[ExI] "death gives meaning to life"

[Natasha Vita-More]

> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Damien Broderick


> "You think life is *meaningless* without suffering and death? What
> the hell's wrong with you? Do you think having a full mouth of good
> teeth is meaningless without the potential for your teeth rotting and
> falling out? Here, let me help you appreciate life better with this
> steel mallet applied to your mouth. Are you really so incompetent in
> logic and reason that you can assert: 'Without death, life is
> worthless, and if life is worthless you might as well be dead'?"
> 
> It's true that threats against our physical integrity, lethal and
> otherwise, arouse intense, gratifying  states of alertness and
> responsiveness in an otherwise complacent, routinized and dulled
> person. But in those cases it's not *death* and *harm* that give us
> meaning; it's their successful *avoidance*. That's why people call an
> unusual escape from threatened death a "miracle" and "thank God" for
> it; nobody calls the death of all those others who failed to be saved
> by the "miracle" praiseworthy and miraculous in giving meaning to
> those doomed people's lives, and ours.


That is first two paragraphs of would be an exceptional serious fiction
book.  

Natasha