@hightor,
hightor wrote:
In this case no guessing involved, Frank. We have a word, "death" which describes the end of life, the cessation of life. We have another word, "after", which means following or subsequent to. So it's difficult to understand what "life" in an "afterlife" even means. I'm not making any conjectures or assertions other than that the word "death" is being misused.
To me, it sounded as though you were mocking and disparaging his blind guesses about REALITY. It seemed to be the kind of thing I see so often from people on the theistic and atheistic side of questions about gods. If I was wrong and the only thing you were doing was noting that the word "death" is being misused, accept my apologies.
Quote:Why not just say that humans never die? I've never heard it claimed that dead plants and animals exist in an afterlife; for some reason this mechanism of immortality only applies to our own species. Which makes me wonder when this phenomenon first occurred in the evolution of hominids, and in the gestation of Homo sapiens.
I suspect that the notion of gods and ideas of some sort of immortality are peculiar to humans because it seem to be the only species intelligent enough to come up with notions of that sort in order to deal with fear of death and harm...which appears to be more wide-spread among living things.
Quote:I prefer methodic skepticism to the systematic or radical approach you seem to employ in these discussions.
Do you?
That is an interesting variation on the kinds of responses I get to many of my "systematic/radical" comments questioning blind guesses about the many unknowns of REALITY.
They seem to be nothing more than different ways of saying, "My blind guesses about the REALITY are better than his blind guesses."
Quote:Doubt is a check on new or as yet unproven ideas — one doubts if one has reason to doubt.
I do not understand what you were attempting to say here.
Quote:Why is that so harmful? As long as one is open to new discoveries and doesn't simply close the door I see nothing wrong with making tentative conclusions.
You mean "what is so harmful" other than the many wars, slaughters, genocides; pogroms; suicides; patricides; matricides; fratricides; regicides and **** like that which are a direct result of "tentative conclusions?"
Well...not much, if one ignores the mountains of hatred that spew because of them.