There’s little kindness in breaking the grand comforting delusion of a dying delusional mind.
Just let them go in peace, to do otherwise would be needlessly cruel.
Or, maybe they deserve that cruelty: I don’t have every relationship between every theist and atheist.
Just be aware that it is cruelty.
Some may deserve that, some may not.
Or you could just not be there.
That’s all between you and… well, you.
Now that that’s done and dusted, may we return to discussing the affairs of the living?
The cruelties repeatedly and incessantly enacted upon some category of them, by one particular group or another, because they don’t share some particular principle or value in the way they live their lives?
The cruelties that are themselves mandatory ritual elements of those particular group’s worldviews?
Yeah… as much as I hate my so-called mother, I think it would be needlessly cruel to do that to her… have enough empathy/sympathy to not do it.
Specially because I believe, while there might not be a beyond, there might be a “something” where consciousness is stuck in its last moments… and I wouldn’t want even her to be stuck with the dread of dying, or the hopelessness of being hated in the deathbed, but hopefully her brain creating the image of “heaven”… a better place where she is happy, and not the unhappy bad person she ended up being…
There is a fair amount of evidence that the brain indeed does produce a very powerful hallucination in some people, as they pass.
Near death experiences… do often result in a kind of passage through or into a tunnel of blinding white experience.
Many people who do die in the sense of their heart stopping, but not permanent brain death, or very nearly die… many other kinds of vivid hallucinations of people in their lives or who knows what, or out of body experiences, etc…
While I don’t think there is a beyond, there do seem to be genuine, extremely vivid last moments.
No explicit need to turn those into … well I guess literally the worst trip of that person’s life.
I remain convinced that these end of life hallucinations are the best frame for thinking about heaven and hell, rather than quasi-material spaces like they’re often discussed.
There’s little kindness in breaking the grand comforting delusion of a dying delusional mind.
Just let them go in peace, to do otherwise would be needlessly cruel.
Or, maybe they deserve that cruelty: I don’t have every relationship between every theist and atheist.
Just be aware that it is cruelty.
Some may deserve that, some may not.
Or you could just not be there.
That’s all between you and… well, you.
Now that that’s done and dusted, may we return to discussing the affairs of the living?
The cruelties repeatedly and incessantly enacted upon some category of them, by one particular group or another, because they don’t share some particular principle or value in the way they live their lives?
The cruelties that are themselves mandatory ritual elements of those particular group’s worldviews?
Yeah… as much as I hate my so-called mother, I think it would be needlessly cruel to do that to her… have enough empathy/sympathy to not do it.
Specially because I believe, while there might not be a beyond, there might be a “something” where consciousness is stuck in its last moments… and I wouldn’t want even her to be stuck with the dread of dying, or the hopelessness of being hated in the deathbed, but hopefully her brain creating the image of “heaven”… a better place where she is happy, and not the unhappy bad person she ended up being…
There is a fair amount of evidence that the brain indeed does produce a very powerful hallucination in some people, as they pass.
Near death experiences… do often result in a kind of passage through or into a tunnel of blinding white experience.
Many people who do die in the sense of their heart stopping, but not permanent brain death, or very nearly die… many other kinds of vivid hallucinations of people in their lives or who knows what, or out of body experiences, etc…
While I don’t think there is a beyond, there do seem to be genuine, extremely vivid last moments.
No explicit need to turn those into … well I guess literally the worst trip of that person’s life.
I remain convinced that these end of life hallucinations are the best frame for thinking about heaven and hell, rather than quasi-material spaces like they’re often discussed.
As with the rest of our lives… a very vivid, somewhat standardized and agreed upon hallucination.
We are dreaming sacks of meat.
But that can be miraculous and amazing, if you let it be.