I would appreciate some further explication on what, exactly, you mean by this statement. It sounds intriguing to me, but I’m sure I don’t understand you, yet.
Could be. What do you take?
Unsurprisingly, I agree.
Indeed, there would still be the suffering of the other creatures. They, apparently, are not endowed with the same degree of self-consciousness as a human, nor the scope of reasoning required to view the whole situation in a larger scheme. They do what they’re wired to do, and leave it at that.
Awareness is NOT pretty!
[QUOTE=SanibelManLook, if you’re feeling suicidal, there’s really not a whole lot I can do for you from where I sit. But don’t drag anyone else down with you. Some of us like it here.[/QUOTE]
I didn’t say anything about being suicidal. The stance I advocate is just letting the human race die out, and it’s one with some presence on the internet if you want to Google away. Not that presence on the internet is any validation in and of itself, but the information is there.
And if you “like it here,” consider that the situation you find yourself in and “like” okay is placed infirmly on the backs of thousands, and probably millions, of other people whose lives are an unremitting misery pretty much from beginning to end. I don’t like the percentages. Fuck it.
Not a suggestion per se but more of a question.
If your so convinced that life is more painful and awful than it’s worth, and that one would be better off not exsisting than exsisting,
well…
what are you hanging around for?
More simply put, if you don’t like it here you can leave at any time. No one’s making you stay except yourself. Why have you chosen to stay?
Again, not a suggestion, just a question.
Who exaclty are these people of which you speak? If we’re talking about suicides, well, they make up a pretty small part of the population. Are you imagining that there are millions of people for whom life is, without relief, horrible, but lack the stones to end it?
Life is sweet- and that comes irrespective of race, nationality, or socio-economic class.
However, if you want to argue that pro-creation is, fundamentally, a totally selfish act, I won’t argue.
Luckily, BILLIONS of others are very happy, or at least quite happy. Do we have your permission to remain so, despite your unsuccessful attempts to bum us all out?
I highly doubt it. I was being flippant, of course, but genuinely valid counter-arguments have been presented to you and I see no indication that any such argument could sway you from your beloved nihilism. Your position lacks falisfiability, and thus any objective merit. I see no indication you were seeking an actual debate.
drmark, if you haven’t already heard of it, I’d like to introduce you to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. You are not alone!
if a person views himself as insignificant, he basically has a low self esteem.
Ha! Their homepage mission statement states two b.s. items right off the bat.
“Crowded conditions and resource shortages will improve as we become less dense.”
People are crowded because they choose to live in dense areas. There’s plenty of room if people want to spread out. Reducing the population won’t make it less dense. Those who want to live in certan areas will just move closer together.
And what resource shortages would that be? Food? Water? There’s plenty of that to go around also. Distribution is the problem. Not supply.
The refusal to acknowledge the facts is absolutely key to the persistent perpetuation of the human species. Keep them blinders on, and when you eventually find yourself pissing and shitting yourself in some hospital bed, a profound burden on everyone and everything around you, and start wondering “Why me? What did I do to deserve this?” KEEP THOSE BLINDERS ON! It’s more important at that point than at any other. You’ll have already had more than enough practice to be able to pull it off.
Nah, when I was a teenager, the term goth hadn’t even made it into the popular vocabulary. There were “Freaks,” the light drug users who proved their love to each other by burning the rim of a hot pot bowl into their arms, but they were merely proto-goths.
Still, those pimple-ridden goths do have a point. They’re starting to see it all for what it is, and responding with justifiable panic. Some of them become so overwrought that they end up killing a bunch of their peers, then themselves! (Not an advisable strategy, IMHO.)
Well, my Dad did die last year, but his final years were such a misery to watch (and undoubtedly to experience) that I was more happy that it was over for him than saddened by his exit. Also, we loved, but didn’t like each other very much. Not a major factor in my world view.
I haven’t felt lonely since about the age of 7, and I can count the minutes in my life that I’ve felt depressed on two hands, with a few fingers to spare.
The news, the news. If ever there were a confirmation of everything I’ve said so far it’s the news.
Let’s see: thousands dead in some desert on the other side of the world; the toughest motherfucker of a virus we’ve yet managed to produce results in thousands more dead; a tidal wave drowns 250,000 more. Somewhere in southern France a group of local folk build a bonfire and throw some cats on it, a traditional form of entertainment, and watch in delighted glee as the poor critters experience a screeching, searing death. The list goes on interminably.
