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People With University Degree Fear Death Less
An anonymous reader writes "People with a university degree fear death less than those at a lower literacy level. In addition, fear of death is more common among women than men, which affects their children's perception of death."
Grad studies are worse than any kind of death. I experienced both.
I became an engineer. I work in a cubicle. I bear a slight resemblance to Dilbert when in my work attire. This my friends, is worse than death. Therefore, I have no fear of death because I am beyond it.
But they fear typographical errors much more :-)
Bruce Perens.
Fear of eventually dying and fear of dying young are quite different things, but both get named "fear of death". I read TFA, and it's not clear what fear they're talking about.
IMHO, it's silly to fear the former but good to have some fear of the latter.
People fear what they don't understand. Ignorant people fear more, and are manipulated by their fear en masse.
Bruce Perens.
Death is inevitable. I don't fear taxes, and I don't fear death.
What I do fear, however, since I live in the United States where suicide and assisted suicide are illegal, is becoming almost completely nonfunctional due to sudden paralysis, stroke, etc. The fear is that if I were locked in and could only communicate one character an hour, they'd still keep me alive for as long as they could, even if I had to lay there awake but bored and paralyzed for 16 hours a day.
A distant second is dying a horrible slow death, perhaps by starvation.
Death itself, though, I don't really fear.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Because that's a false statement (more people can't die than the total number of people born, as those who are not born can't die, due to not existing in the first place), and you're begging the question.
Not a sentence!
"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."
If I believed that there was a good chance that after I died I would be thrown into a lake of fire and otherwise punished for the rest of eternity, you can bet your sorry ass that I would be scared shitless of dying. Yes yes if you're good you get to go to heaven, but what if you accidentally committed a mortal sin without realizing it or something? After all, if you read the Bible, God is nothing if not capricious; how can you know that when He said "No mixed fabrics!", He didn't really mean it? What if you really are supposed to believe in the Miracle of Transubstantiation, reality be damned? It's just so uncertain.
Fortunately there's no hell, so there's no worries on that front. Honestly, I can't for the life of me see why theists think that religion brings peace and comfort. What is any amount of Earthly reassurance, in the face of the threat of infinite torture? (take that, Pascal!)
Honestly, I can't for the life of me see why theists think that religion brings peace and comfort
Religion brings money and political power. If you can't derive peace and comfort from those, there's no hope for you!
And if I unexpectedly should be thrown into that lake of fire instead of fading into nothingness, well... That would be the time to go ahead with the full survive, evade, resist, escape program and take the bastard responsible for this on. Let's see who's burning in the end.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Saying that as somebody who spent a lot of time in the academic world:
Ignorance is not at all a privilege of people without a degree.
Seems like there's a long list of benefits in education. Not only will you be less religulous, but you will also not fear death as much and hopefully get a more fullfilling job.
Educating women is even better, they have fewer children and a better health. And they tend to see education as something important for their children.
Have a look at Hans Roslings excellent talk about the miracle in Pakistan for what education has done, and especially education of women.
Long live education, which should be free and availible.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
From the article:
at present, the education system does not have any formal and systematic method to deal with death in class. If death were introduced in the education system, children would have a more real and intense approach to life, and many of the problems derived from the mourning process in the adulthood would be prevented.
I hope they mean the topic of death rather than death itself. I don't really want our teachers killing anybody as an object lesson.
#DeleteChrome
Oh, I did not mean Satan with the guy responsible for this. Any god condemning a single soul to infiinte punishment for a finite transgression is pure evil. That one would be the target in this unlikely case.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Heaven is a terribly boring place, Hell is suffering, I would rather take another chance at life and Re-incarnate, of course it would be nice to retain ALL my memories of the past life so I could learn from experience and not make the same mistakes twice.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Death is your own non-existence, which by definition it is impossible for you to experience.
I work on the method of thinking about what life was like (for me personally) before I was born. That's identical to death in my opinion. What I personally experienced in 1856 is identical to what I will personally experience in 2156.
Definitely a bit of weird thing to wrap your head around in terms of the "non-existence", but I feel it's a better comparison than the post you replied to talking about "peaceful silence".
