Witnesses have been careful to weed out any pagan doctrine carried down by the Established Church --> Catholic Church, but we're not the only ones.

In 1835 in the Excited States, a man called Henry Grew wrote a pamphlet on the condition of the dead. Reasoning on such verses as he proved that eternal life is a gift from God, and not a condition we are all born with. Other verses agree (eg Ezek 18:4, Eccl 9:5,10 & James 5:20, among others).

In 1837, that pamphlet was read by one George Storrs. He adopted that belief, and taught it. Over 30 years later became part of the Bible Study Group founded by Charles Taze Russell. The Bible rejects the immortality of the soul.

In fact there was a series of debates about this subject with Dr. E.L. Eton, a 'champion' put up by the Protestant Ministers of Pennsylvania as they both felt it would be in the public interest. They were covered in detail by a newspaper who immediately recruited Russell to write a weekly column. That informs you how the debates went.

So the Bible-based post-mortem existence we teach is:

• At best - Excellent
• At worst:

That blank space is in fact lack of existence. There would be something terribly cruel about a God who kept people in existence endlessly for the purpose of making them suffer for their few misspent years on earth. After all, If you were to sentence some rotter for his 70 years of (mostly) evil, how long would give him? 100 years? 1000? If a million or a billion years wasn't long enough, but God felt the need to punish these F o r e v e r, would that be a God of love?

Hazel will hardly agree with all of this, but... well, that's what replies are for.

You can only make that claim if you are totally ignorant of the subject and ignore all of the experiments related and the interesting results obtained.

Please do some real research, the information is out there.

Except that he ARGUED with assumptions based up religious beliefs, and arrived at religious beliefs, and actually proved nothing whatever.

The problem with this entire thread is that the article is about science and you are rejecting all science and arguing religion. The two are not really in conflict, you only seem to want to MAKE them be in conflict.

I can't speak for anyone else, hazel, but I can't possibly conceive of the "fear fulfillment" side of eternal existence. Once having confidant odds that eternal life is possible, I can't imagine anyone would not be willing to do whatever it would take to qualify, assuming some manner of qualification was required. Unfortunately I'm quite confidant this is all we get, then "lights out". That does make Life especially rare and valuable, requiring in my view deep consideration of how one I should spend what little time I have, but I would much rather get to stick around to see the Big Picture story unfold.

You misunderstood me. What I meant was that a lot of people might prefer to believe that death is the end, not for rational reasons (although they would tell themselves that), but because they are secretly afraid of something much worse than just an ending.

And now can we get back to Curiosity and life on Mars?

The immortality discussion ought really to go on PM, as there's too much noise here. I won't start it, but if I'm not considered part of the noise(!) please cc me.

On Curiosity, I think my point from post #2 has withstood objections, i.e. Water on an otherwise barren planet ≠ Conditions for life.

There is a desire to be able to transfer the origin of life problem away from earth, by performing the following exercise

1. Calculate the "statistical odds" against life forming through chance by assigning odds to impossibilities.
2. Divide those odds by "the number of planets in the universe "capable of supporting life."
3. Come up with a postulation space travel for early life forms that doesn't make everyone laugh.

Hence they tick a box by finding water. Although water is needed to support life, the fictional first cell could not have formed in water. As science, it is intellectually dishonest to the point of being criminal. Formation of life required an outside intelligence.

I'm only too glad to return to scientific inquiry on Big Kahuna questions (if I can borrow a favorite term from sundialsvcs) that we actually have a chance to ultimately suss out... IOW, questions about the nature of the Universe of which we are actually a part as opposed to hypothetical events outside our Universe of SpaceTime.

Certainly finding Life, or even evidence of previously existing life, on Mars, Europa or anywhere else are extremely important steps in human understanding of "how the world works" but are all quite possibly steps to a much bigger answer to the question "What defines Life?" and "What is Consciousness?"

