> If anything, human life got remarkably longer in the last century.

Well, yes and no. That we live longer than our ancestors seems obvious and is a very common belief.

And average life expectancy has indeed increased.

But it really isn’t that clear cut.

For example: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...

The only thing what has changed is childhood mortality. If you take statistical lifetime of most animals (say frogs) and count in all offspring with hope to describe their average life duration then it would be low number of seconds. Human as such seems to have always same lifespan programmed in, just natural early mortality has been taken away. Basic statistical bias. Does almost removed early mortality really make our species stronger/better is another question. Removal of one natural survival test may have its own consequences.

Definitely not the only thing. Maternal mortality is another big thing. War, famine, malnutrition....

Although the max age hasn't increased, the proportion of people who reach it has.

There are other factors too, sure. But I’d like to remind here that wars killing people too soon are still a thing, now even in the Global North. If you have any means to help to bring end closer to these current issues, please do so.

We have tech community (some of them YC alumni) delivering essential equipment (trucks, generators) to the chrisis zone for example. Today west seems to be already tired of the news and this is exactly what the conflict starter counts on.

This is not true. Humans died on injuries and sickness that are easily treatable now. They used to be more frequent and deadly.

Humans got frequently born with disabilities because malnutrition in pregnancy (like a lack of iodine) that just don't happen anymore in West.

There were whole classes of these issues that killed people and just don't exist anymore.

In the other hand they were not dying from technology induced accidents, like traffic :) Sure it is simplification, but the point is that statistical average life duration and total lifespan of adult person have quite weak correlations.

Actually even now these early years are most risky ones, just the scale is different. Now I have witnesses bias here also - in my 40ies I can expect to live 50 years more, very different from a newborn with immediate terminal condition. So lifespan does have different meaning for us.

It does not cancels out. It is not just simplification, you have to grossly overestimate traffic deaths now and underestimate accidental deaths in the past. (Basically regardless of when and where you place "the past".)

> Actually even now these early years are most risky ones, just the scale is different.

Babies mortality used to be huge too. And maternal mortality used to be huge by our standards too.

People used to die from transportation, drowning when crossing rivers, accidents around horses, etc... were very frequent. Safety codes are fairly modern.

I feel it's destructive for people to hold this incorrect belief. People living into their 60s and 70s was very common for all of recorded history. By ignoring this, modern people are less incentivized to criticize and challenge their modern lives and the societies we live within.

Average person lives longer new. Literally deadly diseases are non-issues now. Whole classes of malnutrition related disabilities that used to be frequent basically don't exist anymore, to the point where many people don't even know it existed.

Nobody says no people lived to their 70s. Just like the fact that people live to their 100s now doesn't mean that it doesn't matter if most people live to their 100s.

Then again, I'd rather be young for 50 years than old for 70.

Everytime someone posts the correct fact that average lifespan has drastically increased in the past century someone will wrongly claim that it is only because we got better at lowering child morbidity. They might even link to the garbage BBC article that only looks at data for rich privileged people who did indeed live long lives centuries ago. However the rich and privileged of old times were not representative of the general population.

Why do people so aggressively deny that things have been getting better in the past 100 years?

Please do enlighten me as to how and where I aggressively stated anything here.

In the meantime, I will gladly point out that anyone who actually read said garbage article couldn’t have helped but notice how the author, very quickly establishes the difference between life expectancy and lifespan, before also pointing out how the data presents multiple huge biases.

I wouldn’t want to die tomorrow. Is that desire “objective reality” or not? If it is, how is that different from not wanting to die a century from now?

The other comment was about disregarding reality, not about wanting to die.

Most people don’t want to die tomorrow, at the same time we need to come to terms with the fact that we age and that our time is ultimately limited.

Which is an objective reality.

As I grow older, I am discovering that life has different chapters. Each with their benefits and challenges. The other comment is talking about us as a society failing to integrate and value each chapter and instead focusing on youth and youth alone. There is nothing desirable in age for western societies (probably others too, I just don’t know enough).

“Life is too short” isn’t disregarding reality, it’s just having an opinion about it.

I don’t understand how anyone can call “various religious constructs” absurd. It’s a very “Reddit moment” thing to do. Religion has existed since the dawn of man. The internal feeling that there is something more out there - something that created us, is something almost all of us have.

As for the feeling that life is too short; I’ll offer a comparison to the early biblical figures: Adam and his sons lived almost a thousand years. Noah the same. Isaac lived almost 200 years. Compared to biblical figures, we live very short lifespans.

It's still a social construct. As knowledge and science advance, the need for religion decreases and it's really on us to accept there are some questions we cannot answer.