Oh, but, over the course of this great televised pageant (proferred by grinning idiots pretending to laugh at each and every one of each other’s lame attempts at humor), Bobby Flay has shown us all how heat up some dead, rotting animal muscle in a manner that will be pleasing to our warped palates! There is goodness in the world, after all!
That’s the news, man.
I’m not bent against life. But I do think that humans possess enough awareness of it to make the responsible decision not to perpetuate it, among humans.
Okay. I can look out over almost any natural landscape and think, “That is reallly beautiful.” This experience, which I’ve had countless times over my lifetime, has never placed so much as a nickel in my pocket. It does so for some, but I would never want to pollute the experience for monetary gain. Such experiences, I find, are a pleasant aspect of life.
But what is that landscape? The result of millions of years relentless and brutal evolution. Those trees aren’t waving in the breeze for my enjoyment. They are there because they beat other trees. And them little birdies flittin’ around and going about their business mean only to grab what they can at the expense of the other little birdies. They can’t decide for themselves to end the farce. We can.
And the idea that “it [life] ends“ is hardly nonsense. “Nothin’, sweet nothin’ forever” reads one gravestone somewhere in the world, perhaps only an apocryphal report, but still apt.
I post here to say what I think, and to hear what others think. And if you think you’re happy, or at least reasonably satisfied, with your life, consider that that feeling derives from the relative misery of countless others. Think about that.
Know about it already, but do appreciate the link. Not real impressed with the site, but that’s just me. It’s like an infomercial: good idea, cheaply realized.
This is a rather silly caricature (based, sadly, on a few real-life events) that has little to do with how most people die.
Deb is a hospice nurse on the night shift and gets called out to help people in the last stages or to pronounce after they have died. Of the dozens of visits she makes each month, she has mentioned anything similar to this scenario maybe once or twice a year.
My father (who did die in a hospital) did not die in this manner. Not one of my four grandparents died this way. Deb’s father did not die this way.
Note that I make no claim that no one dies in this manner. Some do, just as some die in car crashes or in housefires or floods or tornadoes. However, those are all exceptional ways to die, just as your scenario is.
It means that things that are mutually exclusive are not necessarily contradictory — though people often confuse the two as being the same. Two things are contradictory if their truth values are opposites; two things are mutually exclusive if, as sets, they contain no elements in common. For example…
Contradiction: My sugar level is both 85 and 255.
(If 85 is true, then 255 cannot be true.)
Mutual Exclusion: My sugar level is 85 now, but was 255 this morning.
(The element “now” is excluded from “this morning”.)
Yeah. But we’ve got the Shire.
I’ve always felt awareness was the universe’s way of appreciating itself. Whether it’s pretty or not, there’s SOMETHING rather than NOTHING, and nothing decided that to be so. Everything else is just circumstantial.
Do you really blame your parents for giving you your self-concience? Where would it end? How far back would the accusation go? Look, life propagates itself. Who are you (any of us) to decide how or when it will end? How arrogant can you be? You’re here for no reason at all. There’s no one to blame. Accept it, move on and enjoy the ride.
And to imply that nobody here has THOUGHT about such matters is condescending, insulting, and narrow-minded. We’ve simply come to a different conclusion.
A profoundly true statement. The universe is an illusion — a contradicton that proves everything. It is nothing more than a mathematical construct: specifically, a probability distribution. It is not real. And an observation of it is nothing more than a circular argument — atoms observing atoms.
(A colorful username, by the way…)
While it’s true that love is the greatest thing in the world, a dream within a dream, this is not what I meant.
If you love than it’s hard to do most of the inhuman abominations of cruelty. That’s all.
Let’s pick this baby apart!
“The universe,” an indifferent entity, for some thoroughly inexplicable (and unstated) reason has a need for “appreciating itself.“ So, it creates some self-conscious beings to… what? Help it out in it’s narcissism? Why does it need them? And even it it does need them for this purpose, why should they then necessarily be complicit in the effort? I don’t know, maybe the universe created us to eventually get a clue and allow our own suffering to come to an end.
The idea that “…there’s SOMETHING rather than NOTHING, and nothing decided that to be so,” well, phew, you’ve really got me mystified on that one. Nothing decided that there would be something? Explicate, please.
[QUOTE=cmyk]
Do you really blame your parents for giving you your self-concience? Where would it end? How far back would the accusation go?
Look, yourself. Of course life propagates itself. That’s certainly not in question. It is not a matter of “how far back would the accusation go.” What’s done is done. We, who live now, can make the conscious and responsible decision not to extend the misery any further. And, IMO, we should. A few have agreed with me, more or less, many have disagreed, and the rest blah-de-blah away.
