Luxor4u

The recent earthquake in Nepal just highlights the futility of existence,

So now they say its 3,200 dead and potential 10,000 dead. Of course it will all be reduced to rubble. What the hell is this species thinking? That they can somehow prevail over the forces of nature?
Nature doesn't feel remorse or anything for our species. We are just tiny parasites on this rock, and the nature of Earth doesn't give a ****

We are made to feel that somehow we need to contribute to alleviate the "suffering" .....

In my twenties, I sponsored so many needy kids through charity. This was even when I was a poor struggling student. Because I felt bad for people, and I wanted to reduce suffering. But how many of those kids have now made more kids? I am complicit in suffering. It is a disgusting joke of "modern society" that we are made to feel bad if we don't pay for people to keep generating more life........

Jewel, how does all this negativity sit with your Buddhist beliefs?

Well, as I wasnt a student in my twenties, had my own business and never gave a penny to any charities. But did do a lot of voluntary stuff, mostly animal and disabled people. Took hundreds of animals to be neutered, would have taken people too but it wasnt allowed. - - - Best wishes for your future jewel, from me, looking on the bright side of life - - -

A Ray of hope:

When the People lead, the leaders will follow...

HEPZIBAH wrote:Jewel, how does all this negativity sit with your Buddhist beliefs?

You are equating so called negativity with realism?

Firstly as a Nihilist I don't have any beliefs - Buddhist or otherwise, but cherry pick books like Shakespere and the bible for appropriate quotes.

Buddhism clearly states that life = suffering and that all is illusion.

Only by means of relative or absolute childlessness, resulting in mankind’s ebbing away, could happen what might be named – borrowing from the Greek myth – Sisyphus’s revolt. He would give up his work, not in order to commit suicide but rather by refraining from having children who otherwise would have taken his spot. In such a way that in some point in time there would be no one in the rock’s path which would eventually roll out. In terms of the Asian primordial decision: By means of abstention from procreation the wheel of suffering would be deprived of its impetus until it comes to a standstill.

In Buddhist writings, mention is often made of „the abyss of birth”. An abyss indeed, a gulf into which we do not fall but from which, instead, we emerge, to our universal chagrin.

Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, New York 1976 (1973), page 33.

Buddha states his propositions in the pedantic style of his age. He throws them into a form of Sorites; but, as such, it is logically faulty and all he wishes to convey is this: Oblivious of the suffering to which life is subject, man begets children, and is thus the cause of old age and death. If he would only realize what suffering he would add to by his act, he would desist from the procreation of children; and so stop the operation of old age and death.

If you're never born, you'll never suffer, you'll never die, and you'll never experience one iota of experiential deprivation concerning the 'good stuff'.

On the other hand, if you ARE born, you WILL suffer, you WILL die, and your fulfillment-to-deprivation ratio WILL BE contingent on determining factors mostly to wholly outside your control. On top of which you WILL cause harm to countless lifeforms along the way, no matter how nice a person you think you are.

Oh, yes, and you'll end up in the very same place you started from before you existed, with absolutely no awareness that you ever existed in the first place?
Nothing as constant as change, nothing as certain as death.

Tax is fairly certain too, not just death

Death & Taxes !
After undergoing surgery in the London Heart Hospital, I found the TV room empty, sat down to watch Meet Joe Black..

I admit the circumstances caused me to watch this film many times since.
Death & Taxes, the latter has never been of interest to me but whilst in that TV room out the window I spotted a pub 'sod death & taxes, what I needed right there and then was a large G&T…