What humans mean by "what it means to be alive and conscious" has changed a great deal over the centuries, even over mere decades. Discovering lifeforms in geysers and other hydrothermal vents. It is important to note that, due to easier access, such Thermophiles were discovered on land first and the more hostile environment dwellers deep in the ocean still came as quite a shock.

Here's a cool video on Thermophiles and their various environments in Yellowstone Park ---

https://www.nps.gov/nps-audiovideo/l...l_1280x720.mp4

Then comes a larger and wilder question being posed by some scientists - "Is everything conscious on some level?"

Here's a fun but serious read touching on that -- https://www.space.com/is-the-universe-conscious

We humans can be a short-sighted, egocentric lot and it seems that we were much more so in the past, or even in isolated conditions in the present. Numerous isolated tribes assume they are all there is. Commonly the terms they use for themselves roughly translates into "The People" much like the term coined for our planet, Earth, reflects early isolated thought that this is the only ground that exists because that's all we could see with our unaided eyes. Even heavenly bodies we could see with the naked eye, like Sun and Moon, were thought to be mere objects dragged across the sky by gods and demi-gods.

This is a large part of why it is so important to explore other worlds, to bring a more realistic "cosmos-politan' perspective to Mankind.

One of the things that fascinates me is the idea that life on other worlds might have a completely different chemistry to life on earth. We really don't know how much of earthly biochemistry is necessary for life as such, and how much is just the way we do it round here. We can't know that even in theory unless we can find some form of life, however primitive, that isn't related to life on earth.

J R R Tolkien has written about his astonishment on discovering the Finnish language, the first that he had ever studied which wasn't a member of the Indo-European group. It made him realise how much of what he had thought of as "how languages work" was really just the Indo-European way of doing language. The discovery led him to invent a new language structured like Finnish, which became Quenya/High-Elven. The whole world of Middle Earth developed from that.

I'm with you some of the way, but come to a hard stop on "find some form of life, however primitive." That's the rub. No form of life is simple. Any life form is self-contained (e.g. inside a cell sac or similar), with some way of feeding and watering itself, some digestive and waste disposal system, some method of locomotion, and most ingenious of all, some way of replicating itself. Digested food and water have to be circulated to where they are needed, and waste removed. Simple life forms are a fiction invented by the likes of Richard Dawkins to obscure scientific reality. BTW, I also doubt that postulating a different "Laws of physics/chemistry" is good enough to let anybody out of jail.

@enorbet: As for the " Big Kahuna questions:" Personally, I don't think we "suss out" anything. Entrenched views are restated, and I don't see anyone being convinced, even when they can't refute the logic presented. A person has to be seeking answers, imho.

The religious among us may have the scriptures, though we differ on interpretation. The atheistic among us lay out scientific factoids and demand we accept them as pure truth. And sundialsvcs sits on every fence in sight, politely explaining why he is doing just that .

As for what defines Life & Consciousness: You'd need to explain what authority, if any, you would accept. Now speculation, of course is free. I see 2 choices:

1. Metaphysics (not my forte) I see it as the art of asking intriguing questions.
2. The Scriptures.

This presumes you ignore roughly the same class of gurus, peddlers of psychedelic substances, and mystics that I do. Otherwise they might constitute a 3rd option if you don't mind being ripped off

There can be no logic when you begin with the premise that how you interpret 2000+ year old superstition is literally divine, infallible and above any criticism or refinement. "Seeking answers", indeed! It appears you subscribe to the idea that ALL answers are immutably in one brand of religious scripture, and definitely not poetry, myth or allegory, but Literal Truth... as you see it.


Incidentally, regarding the fact that Science cannot yet replicate Life as we know it, I wonder if when in school taking a timed test and when the teacher/professor said "OK. Pencils down. Pass your tests to the front of the row" you had only completed say 90% of the questions but all 90% were the correct answer, you should have received a failing grade since you hadn't completed in time?

As usual, you miss my point entirely.