>As knowledge and science advance, the need for religion decreases

Citation needed, massively!

If anything, the powerful technology and knowledge we now wield (weapons of mass destruction, mass surveillance, modern logistics and coordination, global communications) only makes it more important that we don't forget the hard-earned scoial and moral lessons of our pre-scientific ancestors - lessons that were often encoded in evolving cultural systems like religion.

Ah yes, the hard earned social lesson of not wearing mixed fibers. Or not allowing women on their period to share the bed of their husband.

Please don't make comments like this on HN.

Nobody was making the argument that extremely specific religious quirks like this are encode knowledge important to the wise use of modern technology.

It is valueable as the comments shows so easily how wrong religions get it, when many take religions as truths

That's a valid comment to make - religions do get things wrong, but GP is plain old "look how smart I am" strawmanning.

It doesn't make the discourse more interesting or enlightening, and frankly doesn't belong on this site.

You deciding what belongs or does not belong here, what is allowed to be said or what is interesting or enlightening is the terror tactic almost all religions used to suppres people and ideas they do not like

On the contrary, I think comments that push religion as some kind of romantic enlightenment of the past as opposed to science are the ones that don't belong on this site.

Humanism fills that need. It doesn’t matter that it’s new, Islam and Christianity were new once, and corrupted since.

There's an argument to me made that the age/popularity of a belief system does correlate with validity, given that their individual memes are subject to Darwinism.

Of course it's not everything, but I don't think humanism on its own would work without an older religion as its "bootstrap".

I wouldn’t say it necessarily correlates with validity - Darwinism is about one thing: fitness of survival.

I feel like if you squint a little you can see all the positive-memetic adaptations that get bolted on to organised religion.

A commandment to “worship no other god but me” is a classic example of something that seems less like profound revelation and more like an effective memetic adaptation.

I don't consider myself a humanist, but I accept that my views are similar to them. I think humanism only exists because the way Christianity has been promoted recently forced the alternative to have a graspable answer rather than "I'm a good person for my own preference".

UsefulChart's video on humanism may help. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWhz3SXPWkg

> There's an argument to me made that the age/popularity of a belief system does correlate with validity, given that their individual memes are subject to Darwinism.

Absolutely not, because the fitness, in an evolutionary sense, of those memes does not correlate with their truthfulness but with how easy they are to believe because they appeal to our fears, hopes and dreams.

Take that "life after death" trope. The hard truth is that there isn't any, when you die, everything that made up "you" will be gone for good. But no religion based on that truth would ever thrive because the thought is just too scary and bleak.

Why should one choose humanism instead of personal prosperity (egoism)? Religions have an answer. Humanism AFAIK doesn't.

What is religions' answer? "Because Sky daddy said so"?

If "Sky Daddy" is the literal creator of the Earth who gave direct commands to mankind, then that alone is a pretty valid reason.

If he isn't, then he's a powerful (yet imaginary) social construct that has evolved over the past 4,000 years to encode the wisdom of many past generations through a set of rules and stories that happen to match up with the stories and rules of many other cultures. It's also an incredibly fast and low-cost way to reach a solution.

Either way, there's definitely some validity to the claims of any major religion.

The claim of black or gay people beeing inferior had been there for more than 4000 years. Does that give any validity to you?

I'm not sure these views are as consistent as you say they are.

The Atlantic slave trade started in the 1500s and ended in the 1800s. Even then, it was controversial and faces opposition from certain Church groups (while getting support from others).

Vilification of gays based on Christian religious grounds apparently goes back to the 11th century (based on a quick read of Wikipedia, TBF), and is only starting to come undone now. I don't really have an answer for this, it was unfortunate.

The answer is a family of simple heuristics like the "Golden Rule", "tit-for-tat" etc.

I don't think it works well, or better than religion for many people.

How did you come to the conclusion that religion works at all?

I know people who based their view of the world based on the religion.

Oh cut the crap, religious stories are fairytales and everyone knows it. And religious "truths" are either trivialities or simply not true at all.

Taking Christianity specifically as that's the only religion I know at least a little. Religions teach us to value love and compassion. That's nice, but not terribly interesting. They're not values that you couldn't arrive at through other means.

I don't see how those high-level values help in solving modern crises of global scale. Believers searching for specific advise on modern day problems need to work hard and read though a lot of "code" to find a few nuggets - ultimately failing to get satisfying specific answers.

If I do a web search on what the bible says to homosexuality, for instance, I get walls of text discussing precious few bible verses. In my view what religion does here is allow those in charge to enforce their individual preferences and opinions on their believers by means of laying out suitable interpretations of the code. This does more harm than good.

