Existential crisis - please Help!

I suppose it might be construed as hate speech if I put it on a public billboard. But if you're on a private website among friends and colleagues who can smack you down if they think you're being unfair, you're free to speak your mind.

You accuse me of mischaracterizing you, yet you obviously are not very familiar with my posts. I have consistently said that the purpose of every paradigm shift in history (the Agricultural Revolution, the Building of Cities, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Industrial Revolution, and now this one that doesn't have a name yet, the Electronic/Information/Post-Industrial/Computer/Whatever Age) is to make everyone more safe, healthy, comfortable, prosperous, and able to pursue his own dreams by cooperating with each other. I have never promoted greed or anger, and in fact have identified them as the enemies of civilization and all of humanity. As for delusion, it's probably been with us since Ardipithecus came down from the trees and I don't see any reason to assert that it's a bigger problem today than at any other time. At least we now have the first stirrings of a science that intends to understand how we think and feel, so perhaps in a few more generations they'll figure out how delusions work and how to deal with them.

I would replace the verb "try" with the verb "pretend." How can you say with a straight face that a belief system based on fairytales and Stone Age legends--one that does not slap down a fringe movement that actually claims that science is wrong and builds museums to celebrate that claim--is not promoting delusion?

You've been arguing from the position of a religionist. If you're not a religionist, you're doing a very skillful impersonation. So you can't complain if people believe it.

Besides, you just made up stuff about me, with nothing to base it on. I have always decried greed and anger, and I've never weighed in with an opinion on delusion. If you're going to ask to be excused for that because you misunderstood me, then I suppose the civilized thing for me would be to say, "OK then, I must have misunderstood you too," and excuse you in turn. But you will indeed need to extend the same courtesy to me for misunderstanding you--based on the words you posted right here in this very thread, very convincingly impersonating a champion of the religious.

 

Just because I hate religion, for very good rational reasons, why do you suppose I dislike diversity in general?

That's the second time you've called me a materialist. The first time I refuted your accusation by giving you a fairly good view into my daily life. Since you did not deign to even try to rebut my refutation, to continue this same line of reasoning as though there are no objections is a textbook case of disingenuous argument, which flouts science.

I already told you that I will no longer tolerate your insidious, illogical trolling--which is my duty as a moderator since it's a violation of the forum rules. Consider this your last warning. If you do it again, I guarantee that the moderator of this subforum will be delighted to start you on your journey down the ban cycle.

And how have I made it impossible for anyone to earn a living? I vote for candidates who seem most likely to improve the economy, I excoriate our completely out-of-touch Congress who believes that the national debt is our biggest problem, even though A) the vast majority of Americans don't even list it in their top ten and B) Japan's debt-to-GDP ratio is 200% and every banker in the world is still delighted to buy their bonds. I could give you a long lecture on how to put people back to work (I have a degree in business administration, after all), but there's no point since you only scan my postings for tidbits that you can twist slightly and use against me.

Perhaps you assume that because I rant against religion here that I vote for laws that will deny federal jobs and university admissions to churchgoers. Or perhaps that I have formed my own version of George Zimmerman's "Neighborhood Watch" and lie in wait for them as they walk back from the Seven-Eleven. In which case you're doing exactly what you accuse me of: characterizing me wrongly.

I'm not dumb enough not to realize that the vast majority of people who believe in the supernatural manage, nonetheless, to be pleasant, productive citizens. It's a small minority who start the wars and build Creation Science museums. I'm not going to persecute several billion people for the sins of a few. I would like to re-educate them, but that's a different tactic. And considering that I don't know how, I'll leave that for the next guy.

Of course not. It's their nature and content that makes them fairytales. They claim to falsify the entire scientific method, yet there is not one shred of respectable evidence to support them. Even you have not been able to pull evidence out of your hat for the six-day creation, the flood that covered the world with three times as much water as there is, or the Resurrection.

You're arguing that religion is believable, in a place of science and scholarship. If that doesn't make you a religionist, then it makes you a troll who simply jumps into an argument and takes the side of the underdog just for fun.

We can all see that, regardless of their truth content, the metaphors that comprise religion have the power to do good. But you never take that approach to the argument. Perhaps because you're not prepared to defend it against the predictable rebuttal that accepting metaphors as truth is a faulty cognitive process, and that, at least in the last several centuries, despite the good that religion may have done it has done far more evil.

