<p>I’ld like to meet someone who doesn’t struggle with it. there are few societies that are able to 100% respectfully speak to others with opposing beliefs even if they’re not talking about religion. a lot of people don’t even realize this consciously. sad really :(</p>
<p>An interesting debate transcript. Sam Harris v William Lane Craig</p>
<p>[Transcript:</a> Sam Harris v William Lane Craig Debate ?Is the Foundation of Morality Natural or Supernatural?? UPDATED | MandM](<a href=“http://www.mandm.org.nz/2011/05/transcript-sam-harris-v-william-lane-craig-debate-“is-good-from-god”.html]Transcript:”>Transcript: Sam Harris v William Lane Craig Debate “Is the Foundation of Morality Natural or Supernatural?” UPDATED)</p>
<p>^^And I think it’s our nature. It’s fun to argue, but there is a distinction between debate and disrespectful statements. Even outside of an argument, disrespect is common. People need to listen to Aretha Franklin, lol. </p>
<p>“Humans instinctively seek answers for the questions that naturally seem unanswerable (e.g: where we come from and what happens when we die). Due to this, conflicting ideas are more than a given, though people rarely realize that. If a religious person can respectfully talk to a secular person without any spite (and vice versa), respecting each other’s ideals (no matter how “incompatible” they may seem to you), we’d be avoiding the ideological militancy that has plagued society today.”</p>
<p>Well put. Because of our biases, we place our opinions and beliefs above others’. Therefore, it’s difficult to approach others’ thoughts with out any bias. Then people like to “speak” their minds, even if it offends someone else. Unfortunately, not everyone has a filter. But, listening to other people’s opinions from a neutral ground is impossible. You can attempt to, but won’t succeed. You can’t ask people to do this, because people tend to do what they want rather than what is right. That’s why there is so much corruption in this world (war,rape,abuse,etc.).</p>
<p>I pretty much have this permanently. My only solution is to try and be remembered.</p>
<p>My life is literally a huge existential depression. And I’m still not really sure how to deal with it.</p>
<p>^ one way people some people deal with it is by ending up involved with a lot of transhumanist stuff i think , with working to change human experience so we don’t die and age so fast, so we don’t suffer as much, so we get a chance to explore some of this vast universe and things like that.</p>
<p>in addition if one realizes that their is a growing scientific consensus that places worrisome lower bounds on humanities’ capacity to survive the next century (which comes primarily from the threats of new technology that would be developed without the right precautions - for example smarter than human A.I or nanotechnology), then joining the fight to save the world attracts a fair number of people (of course you have to have the optimism that there is a future is future possibility space which could be good and even amazing for humans).</p>
<p>I’m sort of biased to think this a cool approach, but i know not it’s not a workable solution for the majority of existential depression, probably.</p>
<p>that post was a little messed up :/. i meant lower bounds on extinction risk. greater lower bounds on survival chance is of course good. and of course by scientific consensus i just mean a consensus by scientists, by the people who study that kind of thing, i don’t mean the bounds are absolute in any sense.</p>
<p>Hm, I think these articles are very relevant to the discussions at hand, considering they deal directly with notions of the self, consciousness, the soul, behavior, and identity:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/Wolfe-Sorry-But-Your-Soul-Just-Died.php[/url]”>http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/Wolfe-Sorry-But-Your-Soul-Just-Died.php</a></p>
<p><a href=“http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/all/7714533/brain-drain.thtml[/url]”>http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/all/7714533/brain-drain.thtml</a></p>
<p>I think I started having existential anxieties when I was six, when I had no concept of death and simply worried what happened when people grow up and up and up and became too big to fit into their houses. Later in my childhood I pondered this stuff seriously and became properly disturbed intermittently when I am not distracted.</p>
<p>In the last couple of years in high schools I have done more thinking and have come to accept that the world is absurd and the term “knowledge” is also absurd. For all our petty attempts, we don’t really know anything at all, including all scientific laws, moral codes and even logical statements and also anything to do with mortality.</p>
<p>Hence I came to the conclusion that the meaning of our small and insignificant lives is created by ourselves through the things we choose to believe, put our faith in, since truth and knowledge are absurd concepts. So I might as well stop taking life so seriously and regard everything as beautiful, no matter how mundane, and life will be meaningful again. (Amor Fati)</p>
<p>I had my first existential depression when I was little. I was playing around on a calendar computer program, and I plugged in the dates of my family members. I’d keep clicking the forward year button, seeing the dates increase. I watched as the ages of all my family members increased and increased. Once the ages of my grandparents reached about a 115, their names just disappeared. Poof. Gone. It really disturbed me as a kid, the idea that a person could be so definately gone in just a year.</p>