Annihilism

What little reverence people have for their own body nowadays, the very conduit through which they perceive and conceive their own existence. What stupidity it is to want to be released from our most trusted friend and ally—our very selves. Yet, all too often I hear that we are not our bodies or our flesh or the life we live, but we are something eternal, a soul, a consciousness, an ethereal something yet nothing trapped in a physical, fleshy and entirely valueless sack of meat. The paradoxes and contradictions we spew to arrive at this conclusion are insurmountable, yet the steady sacrifice of self-honesty it takes to favour this belief still continues.

How can one tear apart his own body into so many abstractions without so much as moving a finger? In thought, anyone can, ask Descartés. In legend, only a God can accomplish this.

God, in perhaps a fit of boredom, parodied humanity by donning his man-suit as a carpenter named Jesus Christ; and with all contempt towards the fragile flesh he wore to hide his supreme power, he feigned sacrifice (to himself no less) by allowing the mortals to destroy the effigy of the flesh he so wanted everyone to turn from. Imagine an immortal and all-powerful God pretending to die and suffer on a cross by submitting his mortal costume to a shaming the world will forever remember, and I will show you a deceiver, who unlike us, doesn’t need the body to exist. What does this teach us but to despise the flesh? to sacrifice it for supersensory aims, because—perhaps we too may be like God? Doubtful.

The mind/body dualism is the greatest error and fault of religious scepticism, to doubt ourselves in favour of an abstraction of ourselves—namely, the mind, the psych, the soul, the spirit, nous, the ego, the idea, or whatever it is to be named throughout the ages. It is the body, the entirety, the only thing actually there, actually existing as evident truth that we wish to fragment.

Talk to yourself, scan your memories, reminisce on whatever it is you call a soul and you will only be reminding yourself of yourself. Everything you’ve sensed, the weight of your body on a floor, the heat of the sun, the beauty of a flower, every single word you’ve read, your bibles, your science, your mathematics, every shred of ‘consciousness’ you’ve ever created is impressed and expressed through yourself; not a soul, not an intellect, but through the entirety.

The body is the heuristic axiom from which we understand and create all knowledge. Every notion, inclination or idea is arrived through it. And if these ideas are expressed, it is done so with the entire power and push of life that emanates from any organism. With it we experience everything there is to experience. Without it, there is no spirit, no mind, no love, no consciousness and no yearning to exist apart from it.

And now I’m told to release myself from my skin-shackles, to become whatever energy is left when I destroy myself, or ascend from myself, or be raptured from myself in some twisted perversion of reality. This yearning for an afterlife, to become spirit, to become soul, to live in the kingdom of God, to ascend the body for another dimension, to find enough absolute meaninglessness in existence to want for another. Lets be honest—what is this amount to but a doctrine of death? What is this but resignation from life? To fade into shades?

The preachers of death, all who preach a supersensory realm where we should exist, where they would rather exist, and who scorn the very sensual existence they themselves exist in, are selling you the doctrine of Annihilism.

We must reclaim our body. We must reclaim our senses and our instincts and begin to learn from them and refine them, rather than hide them under a carpet, or worse, destroy them, for a fear that we cannot control them, control ourselves. We must quit doubting ourselves in favour of a hopeful death. Annihilism must fall.

Are you skeptical enough to doubt what you are?

one of my father's truisms: "all of the cool stuff happens AFTER you die."

he really says that.

personally, I hope it will be as though I never was.

does that make me a regular (sans -an) nihilist?

How can you possibly know we have no souls or that life isn't eternal? This is no more certain that those who are spiritual or atheistic or religious or whatever. Basically who the f knows for sure? Go with what feels right. You say anything you've ever sensed comes from your body, not a soul; what about empathy, what about being able to feel or understand something I've never physically experienced? What about coincidences? Coral Castle? Edgar Cayce? Electric universe? I don't know. Something seems to be going on that's greater than we can understand and I love it. Maybe we'll all find out someday or maybe we'll turn into dust and that's it. I'd lean towards the first one, but I'll agree with you that we might as well spend as much time enjoying this life as possible!

Originally posted by tgidkp
one of my father's truisms: "all of the cool stuff happens AFTER you die."

he really says that.

personally, I hope it will be as though I never was.

does that make me a regular (sans -an) nihilist?

If you find no meaning in your existence then yes, you would be considered a nihilist. But in a sense, by default, we are all nihilists. We enter and leave the world without the meaning we create.

Originally posted by greenWeenie
How can you possibly know we have no souls or that life isn't eternal? This is no more certain that those who are spiritual or atheistic or religious or whatever. Basically who the f knows for sure? Go with what feels right. You say anything you've ever sensed comes from your body, not a soul; what about empathy, what about being able to feel or understand something I've never physically experienced? What about coincidences? Coral Castle? Edgar Cayce? Electric universe? I don't know. Something seems to be going on that's greater than we can understand and I love it. Maybe we'll all find out someday or maybe we'll turn into dust and that's it. I'd lean towards the first one, but I'll agree with you that we might as well spend as much time enjoying this life as possible!

How can anyone know? Have you seen one? Have you felt one? Can you circumscribe one? Will one poor out of you if we cut you open? All it takes is for something to show its face, to exist, to know we have a soul. So far, it has only ever been the body. So why should we believe someone else when they claim the contrary?

Have I ever seen a soul? No. I've never seen air. I've never seen gravity. Have I felt one? Kind of yeah. Like I said, something.

Originally posted by greenWeenie
Have I ever seen a soul? No. I've never seen air. I've never seen gravity. Have I felt one? Kind of yeah. Like I said, something.

Have you ever seen a bubble? What's inside? Air is a mix of physical elements. Gravity is an idea, a theory contrived to account for particular events in physical space. Is there a force called gravity? or a thing called gravity? well.. no there isn't.

I would understand that the soul is just as theoretical except it doesn't account for anything in physical space, except perhaps, where we don't understand the body.

There is no absolute, existential fact other than the fact of our existence. No definition of your self is not self proclaimed. You can't say that we are eternal souls nor can you say that we aren't. Proclaiming either as true is a subjective falsehood. The only thing that you can honestly say is that you exist and that the things that you see also exist. You cannot honestly say what they exist as. This is the only common existential truth. Admit that you don't know what anything is, and you will, perhaps for the first time, be telling the truth. Look at the innocence and purity of a 1 year old child. They are true. Build your house upon the rock.

The end of existence, so then will the soul cease. If this is man's fate after death, then I will be satisfied with this. I'm much more interested in the time I spend on Earth. "Time is the fire in which we burn..."

A more concise question is

Can it be demonstrated that a conscious aspect of self (subjectively observable only) can act indepently of the body aspect of self (objectively observable) and/or vice versa?