Interesting Discussion on Life, Spirituality and Logic
Interesting discussion on Slashdot today:
And don’t <expletive deleted> hang yourself, you idiot. You think that will end anything?I am pretty sure it will end your life…
The biochemical machinery that we recognize as clinical vital signs, yes. The abstract nature that is a human being … not so much. Suicide means that [sic] gets stuck in a really awful place to be, plus the clarity to recognize how foolish it was to waste one’s life on a relationship like that. Some would call it hell but it doesn’t need little red guys with pitchforks, that’s just religious fantasy designed to scare you into obedience, as if anything enlightened was done from a place of fear.
Considering that every seven years or so, each individual molecule in the human body is replaced by another, that means we’re not really so material. We’re as material as a wave that is waving through water. Only we’re waving through water and solid matter. There is an abstract nature to this. Not only could you not escape it, I have no idea why you would want to. It’s a beautiful thing.
Even if you are so steeped in logical positivism that you simply cannot bring yourself to entertain this notion, namely because you have a tool (logic) that is quite useful for some things but now you think everything is a nail because you only have a hammer … even if that is who you are and you think death is nothing more than a dirt-nap, a “lights out” with no consciousness remaining … consider it from the angle of those he leaves behind. How selfish one must be to not care about the pain and heartache and long-lasting emotional scars that suicide would put his friends and family through.
So yes, come up with some little trivial one-liner in response to a serious issue. You are uncomfortable with this theme and that’s your way of smoothing it over. I get it. Just understand what you are trivializing.
This was a most insightful comment. Whether or not you believe in a devil and Hell, this guy posted an incredibly poetic view of life, and with an eloquence to which I can only aspire, silenced those who would display the humanist/atheist tendency to disregard matters of spirituality. I particularly appreciated his comment, "…because you have a tool (logic) that is quite useful for some things but now you think everything is a nail because you only have a hammer…" YES!!! Logic is a powerful and useful tool, but because it is easy to see the power and use of this tool, we have a tendency to think it is the only tool available to us when it most certainly is not.
Unfortunately, because we have put logic in the driver’s seat and allowed our other tools (like intuition, faith and spirituality) to atrophy, we think that what we see and feel with our physical bodies is all that is real. As C.S. Lewis once said, "You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body." Oh, that God would open our eyes to see and our ears to hear that the physical world around us is NOT the sum total of existence!