In the West is it even debatable that christianity is on a decline? As for the muslim world its more mixed but I do think the younger genereation is less religious than the older ones. It has a long way to go though till we can say its a secularized society.

“Religious-ness” has two contexts. One is for philosophical purposes, where a person agrees with a set of assumptions (aka beliefs).

The other context is as a tribal marker, for practical purposes. In this context, the “religiousness” is not about agreeing with the set of assumptions, but pretending to agree and/or going through the motions of various customs as a signal of how committed they are to the tribe.

In societies where individuals need to rely less on the tribe, it might be posited that there is less reason for people to put on a show for the latter reason, so they can afford to be less “religious”. So if, on average, children of Christians are more likely to be economically independent, then they may tend to being less religious, and children of Muslims, who are more likely to be economically dependent on each other, tend to be more religious.

As the unit cost of destruction constantly decreases, logarithmically; we might guess instead that keeping the mental attitudes of individual actors in line is more important as tech surges forward. If you have a better method than religion to do this (and I don't discount the possibility) do drop a description of that.

"Humanism" highly correlates with lock sales worldwide as far as I can tell. It's not defense at all vs drug addiction. Humans feel great when drugged up.

Biblical lifespans seem nice, but only if you wholly believe the stories. Given how often the same stories come up across different civilisations, I'm sceptical they're accurate. For instance, Eve picking an apple is not too dissimilar to Pandora's box. The flood in Noah's lifetime is also part of Babylonian myth where the protagonist was Gilgamesh. I recall even the concept of hell was taken from Greek mythology - notice how we call this mythology today instead of religion.

Answering questions like "where did we come from" and "where are we going" have always existed. Passing knowledge down through generations has always existed. Treating these stories as gospel makes little sense to me.

> Biblical lifespans seem nice, but only if you wholly believe the stories. Given how often the same stories come up across different civilisations, I'm sceptical they're accurate.

WTF? "Skeptical", probably not "accurate"?

You have to be absolutely nuts to think that they're even remotely true.

I think you're taking a humorous tone[0] too literally. The poster you answer to was saying that they think the biblical stories are myths/legends.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understatement

I'm usually very good at detecting irony, tongue-in-cheek and similar "humorous tones". I see nothing indicating it here.

I'd call it understatement. Rather than write it all off as fabrication, I'm open to believing there's elements of truth mixed in.

I don't believe Noah lived for 1000 years and had 2 of every animal on a boat. But I could believe there was a tsunami that killed thousands. I could also believe it was rationalised as a an act of god and eventually became the great flood that appears in the Bible.

That’s why he said “religious constructs” and not “religions”. I believe religious systems are useful, but I agree with the parent that concepts like the afterlife are absurd concepts used to alleviate existential dread. Maybe this utility means it isn’t absurd, but I would say that many religions don’t have the concept of an afterlife, so other less-absurd concepts may provide the same functionality without the same cognitive distortions.

Some might view something as a mystery that another views as an absurdity. I think a mystery is more interesting and less ... (Edits: hmm I don't know what the word is.)

In this case I think that the mystery of life requires something to avoid existential angst, and some people use the afterlife as that something. Other religions (like Buddhism) might view the entire question of “what is this?” as absurd, and so use methods like meditation to help alleviate the angst, thus avoiding absurd beliefs.

TLDR: the mystery isn’t the absurdity but our reaction to it might be absurd.

Buddhism has plenty of "absurd" beliefs of this sort. If anything, the delineation of "absurd" is anything but simple.

Yeah some sects can get whacky. I think the core Buddhist tenets are pretty much absurdity free but I agree that it’s not simple to determine.

Are there any beliefs in particular you were thinking of?

The six realms of existence, hungry ghosts (pretas), siddhi, sacca-kiriya, the cosmic buddhas, the Pure Lands...

As you're portraying believing in the hereafter as a cope for existential dread, you could say the opposite.

The disbeliever tries to ridicule the concept of an afterlife as to allievate the dread of being held accountable for their deeds on the day of judgement which would likely lead them to an eternal and painful hell.

In Islam, it's very clearly mentioned that each individual will be judged according to their deeds. There are two destinations possible paradise or hellfire.

Other religions that came before have often tried to tone down this reality by either removing accountability like Chrisitanity with the concept of Jesus (peace be upon him) having died for our sins or by simply removing the concept of an afterlife all together.

The Quran clearly tells us that many prophets were sent in the past with revelation but as time passed on they were falsified by people. In light of this, one could easily see how polytheistic religions came about.

