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I am religious and believe in free will

70 (27.6%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

113 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (24%)

Total Members Voted: 249

[Iduno]

Better question: If you could have a starship, without significant personal downsides, why not have a starship? Most people that have sailing boats or other sorts of water based small craft need them for precisely sod all.

It's one of the more disappointing things with reality and most of human religions' boring ass creator deities, really. There's plenty of neat shit in the world but if I were a creator deity I'd be putting some priority on having cats vomit rainbows instead of hairballs, y'know? Stuff could be a lot more interesting with little to no increase in danger, but for whatever reason most believers seem pretty comfortable with their gods having seriously dropped the ball on that front.

Have you seen a platypus?  Slime molds?  Black holes?  Quantum mechanics? The universe is full of pretty amazing, weird stuff.

On the third day, god was microdosing.


Edit: Crap, I started a new page with that?

[Naturegirl1999]

Yep, also I wonder if other animals got hallucinations with LSD before humans existed, or was it not produced in a part of a plant that they could reach?

You were implying God took LSD, right?

[Frumple]

The argument that "faith" is a hoop to jump through is a specious one.

Why?

Because it is essentially arguing that faith is works; it's re-defining words to be argumentative.  "Belief" is not a "work."

And belief that has no meaningful impact on your behavior is at best piss weak to the point it barely exists, if at all. If your faith is so empty it has no outwardly observable effect on you, there's essentially no difference in you having it and not. You could say that God would know the difference, but there's something of a paucity of gods in religious works that give any indication of giving a damn about that much of a "difference".

Faith isn't a hoop you jump through, but if your faith doesn't make you start jumping hoops whatever it is you got ain't faith. Ain't no religious figure in existence known for doing nothing but sitting on their ass, yo'. Even Buddha stepped out from under the bodhi tree. You can't separate faith from works any more than you can separate it from belief.

Yep, also I wonder if other animals got hallucinations with LSD before humans existed, or was it not produced in a part of a plant that they could reach?

Other animals got jumped up on stuff prior to humans being around, sure, if not necessarily LSD. Shrooms and booze been around roughly as long as there's been plant matter to ferment and fungi to grow, maybe longer, and we know for a fact some species'll get inebriated on something or another even without human intervention. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.

[Iduno]

You were implying God took LSD, right?

Have you seen a platypus or a tardigrade?

[Naturegirl1999]

You were implying God took LSD, right?

Have you seen a platypus or a tardigrade?

yes and yes

[Rolan7]

Spoiler: Heavy discussion of death, mostly about the fear of death (click to show/hide)

I had another brief pang of terror over the prospect of my mortality, but I let it linger a bit (perhaps in a sweet spot of mild inebriation) and might have had an insight.

I've often assumed that it's a fear of "not existing", and sought to raise my impact on the world.  But that's nonsense...  I don't actually care about making myself more notable.  I'd like to leave nice works, sure, but only out of general goodwill towards humanity.

What I felt, like every time I truly feel the fear of death, was a fear of eternity.
And isn't that odd, when death is the exact opposite of that?
I imagine what it will feel like to not exist.  I think of suffocation, and vertigo as millennia pass in an instant.  Pain is notably absent, presumably since I'll lack a body.
Really it's the suffocation that scares me the most.  But that's just what I fear in life.  It's just as nonsensical as pain, without a body.

I have observed the minds of older relatives die as the body lives on.  Heck, I've made a habit of it myself.
And the body obviously dies, no one will question that.
What remains? 

If there is a soul, it is separate from both body and mind.  So it will not suffocate, or fear.  Some say it can suffer a distance from the divine.  Some say it will get another chance.
I say there is insufficient information despite humanity devoting a large portion of our collective existence towards the question.  The very existence of this third portion of humanity defies all testing.  I don't mean this as an excuse - but it makes any attempt to better my soul's fate a roll of the dice.  Anything I try is equally likely to damn my soul as to save it, *if it even exists*.

Technically I guess that makes me a hedonist, though I plan to enjoy life in the same way I always have.  Being what I consider to be a nice person, getting along.  And taking a certain comfort in how little pain there is in mindless unconsciousness.

I was tempted to end with a repost of Dirk's AI Hal begging not to die, but eh.  Would confuse the message (they have a weird mirror-clone thing going on), and not even lighten the mood.  The jist is that Dirk is surprised that the AI is afraid to die "not exist", and the AI replies "Aren't you?"

[Egan_BW]

Dying eventually is far preferable to the alternative.

[Frumple]

To some alternatives, anyway. It's pretty trivial to imagine immortality setups that aren't particularly onerous. Reincarnation schemes in general probably fit, if there's no way off the cycle. So would a psychology or whathaveyou that just doesn't get bored or troubled by the passing of less long-lived companions. There's plenty of constructions that are indeed worse than most formulations of death, but it's not a necessary thing.

[TD1]

Personally? Immortality does not seem onerous. At all. Assuming that degradation of the body doesn't occur, because that would be nightmarish.

People dying? Any long-lived life is going to be littered with friends dying anyway. You make new friends throughout normal life (one school to the next, work, what have you) so it's absurd to think you couldn't form new connections as time passed.

I have a ridiculous number of hobbies and interests. I exercise. I doubt I would get bored, but not having a sufficiently long yardstick I can't say for certain.

Whether to add invulnerability to the equation is the real sticky question.

[Naturegirl1999]

((Noticed they title change, interesting))

Imagine the long term experiments you could do if you were immortal. I’m curious how parasitism evolves, being immortal would allow me to perform million year long experiments to learn how it evolved. Parasitism evolves independently numerous times. To me it would be interesting to see how life evolves over the millennia. Being immortal would allow me to learn this, as well as live through various points in history. To me it will be interesting

[McTraveller]

These discussions rarely consider the possibility that perception of time may be different in any "afterlife" context.  Any "fears" of immortality are based on our current experiences of the passage of time.  If time is no longer a "scarce" resource, why would "immortality" be concerning?

[Telgin]

I imagine many religions with afterlives believe you become more "perfect" and don't experience negative feelings like boredom.

Anyway, I think I could probably keep myself entertained for hundreds of years, and maybe thousands.  Several times I've given up projects because they'd take 5-10 years to complete, but that doesn't mean anything if you're immortal.  I'd also love to know what it's like to live so long.  How skilled and knowledgeable can someone get?  Will you eventually lose even strong memories of the distant past?  So many questions.

[delphonso]

That's also assuming a psuedo-physical existance or at least some creative power. I'd love to build and grow a forest, but that assumes a lot, including other lives. Most religions have a more defined, preset afterlife.

[George_Chickens]

Sure, god's all powerful, but does he have lips? Woah...

[Eschar]

Sure, god's all powerful, but does he have lips? Woah...

"And God said, let there be light..."

Well, Judaism's deity, at least.