One definition of "religionist" is "a person with pretended or affected religious zeal." Since you have never actually identified yourself as a Christian or a member of any other religion, which any Christian or member of any other religion would certainly do under these circumstances, that definition seems to fit you. You very carefully tell us nothing about yourself, so you can slip into any persona that will infect our discussions with hostility and argument for the sake of argument.

No. I only feel that way about a few things like racism and religion.

Not true. You always come out against me so I don't have to make that decision in your case. Among others I'm perfectly content with the old adage, "Reasonable people can disagree." You're never reasonable so it doesn't apply to you. You always come here looking for a fight, and you know you can get one from me because I'm at the end of my patience with you.

Uh... you certainly did clothe yourself in the garb of a religionist. So you either are one or you're pretending. Duh?

You, who I would guess are no older than 40, continually rag on me, who will be 70 this year, about my decisions regarding the end-of-life issues which I must face now. I hope when you have to face them you will be able to do so honestly instead of having to maintain your persona.

As usual, you snark without explanation. You have never once explained why it's wrong for a person to want to end his own life when he's still in possession of his senses, rather than spending another six months in bewilderment, captivity and indignity, losing his mind and everything else he had to live for, not knowing his friends and family, in an institution that is quickly dissipating the estate that his family and favorite charities were hoping to receive.

All you do is insist that I should spend the last few months of my life that way, without explaining why. The only people who will benefit will be the bureaucrats and lawyers who run that institution. Even the people who do the actual work there aren't paid jack shit!

 

No, you don't exactly order me to do that. But you consistently snark about the helium bag or any other way for a person to decide when his life should end. If I can't do that, then I'll end up like most of the other people I've known: warehoused in an institution, turning into a vegetable, while the people who loved me dither over how not to make this their last memory of me, and while a bunch of bureaucrats and attorneys divide the money that was supposed to go to a few deserving friends and various animal charities.

No you haven't. It's Vipassana, not Vajrayana, and I would have caught that (quite forgivable) error the first time.

She has brought home absolutely nothing about death or the preparation therefor. She feels exactly the way I do about end-of-life issues, and hopes as I do that we stay healthy at least long enough to take advantage of the sea-change in the laws about these issues that will inevitably occur as soon as the tsunami of Baby Boomers start facing them, which could be an economic nightmare worse than their sudden eligibility for Social Security and Medicare. This is a reasonable hope since we're only a few years older but a lot healthier than that generation.

Whichever of us goes first will have the advantage of the other one's attempt to enforce our wishes, although it did no good in her mother's case. She's the one who's chosen the animal charities as our heirs, and the idea of that money going into the pockets of predatory lawyers and elder-care managers makes her very un-Buddhistically angry.

You seem to think that I could be married to someone with whom I have great philosophical differences. Not our generation!

And what, pray tell, would be a wide-angle view of death and dying? As usual, you criticize while offering only the vaguest hint of an alternative. Disingenous arguing again, your hallmark

Well let's see if I can dumb it down for you:

• We're all gonna die.
• If the medical industry is allowed to manage our last six months of life, they will suck out of our accounts as much money as they have taken in all previous years combined.
• To do so, they will keep our bodies "alive" long after our brains have lost coherence, so we will not be able to recognize anyone, communicate, read, or even enjoy a TV show. The contemplation of what it might feel like to have a brain that's still pumping blood and firing synapses but is now lacking order is incredibly frightening. That alone should give you pause. It could feel like endless pain, endless sorrow, endless fright, etc.
• This will include ignoring any orders we have filed that direct them to do otherwise. (My mother had a no-tube-feeding order, which in fact often is respected, but since they knew we were too far away to come running down and bitch at them, they ignored it.)
• This will be legal. The laws in the USA are heavily influenced by Christianity. We're supposed to wait for God to decide when it's time to die, while we and our loved ones suffer for some arbitrary number of days or months as we wait for that Divine Decision.

So what I have to offer is simply this: LET EACH OF US DECIDE HOW TO HANDLE IT.

I appreciate the vote of confidence. But you are now on Wynn's shit list and you'll be peppered with snark too.

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