered ‘alternative knowledge.’
Science is the stasis, the fulcrum-point where imagination and skepticism meet: with skepticism used to winnow the golden ideas from the bullsh*t, the good ideas from the bad generated first by imagination, since most ideas conceived are ultimately unworkable.
Science is a method, not a position. Okay, I can grant that.
It is, however, a method for reaching a position, a tentative one, on the nature of reality.
There is a way things really are, and over time, scientific inquiry and similar approaches can get us closer to a serious understanding of those things.
Show me a better set of methods, and I’ll happily switch to that instead, hands down.
Related articles
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Fractal of the Week [Belated]: Unity of Blue
All images in this post are original works by the author, and are copyright 2012 Troy Loy
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APW | Astronomy Pix of the Week [Belated]: January 22-28, 2012
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Image via Wikipedia
Saturn’s Hexagon Comes to Light
APW is a weekly installment, normally published each Saturday between 7:31 and 8:30 am, with links to each daily entry on NASA’s website Astronomy Picture of the Day. I hope you enjoy looking at these often breathtaking images as much as I do.
xkcd: Sustainable
I would not be surprised at this…
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.
This means you’re free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). More details.
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Peanut Butter, The Atheist’s Nightmare! Really??
I’m aghast at the abject stupidity apparently being promoted as serious truth by these people.
“Evolution teaches that…”
Evolution teaches nothing. It is those who understand it who teach, and those who do not who mislead.
Like this:
WLS | Web Links Sceptique for January 26, 2012
- by Dr David Brin… “So you want to make gods. Now why would that bother anyone?..”
- at the Sydney Morning Herald… Science on wind-turbine illness dubious…
- on the Times of India… Scientists would tweet if aliens got in touch…
- by Ben Radford… If you see a Bigfoot, shooting him could be a problem…
- Reeeallly?? Who’s been smoking what, and where can I get some?.. “Psychics” Say Apollo 16 Astronauts Found Aliens on the Moon…
- at CultureLab… Remembering things that never happened…
WLS is a selection of links to blogs, news outlets, and cool little sites on the Web that relate to science, reason, skepticism, atheism, the fringes and borderlands of science, memes relating to science or skepticism, and anything that catches my eye or which I’m deluded enough to think might arouse the interest of you, my perspicacious readers. WPS is published weekly each Thursday on the Call.
Like this:
Midweek Fractal: Immanent Nucleus
All images in this post are original works by the author, and are copyright 2012 Troy Loy
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Dropping the Bomb [Repost]
Image via Wikipedia
(Warning: this post gets a bit personal, but says what needs to be said — because the truth is paramount and I owe it to you, my amazing subscribers. What’s posted here is no great, dark secret that I felt a need to hide, but something that save once before and again here, there’s simply been no occasion to mention. The original post dates back to March 24, 2010, and this repost is identical to the original in text and context.)
Hey, guys. Many of you might have found out about James (the Amazing One) Randi’s recent ‘coming out,’ and it gave me the idea to open up to my incredible readership in revealing a little something that hasn’t been mentioned in great detail in the past, though I’ve occasionally alluded to it from time to time.
Some of you may have suspected it from my writing style, some from my early comment responses, others of you already knew, to more than just a few this may be a bit of a surprise, and some probably just won’t give a crap…
No, I’m not gay — not if any of my ex-girlfriends have a say in the matter — but I do harbor a rather bothersome medical condition that I’m not particularly proud of, nor especially happy about, but which I’ve seen no reason to hide in person, and as of now, here…
I’m schizophrenic.
This condition is one of the most debilitating neurological disorders known to Man (or Woman for you readers of the fairer sex), and something that I have struggled with ever since my early twenties.
My particular condition is one of a family of related disorders, having nothing to do with ‘split-personalities’ as they are popularly termed (That is actually referred to, if I recall correctly, as Disassociative Identity Disorder, an entirely different class of condition) in the media, and this is one of the many reasons among others that I’m a skeptic, since keeping better in tune with reality is a Good Thing™, as this enables me to stay out of trouble more easily than would otherwise be the case.
Is skepticism effective for combating mental illness? I would venture not by itself, and I recommend to others with mental illnesses that you stay on your treatment plan and follow it scrupulously, just to be on the safe side.
You are not alone.
For me though, skepticism is a useful adjunct to my basic treatment. Learning to think clearly is always a good thing with or without a problematic condition.
Few with the more extreme variants of my condition can benefit from skepticism, and many often require physical care as well. But fortunately my illness is mild enough and sufficiently amenable to treatment to allow me to function in daily life and do the things I enjoy, like post on and administer this blog.
I consider myself lucky, to the extent luck actually exists, that I got treatment for my affliction during the early stages before it became too advanced, otherwise I would not be typing this into my browser window for you all to read.
Pushing the ‘publish’ button for this entry was not an easy decision, but a necessary one. Some things are important enough that they need to be said. The Randi-Meister was a big factor in this…
As one of those ‘fervently dogmatic, pseudo-skeptical, pseudo-intellectual (and according to one recent commenter, ‘unread’) debunkers,’ there is no point in pretending to be what I am not and can never be — perfectly normal, ‘just like everyone else’ — since the truth should always be paramount.
Hence this post.
I have little doubt that this entry will be used as a convenient source of ammunition by those online who’ve expressed impatience towards my ‘attitude’ as a skeptic, and that’s fine with me — as long as any disagreement between me and others remains bloodless and gentlemanly — including disagreements with those I’ve annoyed in the past. And believe me, I’ve annoyed quite a few…
For the past couple of decades, I’ve worked at a vocational rehabilitation business as an administrative assistant, only retired as of last December, and this has helped immensely in my personal growth and experience in the workplace.
The people I met and knew there, clients and employees, will always be a reminder how much stigma is still attached to mental illness in this country, as well as others. They will also be a reminder of the incredible resilience of human courage, hope, and ability.
I plan to diversify the subject matter posted on this site to include advocacy for the rights and well-being of those with disabling psychiatric conditions, both like and unlike my own.
I’ve so far immensely surpassed where I was when my illness first popped up some years ago, and I plan to do better still, helping others like me as well. You, my readers both locally and around the world are an absolute joy to write for, and this blog is a wonderful journey & learning experience for my Troythuluness.
Let’s travel and learn together.
Like it says in my collector’s edition copy of the Principia Discordia– Fnord.
Like this:
TEDxMIA – Scott Rickard – The World’s Ugliest Music
Scott Rickard has degrees in Mathematics, Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering from M.I.T. and MA and PhD degrees in Applied and Computational Mathematics from Princeton University. At University College Dublin, he founded the Complex & Adaptive Systems Laboratory, where biologists, geologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, social scientists and economists work on problems which matter to people. He is passionate about mathematics, music and educating the next generation of scientists and mathematicians.
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Magnificent! The Known Universe by AMNH… [Repost]
This is the simulator done by the American Museum of Natural History, in conjunction with the world-wide work of many others.
It is an outstanding example of multinational academic cooperation, and to me brings hope for our future as a species, however precarious that may be for the next century or two.
Things like this are reasons why I consider myself a citizen of the Earth, not just of a single nation.
