Unless you are suffering interminable excruciating pain. For such a person death might be considered a reward. For people who die without pain, there is no reason to call it punishment, since there can be no punishment without an awareness of being punished, and there can be no awareness without being alive and awake (with normal brain function and mental state). The punishment is imposed on the grieving loved ones. Notice how religion tends to ignore the reality of the trauma and suffering of the grieving survivors. Somehow they suddenly disappear from the radar of compassion of the so-called Personal God. Life is a biological process. Do you assume that a skin cell is cut off from God when it dies? We are systems of cells integrated into tissues which are integrated into organs which are integrated into systems, which integrate into the body. The integration of the complete human is more complex because it involves the integration of the mind into the brain which is barely understood, if at all. Being cut off from God (as in being brain dead, asleep, or being an atheist) has no bearing on whether a person is alive or dead. You appear to be referring to the Personal God of Judeo-Christian Orthodoxy and/or Christian Fundamentalism. That adds the rest of people who believe in God to the group above. I don't know abut you, but I see life teeming all around me. The living dead are the cells of your body, programmed in your DNA to die (apoptosis). Fundamentalists and atheists have the same life expectancies. Not at all. The body stops functioning when vital tissues, organs or systems becomes physically or functionally separated from the integrated body of systems. (Here I'm treating blood as a tissue.) In general it happens when fresh blood is separated from the body cells by lack of circulation. At the molecular level, you could say it occurs when cellular respiration ceases when blood stops flowing. There is no spirit. If there were, it would have to reside in all living things, including the prokarytes/eukaryotes (like bacteria) from which we evolved. The idea of an animal spirit has been superseded by the discovery of Brownian motion and its role in all cellular activity. It's also the means of diffusion in non-living liquids. Therefore if there are spirits in us, then there are spirits in the jar of formaldehyde (in Brownian motion) into which the dead tissues and organs of the biologist's lab are kept. This would restore the "separation" of the spirit from the inanimate tissue or organ (such as a sectioned brain). However, the specimen remains dead, so your statement can not be possibly be true.
Actually, the living state makes use of a fifth force of nature called the entropic force. This fifth force can be demonstrated in the lab with osmosis. Osmotic pressure, which is force/area, is generated as the entropy of the water molecules increases, as these diffuse in the direction of the higher ionic concentration. This osmotic force is not connected to any of the four forces of nature, but exclusively to the second law of entropy. This is a colligative property of water which is not dependent on particular ions just the concentration. It is not force dependent or the osmotic pressure would change for each ionic blend we add. It does not change that way. Although entropy is often associated with randomness, in the case of osmosis we also get a directed force, that is dependent on the shape of the container. Osmosis is an example of order from chaos driven by entropy. This can be demonstrated in the lab. Brownian movement is real but can be superseded by the entropic force as it pushes things into order. A good example, is proteins have specific folds. This is not random or average folds but very specific in spite of the energy needed to change the shape very small; equal to 2-3 hydrogen bonds worth of energy. Entropy is more than disorder. In general terms, entropy is change from the status quo requiring additional information to define the change. Order from chaos can also be a form of entropy, if it changes the status quo. In the case of osmosis, we get double entropy, one aspect is the randomization of the water and the second aspect is connected to the entropic force that pushes into order; new state. The latter is traditionally referred to as the ordering spirit within life. Science is stuck at the mythology of chaos, and does not take into account the ordering principle of the entropic force.
All in all, not a bad post, especially for you. Just a couple of errors of facts making it mainly nonsense - much better than many you make, but both parts quoted above are exactly wrong / backwards. Pure water on one side of a permeable membrane and brine on the other, is the more ordered state than when both sides later have the same salt concentration. - Have gone to the higher entropy, less ordered state from the well ordered, initital lower entropy state. Also this change is NOT driven by entropy. In fact, I don´t think entropy "drives" anything. There is no "entropy force." What is happening is that each ion or water molecule incident upon the membrane, from either side, has same probably of passing thru. But there are many more ions initially incident on the membrane from the brine side than from the nearly pure water side, so of course there is a net flux of ions from the higher concentration side into the lower concentration side - just statistics, pure and simple. Entropy is not driving this net flow but is being driven to higher level by it (The statistical imbalance). If the membrane is such that only H2O can pass thru, then it is the attraction between the Na+ & Cl- ions to /with the H2O which is a polarized molecule* (the O end is negative and the H end is positive) which slow the rate** of H2O passing from the brine side compared to the rate of H2O passing thru membrane from the pure water side (with no electro-static force from Na+ or Cl- retarding the H20 molecules. Again NO ENTROPY FORCE in living or dead matter. - just statistics. *You need to know that H2O is not H-O-H, a symmetric molecule, but HH--O with both Hs on the same side 105 degrees apart. ** This H2O ion attraction is also evident in the slowing the rate of evaporation of water at 100C. I.e. to make salt water boil , the temperature must be greater than 100C. For example, you can hard boil and egg faster in strong salt water.
The only ones pretending here are you and the recent posters in this thread along with the one who keeps sending me pm's. You are the ones 'living' a fantasy regarding the non existence of God and spirit. You know the sense of relief you experience upon waking from a nightmare? Well, imagine the opposite...feeling relatively at ease, and then: unimaginable, inescapable, never ending horror...such is your (plural) fate.
There is spirit. Thankfully, it's existence is not dependent upon your reasoning ability, anymore than the reasoning required for Stephen Hawking's cure does.
Unfortunately for many people, Christianity was the horror that created hell on Earth, in the form of burning people alive, and death was their only escape.
Well, let me assure you that for those who hold such twisted understandings, their death assures them they'll remain forever entangled.
Again with the fire and brimstone. That's your only response to any intellectual challenge. Oh well. Maybe you can come up with something better during your little timeout.
You're not proselytizing or saying anything that should result in a ban. Consider the continual nonsense posted in this forum without a ban associated with it. Reams of intellectual dishonesty. No ban.
