Gav said: interesting dave. is meliorism best served by denying reincarnation? by avoiding the issue of death and what happens after? i dunno i tend to think we have skirted around the very natural issue of death in the west, whereas in the east you could say they have *empirical* evidence of what happens...tibetan book of the dead etc
dmb says:I don't know either. I don't think you have to deny the afterlife to be a meliorist, but it is focused on making improvements in this life. I haven't read the Tibetan Book of the Dead but if my professor is correct about it, that is a symbolic work and depicts the hero's journey. Or maybe that's just one way to read it. The demands of radical empiricism probably effect this anti-supernaturalism far more than the meliorism. I don't quite understand what would count as empirical evidence of an afterlife. And personally, such notions always seemed impossibly tangled up with our deepest wishes and greatest fears. Maybe it's just a fancy form of denial on my part, but I tend to think the trick of overcoming death is really about overcoming those wishes and fears, especially the fear of death and the wish for immortality. Maybe the trick is to identify with life in general rather than the single organism we usually identify with. Instead of being a few decades old with just a few more to go, you're 3.5 billion years old and there's no end in sight to your life. Gav also said: ...and in any case - your reason for being here, the point of it all: to evolve, to become perfect, to move forever towards quality....does this not mean more than living and dying in some brief, meaningless and dull existence? which one rings true? are we really in a position to say that all this stuff on death and dying is irrelevant - can we pick and choose like that? is that good? i would say that if the rest of buddhism, hinduism, seems to gel with the MOQ, chances are the death stuff does too. death....and beyond....we don't deal with it really....we are ignorant and therefore scared. dmb says:I don't think meaninglessness and re-incarnation are the only choices. But you're probably right about the ignorance. I just don't know of any reason to believe it. Those near-death stories are interesting. People really do have such experiences, but I'm not so sure about the claims that follow. You know, psychological facts and ontological claims are very different things. Especially if you're limited to only what can be known in experience, as radical empiricism demands. _________________________________________________________________ Insert movie times and more without leaving Hotmail®. http://windowslive.com/Tutorial/Hotmail/QuickAdd?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Tutorial_QuickAdd1_052009 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