In the end Islam is the last religion and it was intended to be preserved which makes it unlike any other religion in the world today. It has one book there a no multiple different versions. It is perfectly constructed and there are 0 inconsistencies and errors. No arab linguist can deny that.

Allah sent the previous prophets specifically for their nations however the last prophet Muhammad peace be upon him was sent for all mankind until the end of times.

Give the quran a read. https://quran.com Do some research on the topic. YouTube is a great ressource for this. Make your own opinion.

In light of this, I still want to invite you to become muslim. Islam answers all the questions Chrisitanity and other religions couldn't. Most importantly it will save you in the hereafter. I'd suggest putting your hand on a hot stove (not too hot) and ponder. Do you really want something like this for yourself and for eternity?

I respect your passion and faith but I think you are very mistaken.

I tried to read some of the Quran but couldn’t find anything that spoke to me. Can you recommend any good sections or translations? Maybe the parts that make you so certain of the afterlife?

I will criticise one of your points since it seems fairly objective. Aren’t there many versions of Quran and countless hadiths? https://answering-islam.org/Green/seven.htm

When you say different versions of Quran, what you are talking about is very different from something like different Bible versions and edits and translations etc.

The Quran is multi form. Oral texts tradition and from the Hadith we know that the Quran was recited in different modes by the Prophet Muhammad pbuh. But these are all valid revelation. Actually one of the “miracles” linguistically about the Quran is how the authentic Qiraa’aat (the reading-out of the Quran) can be traced back to a chain of reciters authentically. And each Qiraa’aat adds eloquence to the Quran and it also speaks to the people of a certain dialect. Think about British English and American English and how the same word can be pronounced differently, and you begin to approach an understanding of Qiraa’aat.

Actually, different Qiraa’aat are essential to the revelation of the Quran and giving evidence about how it has been revealed as an “Arabic Quran” in which many examples of mankind and prophets are related.

These qiraa’aat add enhancement to the meaning of the Quran. For example, if you look up tafsir Al-Qurtubi [not sure if there is an English translation but you can find the Arabic text on Quran.com] (tafsir is an explanation of the Quran), of (verse 87 from chapter 20)[https://quran.com/20/87 ] you will find that the word ملكنا has three different readings مِلكنا ، مُلكنا، مَلكنا which when we transliterate to English we get: mulkinaa, milkinaa, malkinaa. Malkinaa and milkinaa translate to “our will”. Mulkinaa translates to “our power”.

And all together in the verse it enhances the meaning that shows that the Children of Israel were made to carry the burdens of weight of the jewelwery/ornaments from the Pharoah’s people.

Also in this verse, we have two readings for حملنا which are: حُمِّلنا and حَمَلنا which is hummilnaa, and hamalnaa, respectively. Hummilnaa is the passive voice and means “we were forced to carry”. While “Hamalnaa” translates to “we carried”.

Both of these convey a similar meaning of carrying, they enhance aspects of what is happening in the verse. Passive voice focuses on how people were forced to Carry while the active voice focuses on how people indeed did carry.

This is just one example of how important and helpful knowing Qiraa’aat are and Arabic.

If you take a step back, it is a great and profoundly absurd mystery that there is existence at all.

So given this background absurdity, how do you even delineate what's absurd and what's not, when it comes to concepts relating to the nature of existence itself? It's certainly fashionable to attempt putting everything in terms such as "cognitive distortions", but it's not clear it's sound reasoning when it comes to things like this.

And I say this as a rather staunch irreligious person.

What kind of concepts would be hard to delineate?

I like the Zen approach to mystery, which is to accept it and resist the temptation to rationalize the mystery away. Thus no absurd concepts are needed, since concepts are not needed. (I’m relatively new to Zen so I may be off the mark a bit here, but I think I got the essence correct)

Ah yes. Adam. Noah. Isaac. And yet, literally no historical record shows that anyone ever lived that long. And if you believe that the Bible is the only historical record we have of those times, boy do I have a bridge to sell you.

> something that created us, is something almost all of us have.

Buddhism claims that nothing created us. Samsara is beginningless and wasn’t architected by anything. And that’s just 500 billion people or so.

> 500 billion people

* million

"Life is short" isn't meant to be a philosophically rigorous, consistent logical statement.

It's just a common saying that's meant to remind us that we have a tendency to spend huge amounts of time and emergy on things that ultimately don't matter, and hopefully sometimes short-circuit the thought process that causes us to do this.

PG seems to be putting it in very concrete terms. For example, he mentions spending only 8 Christmas with a young kid who feels it's "magical". 8, he argues, is an objectively small number for lots of human experiences, like "8 books" or "8 times I dined my favorite meal".