I don‘t believe that I’ve implied any such thing. I do believe that nearly everyone HAS thought about such things, and the conslusions that inevitably follow (or that would follow if they dared to keep thinking the situation through) are too terrible for them to bear. So they blot such thoughts out of their consciousness, go about the reflexive business of producing more misery-laden and misery-producing individuals, and figure that they’ve done their minimal duty on this earth.
There is another level to this, which I think involves looking at the overall situation and making the individual decision not to allow it to go on. The “different conclusion” of which YOU speak (and not necessarily every other poster on this thread), is one of rationalizing your own egotism and fear of death.
And please stop resorting to the use of the pronoun “we.” I see right through it and I won’t let you get away with it.
Except for a nice MLT - mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich, where the mutton is lean and the tomato is ripe…
To address the OP: is producing life the greatest human cruelty? This should be easy to disaffirm – finding at least one act crueler than giving birth to a child should suffice. For example, let’s compare the siring of a child to burning someone at the stake. First, we’ll have to find a random sampling of people who have been born and have them fill out a questionnaire. Next, we’ll have to find a random sampling of people being burned at the stake, and have them fill out a similar questionnaire (we’ll assume they can take a stake-burning break, and that they have not yet gotten their writing hand too badly charred).
1) Questionnaire for people who are alive:
Do you wish that you were never born?
Do the people who care about you wish that you were not alive?
Do you believe that your parents were cruel for giving birth to you?
Do you believe that your parents consider themselves cruel for giving birth to you?
Do you wish that you were not alive right now?
If there were an easy way out, would you hesitate to put an end to your life?
My guess is that the percentage of people who answer all of the above questions in the affirmative is considerably less than 100%
*
2) Questionnaire for people who are being burned at the stake:*
Do you wish that you were never lit at the stake?
Do the people who care about you wish that you were not being burned at the stake?
Do you believe that the people who are responsible for burning you at the stake are cruel?
Do you believe that the people responsible for burning you at the stake consider themselves to be cruel?
Do you wish that you were not being burned at the stake right now?
If you could easily put an end to being burned at the stake, would you do so?
My guess is that the percentage of stake-burnees who answer all of the above questions in the affirmative approaches 100% (I’ll allow for a few martyrs with extremely high pain thresholds).
If the #2 percentage is greater than the #1 percentage, I conclude that conspiring to bring life into being is not the greatest human cruelty.
The only argument one could attempt to use against this conclusion is to say that people who are not born cannot be burned at the stake, ergo one act prevents another that is cruel. I believe that argument is convoluted and has been properly addressed earlier in this thread (i.e. human potential).
So, if not the greatest cruelty, is creating life cruel at all?
No, it is not.
Can being born ever be considered cruel? Yes, but in numbers that I believe are far less than many hypothesis. IMO, the peoples whose birth can truly be considered cruel are those whose lives have been unremittingly filled with pain and totally devoid of pleasure. I don’t believe that a high percentage fill that bill.
Let’s hypothesis being able to ask a sampling of recently deceased people one question: Do you wish that you had never lived? My guess is that nearly all would answer, “no”.
What about people like the following?
Suicides: Perhaps many may be glad that they succeeded in ending their lives when they did. But would many 40-year-old suicides wish that they were successful at 5, 10, 20 years of age – I doubt it. Major depression is rarely an unremitting, life long affliction.
People who endure terribly painful deaths: On balance does, for example, 6 months of dying painfully necessarily negate 60 years of meaningful life? I think not.
People burdened with afflictions that you deem too great to successfully co-exist with a pleasurable, meaningful life. Don’t underestimate people’s capacity to adapt and find pleasure in sometimes unfathomable circumstances. I have crossed paths with many people burdened with terrible afflictions who are quite happy to be alive. I cannot, for example, imagine having been in Christopher Reeves situation and finding meaning to life - but I bet Mr. Reeve could not have imagined it either, before his accident. I don’t think that he was in any rush to end his life after his accident.
Should parents ever be accused of being cruel and held accountable for the lives of children who really are devoid of pleasure? In most cases, no - their intent was not to inflict cruelty, and statistically they should not have considered that that to an issue. A case can certainly be made for crack-heads, alcoholics and others who willfully give birth, knowing the potentially devastating effects on the offspring.
All in all, life is good…burning at the stake, not so good.