(Post-) Buddhism without Rebirth
Traditional Buddhists tend to believe that rebirth and karma are essential parts of the Buddhist worldview and that one, therefore, cannot be a Buddhist without accepting those. For example, the 14th Dalai Lama has written that โas long as you are a Buddhist, it is necessary to accept past and future rebirthโ, which means that you canโt be a Buddhist without believing in rebirth. Many Buddhist modernists, on the other hand, consider the doctrine of rebirth and karma unimportant, or radically reinterpret it in an attempt to bring it in line with a more or less Western, โmaterialistโ worldview, or...
Technological Immortality
Seven years ago I published a paper arguing against afterlife beliefs and various other kinds of โdeath denialโ titled โThe Incoherence of Denying My Deathโ. The denial of death in this sense is not a denial of physical or biological death so much as it is a denial of annihilation. In that paper I distinguished two ways of denying death, which are distinguished essentially by which word in the short proposition โI dieโ they deny. Strategy 1 denies the dying part โ that is, it argues that I somehow (can) survive my physical/โbiological/โbodily death. Strategy 2 denies the โIโ in...
Death, Masculinity, and Hegemony
โAt the center of the symbolic order is the abhorrence of death,โ writes Odile Strik in the conclusion of her short essay The Symbolic Order of Life and Manhood. The โsymbolic orderโ of the title connects death and masculinity, and (supposedly) structures the way most people understand reality. The essay is terse and almost poetic, and only presents a rough sketch of this symbolic order, but it deals with a number of important themes โ such as masculinity, life and death, and cultural hegemony โ and it deserves credit for bringing those themes together. This article is a (long) commentary...