Meet us in Semantics and I'll invite you. Setting up table now.

On my way.

(wanders out again, closing door)

Hey! Who turned the light off?

::stumbles about, knocking over the taxidermied goat::

Does that sort of extinction of being freak out other people here

It sure does; I have a really hard time dealing with the death of a loved one because I believe they're completely gone. I don't believe my grandmother is watching me from Heaven. I don't believe she's gone to a better place. I don't believe her soul lives on. I don't believe that she'll be waiting at the end of the tunnel of light for me when I die. She's dead, and she is gone from my life forever. That's a pain that will never leave me.

Perhaps strangely, the idea of my own death and subsequent non-existance doesn't really bother me all that much. It probably will as I get older and closer to it.

On a more positive (to me, anyway) note, I'm pretty sure my admittedly extreme beliefs in nonviolence and veganism come from my disbelief in an afterlife. In my philosophy, no one has a right to take another person's life for any reason because this life is all a person gets, and taking it away means annihilating them forever. The unique person they were is gone and will never exist again. There are no higher stakes than that. A life, any life, is no one's entitlement to take. It's no one's prerogative.

And I'd go further and say that no one has a right to take an animal's life for their own benefit, be it food or amusement (like hunting/fishing). All sentient animals, even non-mammalian ones like chickens and fish, are entitled to live out the natural course of their lives without being killed and/or conscriped forcibly to feed us, since we can live in perfect health without their flesh or byproducts. One life is all they get, too, and it's not my right to end it.

But I understand that I lose most everyone there, even the folks who are as uncompromising about the nonviolence towards humans as I am.

So I'm an athesist

Yeah, no one's been able to prove a thesis statement to my satisfaction, either.

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Does that sort of extinction of being freak out other people here?

Not me, and that makes the things I do here and now all the more important. I'll live on in the effect I've had on people and the works I've done (what puny works there are).

There may be reincarnation, there may not. There may be "old souls", ones that come back again or have the energy to become "ghosts" or whathaveyou. I think there are, but I'm not one of them. I have a distinct feeling that after this life, I'm done. And that's cool. I'll need the sleep, anyway.

Taxidermied goats always show up at the most inopportune times.

"Goddamn the Evil! It always approaches in the middle of dinner."

So, did I mention that I found slash in a high school literary magazine?

No, you did not.

See above: Emily "Spike's Bitches 22: You've got Angel breath" Feb 18, 2005 9:55:05 pm PST

Sorry. I'm in exactly that kind of mood. Um, it was Romeo/Benvolio Mercutio/Benvolio, with mention of Romeo/Juliet.