If a person is satisfied with the answers he has, a contrary opinion however well supported does not convince. As was said:

I sincerely doubt I missed your point at all. It's just that we very much disagree on what constitutes "well supported". In my view almost everything written 2000+ years ago is hardly even in the running for well supported with regards to the Nature of things. Yet you adamantly deny Big Bang and Evolution, and the entire basis of the scientific method, and call your conviction "logical", based on 2000 year old superstitious dogma instead. While I stand firmly in defense of your right to your opinions and conclusions, however you arrive at them, just as firmly I stand against your misuse of terms to satisfy your need for confirmation. Your methods are by no means scientific or even logical. Circular logic is the antithesis of logical.

How come you are the only one here trying to drag ancient texts into this, accusing me of bias?

My point here was that Water on an otherwise barren planet ≠ Conditions for life. What's ancient or religious about that?

You've been throwing out accusations of religious bias in every post when I don't think I spoke about religion at all. You did admit that that life originating on earth cannot be proved. I pointed out that so much is known about the cell that the impossibility of life from inanimate chemicals can be better appreciated and should be admitted as the reality that it is. What's religious about that? If it didn't happen here, an outside source was obviously required. By stating the obvious, I seem to have trod on the toe of your religious beliefs - atheism.

Darwin saw a cell as one blob, which became two blobs after a while, and could be excused for thinking life was simple. Spontaneous generation of life was accepted science in 1859. It was rubbish, of course. But 100 years later, the fantastic complexity of dna was understood, and modern instruments have turbocharged genetics. Microbioligists and geneticists are making the running in that field. Darwin's simple blob has turned into a complex city. And there's more hope of a city falling together than a cell. Why not advance science and admit it?

business_kid, I did NOT admit that life originating on Earth can NOT be proved, only that it hasn't yet AND pointed out that we grow ever closer to exactly that conclusion. I am an atheist, that much is true, but it is not a belief system, despite the fact that fundamentalists see belief systems in everything calling current scientists "Evolutionists" if they simply accept the fact that it has yet to be falsified and has mountains of objective evidence, severe tests, and predictions all in it's favor. If some new theory explained more things better, and evidence did falsify Evolution, that confidence would disappear and the new, more complete one adopted.

You, OTOH, have demonstrated time and again that you are a fundamentalist Believer, a Jehovah's Witness in fact by your own statements, who denigrates Science wherever it appears, even starting your own pseudoscience threads like the (paraphrased) "JWST disproves Big Bang" thread and quotes scripture in many if not most of your posts and responses, even if the thread is totally secular.

Cities are artificial human-made constructs. Cells existed billions of years before they evolved to congregate in multi-celled organisms, and early multi-celled creatures existed for hundreds of millions of years before Homo Sapiens appeared. That you equate a cell with a city demonstrates the lengths to which you will attempt to pass off untruth and incompatible concepts as if they are objective evidence, and the specific arguments are carbon copies of the fallacious arguments made by fundamentalist Creationists who do so to "knock down" scientific inquiry", all the while trying to employ it to shore up 2000 year old superstitious beliefs... even if you have to misrepresent it.

Evidence of just how far down that anti-science path you sink, is that you actually quote The Discovery Institute, proven in a court of law, to promote pseudoscience not even shying away from bald-faced lies even after it was proven they knew they were lying.

If I am mistaken in my assessment formed over more than a year reading many dozens of your comments, then I challenge you to state right here under no uncertain terms that you do NOT think the Christian Bible is the literal Divine Word of God, and anything to the contrary, including scientific discovery, is inherently wrong if not a lie. IOW state that The Bible is NOT the Literal and Ultimate Arbiter of Truth for all things. Actually, let me reduce that...just state that it is possible that the Christian Bible is written by men and could contain contradiction and falsehood.

That post constitutes a personal attack and has been reported as such. It is also hugely off topic. Find some other forum for your baseless insults.