Quote:
Originally Posted by WVUskinsfan
I personally think death scares people....but even at a very young age I remember thinking about the "idea" or "heaven" of living forever. Forever.....That is kind of scary.
Do you remember what life was like before you were born? No. Of course, not. I expect death to be the same.
I think there is such a difference between something that has yet to begin and something that comes to a complete and utter end (I mean subjectively, obviously not objectively). We have such a gradual recollection of our early lives, and probably no memories whatsoever of our initial weeks or months, that softens the line of our existence before we were born.
Death otoh is often a sudden and clear point in time, after which there is just nothing. It's a rather different idea in that way (in practice, it could be long and drawn out, but I don't think it changes my point in how we
think about our existence). We are also in the position of being able to contemplate our impending and looming demise, while it was impossible for us to contemplate our birth!
I don't think I am explaining myself very well, and I really struggle with the idea of death (esp recently). In fact I sometimes have feelings of real panic when I try to conceptualize it. I think it's partly the idea that there is no opportunity to reflect on what happened, and reflection is how we come to understand things, and partly about how the things we think about, plan for, worry about etc become so trivially meaningless if we happen to die in our sleep that night. Add to that the fact that non-existence is just utterly beyond our scope of conceptualizing, I reject that meme about how it is after death is really no different to how it was before you were born.