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
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People fear what they don't understand. Ignorant people fear more, and are manipulated by their fear en masse.
Getting a master's degree in physics did not give me any particular understanding of death. However, a central point of experimental sciences is coping with uncertainty. Understanding that the world is not black and white has a lot to do with your personality, and many people do not seem to be comfortable with themselves unless they feel absolutely certain about some things.
In my current work as a teacher, one general challenge is getting my students from "what is the right/wrong answer" to understanding and analyzing the questions in a deeper level. I feel like I must first undo the elementary school teachings, in order to teach scientific thinking.
This seems to reflect the fact that lower levels of education are about strict judgment and rote memorization. People at this level fear death, because they feel like they must have some kind of absolute knowledge in order to deal with it.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Look, that's certainly true, but we're talking about distributions here. I've seen stupid people in academia, and I've seen smart people in the general population. But here in academia, if I walk up to someone and strike up a conversation about some complex issue that perhaps one or both of us aren't very familiar with, 99% of the time I'll come out with a greater understanding of the issue than I had before. I learn something, just by accessing the intelligence of that other person. In the general population, 99% of the time the best I can hope for is a complete lack of interest from the other person or a few very stupid comments that make me sorry I started the conversation.
So yeah, academia ain't no intellectual utopia, but there is a difference...
weinersmith
I really like the story with the Devil and God throwing him out. And God being good and the Devil being bad.
Good versus Evil. Great storytelling.
But what if the Evil guy had won and then says He is the good guy? If I were the evil guy, I certainly would mess with peoples head and say that I was good, although I was evil. Say to two different persons that I am their only God and kill the other one and see who wins. Just because I can.
Let people die and the few who live must thank me for my mercy.
All the while the Devil who tries to come back, I will tell the worst stories about. And all the the Devil want to do is you to have fun.
Or is this just a matter that absolute power corrupts absolutely?
Anyway. Nice and entertaining stories. Lots of violence and sex, so great to turn into movies.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
It's a lot easier in the pulpit than it is in the pews.
Hell, you just have to pass around a plate and people put their hard-earned money on it. As a former altar boy I was fascinated by the collection. In my church, they had guys come down the aisle with these baskets with long handles, because they were afraid to pass a plate and tempt the believers with actually handling a dishful of money. It seemed like a great racket, and I may have gone into the church business, until I learned that the Priests got zero pussy. I remember asking my older brother what kind sex Father Moran was getting, and when he answered "None", I thought he said "Nun" and figured he was banging Sister Margaret Mary. Well, Sister Margaret Mary was a dead ringer for Dick Cheney, so I figured maybe there were better rackets to make an easy buck. That's when I decided to become an English major. Well, it was a long while before I started making any real money, and by then I had to join another kind of priesthood called "Academia", but I got to bang a lot of goth chicks (or what would be called goth today), who looked a whole lot better than Sister Mary Margaret. By the way, if you're college age and you're staying away from the goth chicks because you think they'd be no fun in the sack, don't be a dope. The pale makeup and dour expression both come off when they get a few drinks in them and they turn into more fun than Chucky Cheese on weed.
Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh yeah. Religion. Fuck them. And if you're an altar boy wondering what kind of sex your priest gets, stop wondering right now and run away because it's a trap!
You are welcome on my lawn.
it's because (statistically) the more educated, the less religious. While one would think that the religious person, hoping for life after death, would fear it less, I think the opposite is true. The atheist can take comfort in believing that everything just stops when you die, that is you just cease to exist - no pain, no awareness, no anything. A religious person who believes in the after life has to worry about whether they're going to heaven or hell, will it hurt when I'm dead and (for some) maybe even a little fear about the cracks in their faith (i.e. could I be wrong?)..
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
That's not the whole story either - hard to pull the "good needs evil" thing out of the bible either. The whole Lucifer/Satan thing is rather apocryphal anyway and more based on Milton than on the bible itself. The words "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven" are by Milton originally, spoken by his Satan. Milton didn't write Paradise Lost as a piece of Christian fiction - given how heavily influenced he was by Greek and Pagan ideas and how much of that shows in the poem. Amusingly, he is still the main source for the popular picture of hell and Satan.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.