Death

My mind's compass turns a 360-degree revolution several times reading this. Are you speaking clinically in which the stoppage of the heart-beat, breathing and so on are taken into account? Is a cultural anthropologist or a chemist in you speaking?☺



The word "belief," I believe, gives the clue to the probability of your speaking in spiritual terms. Then, that's what I am most interested in life.

But for confirmation, isn't it the theme of your thread, oja Khelsoril?

It seems improbable that there is an agent managing the universe, controlling even your natural calls and involuntary actions such as sneezing and breething and their modalities. It's not because God cannot do digestion for you, move food in your digestive tract and push the waste out of your excretory organs in the form of urine, sweat, and ☺; it is because such an idea of a busy personal God does not seem possible.

Then, is the world an orderless chaos? No. The world cannot be an orderless chaos. From the smallest to the largest of things (say, from atoms to the universe) known to us, there is the evidence of an interrelated order or a system. The periodic table shows the systematic distribution of matter in nature. The solar system follows the same law of nature as what we see in an atom. Evidently, there is an order, a system, or a design.

If there is soul, though it is not of matter, it must behave based on the same principle as that which forms a system, which may be independent or part of a larger system. In either case, it is unlikely that the spiritual system would be in contradiction to the system of matter, whether or not they are independent and unrelated systems or they constitute a larger system.

My contention here is that it seems nobody arbitrarily decides whether one goes to heaven or hell when one dies. It is the uncompromising and uncompromisable system that determines everything. If the world is a system, and if there is nothing beyond this system, then the question comes: What are good and evil, and where do these ideas come from? The binary ideas of heaven and hell seem to be culturally informed.

Thank you very much, Oja Thoithoi, for sharing your valuable thoughts on the subject of "Death." Yes, "belief" has to do with something which cannot be readily supported with concrete/ substantial/ physical evidences. It has to do with something which has been given as fact or truth, but whose acceptance or rejection depends on the choice of the person who encounters it. One example: A person may or may not belief in the existence of God or evil. Religious books talk about the existence of God/ gods/ devil and demons.

Different religions believe in different God/gods. So, agnostics and atheists choose or prefer to be free from all these controversies. Some religions believe in harsh God/gods, some believe in many gods--there are thousands and millions of beliefs, belief systems etc. Even in the same religion, say, Christian, there are hundreds of denominations whose belief systems/doctrines widely differ. For instance, the Catholics believe in the divinity of Mary whereas many millions of Protestant Christians believe that Mary was only a human being, who was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus, who is believed to be God who incarnated as a human being. And in many other subjects and issues, there are numerous conflicts and controversies within Christianity itself. Likewise, I believe there are countless differences, conflicts and disagreements in other religious bodies too say, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, etc.

Coming to the subject that is being discussed i.e., "Death"; here too, I believe there are numerous beliefs on what happens at death; whether there is something called soul/spirit; whether the death can see, hear, feel sorrow, anger and so on. If I am to express my personal view or belief, I can only say "I don't know." But if you ask me if I want to know what happens at death, my answer will be "Of course". But the difficulty is where to find the answer to my queries about something which is beyond my five senses-- beyond what is physical-- something metaphysical-- something I cannot know while I'm still alive.

Consequently, I start out in quest of answers to my spiritual queries-- I come across many answers, but which one shall I choose out of the many. It is up to me to choose or decide which one I should believe-- which one is most convincing as far as I am concerned. I do believe in free thinking, free choice and free decision. But I do have my own belief! Which I shall not try to impose upon anybody. This is not the end yet, of course.       

Thus, let us step into this darkness, but in doing this we will not engage in wild, chaotic play of guessing. We will remain guided by our rationality. Yes, when stretched almost to its limit, our rationality may become frayed or verge upon irrationality, but we will let it go as far as we don't lose our integrity.

In one of my posts above, I said:

If there is soul, though it is not of matter, it must behave based on the same principle as that which forms a system, which may be independent or part of a larger system. In either case, it is unlikely that the spiritual system would be in contradiction to the system of matter, whether or not they are independent and unrelated systems or they constitute a larger system.

The gist of this is that I think there is no contradiction between the material system of reality and the spiritual system of reality though they have different measures of their own. Difference does not presuppose contradiction. There is no contradiction between sweetness and bitterness. They are just different. Spirituality cannot be irrational though our readon may not be the right or good enough tool to trace all its movement quite in a way detectives with all their logic and devices developed using mathematical and scientific principles fail to trace the trails of several crimes whiles these crimes may have in no way committed in an illogical way. There are a lot of things happening following certain orders ( we call the order logic) which we fail to trace. However, just because we cannot follow the order we cannot call that process illogical or irrational. It is simply that we don't know what specific order that process follows.

In the same way, spiritual things follow some order, some logic, or some rationality, and our material rationality may not be fully able to follow that process for the trace to form a coherent story. However, it is unlikely that the spiritual realm follows a logical process of its own which is incoherent for and incompatible with the logical process of material reality. It is probably something like the system of the spiritual world is of a too high and/or too low frequency/frequencies (don't think of it in material terms:)) ) for the material world while they describe the same path.

The point being made is while we don't know for sure what happens to our soul (if it transcends bodily death) after our death, our logical investigation and rationally guided speculation will really help us.