I hear a lot of people say that life is a gift from God. And it got me thinking why is it always a gift? The best reason I could come up with is that if you were never alive you could never go to heaven.

Does anyone else have any opinions?

Maybe it's viewed that way because we know the loss of death...

Life is not as much a gift as existance is a gift. God put us here to test us, but the real gift is to be at all.

Gifts don't really exist.

quote:Originally posted by Zman:

I hear a lot of people say that life is a gift from God. And it got me thinking why is it always a gift? The best reason I could come up with is that if you were never alive you could never go to heaven.

Does anyone else have any opinions?



Because breathing air is orgasmic.

Life is beautiful, without it, you're dead.

[This message has been edited by quasicurus (edited 07-18-2005).]

What makes life beautiful, I mean, what if your life was so terrible that it would be better to not have lived?

quote:Originally posted by HomerJay603:

Life is not as much a gift as existance is a gift. God put us here to test us, but the real gift is to be at all.

Are you kidding? Life and existence are obviously the same thing, in this case. What the fuck.

What kind of idiot runs tests of which he already knows the results (given omniscience?)

[This message has been edited by Antiquarian (edited 07-19-2005).]

There just saying that you are a result of him making you, so you should charish it like a gift, blah blah...blah,blaah.

So god creates us so that he can test us? Why would he test his own creation? Someone who knows all would already know how your life would go, why would he need to create you at all unless he was questioning himself which wouldn't make him much of a god.

Have you ever seen that movie Simone with Al Pacino? He convinces everyone that she is real, she looks and sounds real, but she doesn't exist despite those facts. Eventually it comes out that she was too good to be true and that she was no more than another persons imaginative creation. What's the messege?

I'm not suprised religion became so popular. It illiminates uncertainty when completely believed to the point where you actually are willing to except total lies as long as you're happy, and have no fears about your fate. Once a person achieves this stage of ignorance, they become close minded start to use circular defence that makes no sense but can't be disproved. It's not really an argument, more blocking a discussion because it'll fuck with your bliss.

Manipulating people by telling them what they want to here can be easily done and people will flip flop to the next thing they want to here in a heartbeat. Bush used these tactics to win both elections. Nothing more than puppets.

quote:Originally posted by Antiquarian:

What kind of idiot runs tests of which he already knows the results (given omniscience?)

Who said that the tests are for God to find out the results?

I know this is a poor example, but when i was in basic training (US Army), we had to go through the confidence course. The reason it is a poor example is because that exercise was used as a way for the Drill Sergeants to evaluate us. But, as the name implies, it is also a way to let new soldiers understand what they can do; to let recruits have faith in self.

The "trail period" of life is to let us know we can and should trust in God/Jesus/Holy Spirit.

yeah, same as the reason we pray. I mean, I really doubt we're changing God's mind, but God is just bring us close to Him.

quote:Originally posted by xtreem5150ahm:

Who said that the tests are for God to find out the results?

I know this is a poor example, but when i was in basic training (US Army), we had to go through the confidence course. The reason it is a poor example is because that exercise was used as a way for the Drill Sergeants to evaluate us. But, as the name implies, it is also a way to let new soldiers understand what they can do; to let recruits have faith in self.

The "trail period" of life is to let us know we can and should trust in God/Jesus/Holy Spirit.



I like that, very insightful

living beats nothing?

for some people, for some not

Life is a gift that we only may have once in exsistance, unless reincarnation is true, then we may have had lives in this world, or other worlds, this raised another question in my head, we destroy this planet now with emmissions from machines, or nuclear war fare, who would want to become reincarnated in the next life, we maybe creating hell for ourselfs and our children in the future, if reincarnation is true, you could be reincarnated into another baby as soon as you die, or maybe reincarnated into a baby in 5 thousand years. I dont know what this world will be like in 5 thousand years, maybe like the movie Judge Dredd, where we will have to build huge metropolis citys to survive the worlds ecosystem. It wont be better then this world in the present. To many people destructing it.

quote:Originally posted by Lou Reed:

living beats nothing?

Well put ^

Life is a gift, but it's in the way that you just so happen to get the "better" flip of chance. Not, in my opinion, like a gift from some mysterious omniescent Creator.

Is being alive as a human preferable to an existance as an inanimate "alive" object such as a tree or a blade of grass? Yes! Do I belong to the former class? Yes! That is how I consider my life to be a gift.

Yay, I have a complex brain that can conceptualize things such as art and music and am so lucky to have a language instinct and an apparatus to use so I can speak my thoughts!

That is how I look at it. Eternally grateful for all that.

Because it's more fun than death.

Cheers,

Lost

[QUOTE]Originally posted by AngryFemme:

[B] Well put ^

Life is a gift, but it's in the way that you just so happen to get the "better" flip of chance. Not, in my opinion, like a gift from ...

WOW!

quote:Originally posted by LostCause:

Because it's more fun than death.

Cheers,

Lost

Is it really always more fun than death? I'm sure plenty of people have had horrible lives. Seriously horrible lives. What's their gift? Whats the one thing that makes life worth living to anyone?

Okay. To take a leap:

Why are we the only animals who commit suicide?

quote:Originally posted by Zman:

Is it really always more fun than death? I'm sure plenty of people have had horrible lives. Seriously horrible lives. What's their gift? Whats the one thing that makes life worth living to anyone?

hope? compassion and mabey the ability to make something wonderful happen for another person.

and i've seen animals kill themself.

i read somewhere about a flock of sheep who commited suicide by jumping off a cliff



i'm not kidding!

quote:Originally posted by quasicurus:



Because breathing air is orgasmic.

Did you pay for life before you got it as far as your aware??? NO? so then it's a gift, simple as that, you got it for free, not take you free life outside and go play

quote:Originally posted by dark-easterbunny:

Did you pay for life before you got it as far as your aware??? NO? so then it's a gift, simple as that, you got it for free, not take you free life outside and go play



Nobody pays for cancer. So, it's a gift too?

because you are worth more to the religions and governments alive than dead... in the end its only because you gain them power and money, if you kill yourself, you are making it harder for them (most of the time)

quote:Originally posted by smashed kaleidoscope:

and i've seen animals kill themself.

What kind of animal? What did they do? What was the situation? Where? How?

DETAILS!!

quote:Originally posted by Lou Reed:

i read somewhere about a flock of sheep who commited suicide by jumping off a cliff

i'm not kidding!

I found an article on that!!! http://hcgtv.com/item/1216

Blew me away. Clean away. THAT is a phenomena.

And then The Straight Dope (science advisory board) claims the following:

If you mean, "Other than humans, do otherwise healthy and reproductively-capable individuals of any other species perform actions foreseeably guaranteed to result in their immediate death?", the answer is NO. Violate any one of the conditions in the preceding statement, and the answer is YES. Sick or injured animals of many different types will act in such ways as to guarantee a speedier end to their suffering, and this appears to include whale beachings. Whale beachings are also one reason for the qualifier "foreseeable," in that it appears healthy whales may follow a sick leader when the latter beaches--as social animals, they instinctively trust their leader, which under most circumstances would not lead them to their doom, so their unexpected (to them) beaching cannot be considered genuinely suicidal. For that matter, a rabbit that walks out into an open field when there's a hungry owl nearby may be performing an action virtually guaranteed to result in death--but not foreseeably so. Nor would an animal that dies defending its young necessarily be considered suicidal, even if the enemy is something pretty much impossible to defeat; after all, the enemy might retreat if it doesn't seem worth the trouble, so sometimes defense works.

The reason for the clause "reproductively-capable" is that there are many social insects with sterile, suicidal soldiers or workers--for example, termite soldiers that explode their bodies, which are filled with sticky guts, immobilizing their enemies in goo. As a final note, the stuff about lemmings jumping off cliffs, of course, is a myth.

*scratches head

Edit: Herd Mentality. That's gotta be it!! One animal is startled, jumps to it's death, the others follow blindly.

[This message has been edited by AngryFemme (edited 07-27-2005).]

Reminds me of whales and dolphins beaching themselves.

No non-human animal decides to kill themself because no non-human animal has the brain power to think about the positive and negative consequences of the said action. Besides, how would an animal kill themself? They are too stupid to think of a way to kill themself. They weren't born with that knowledge and they certainly weren't taught how to kill themself, so how would they know?

It's a stupid question anyway. It has nothing to do with the original thread.

Life is not a gift. It is an occurance. We just happened to become alive. The religious views of life make no sense and the only other explanation is that it was a just a really crazy occurance. We weren't created, we just became alive due to a series of cosmic events.

Life may not literally be a gift from the Universe, but it would still be most valuable if you possessed a trait in you that provided the enthusiasm, vigor and conviction to celebrate your own existance enough to make it seem like one.

A life unexamined is not worth living -(Soc)

So celebrate everything you find and be thrilled to be alive.

LEMMINGS

quote:Originally posted by AngryFemme:



A life unexamined is not worth living -(Soc)

So celebrate everything you find and be thrilled to be alive.

Gotta love that!!!

quote:Originally posted by LostCause:

Because it's more fun than death.

Cheers,

Lost

Not in all cases. Take Christianity for example, when you die, you are supposed to go to heaven, which sounds more "fun"? The Hell we live in today or Paradise? So i've always wondered why Christians don't just commit mass murder/suicide and say it's for Jesus/God... And if their religion is actually true, everyone is in paradise...(even though killing is a sin, but hey, everyone has sinned, and Jesus forgives, right?) Now everyone's in heaven.. Yay! http://www.totse.com/bbs/smile.gif (http://www.totse.com/bbs/smile.gif)