We seem to be drifting pretty far from the original topic.
My opinions: I think this discussion went off-topic a long time ago. The OP wanted to talk about the coming end-of-life, from the viewpoint of other older forum members. Sounds like a reasonable and pragmatic thing to talk about, a lot of us are getting older. There are a lot of issues that older people face, and discussing that seems entirely reasonable to me.
But very quickly, the discussion turned to what happens
after death, and into an ever-cascading discussion of religion. IMO, when the topic turns to religion or politics, this type of result is predictable. I think there's a very good reason that almost ALL topic-specific forums similar to the SGF
strictly prohibit any discussions of religion/theology or politics. They are divisive, and off-topic to anything which the forum is about. I really thought that this type of topic was strictly prohibited here, and I think we should return to that standard. In all seriousness, how do you possibly get into a discussion about what happens
after death without getting into theological arguments? I actually like discussing theology, but I don't this forum is a proper place for that.
On the discussion of the last few pages - I just love it when people write that they aren't going to try to convince anybody about anything, but then, in the next paragraph, write that anybody who doesn't agree with how they interpret certain religious ideas (whether it be other viewpoints/interpretations within the same faith, different faiths, agnosticism, or strict atheism) is going to spend eternity in hell. How are people of diverse approaches to faith (or lack of it) supposed to conduct a civil conversation when this inevitable challenge is made?
An 82 year old male has a life expectancy of about 7 years; not so near after all.
Good point. Here's the complete, social security administration actuarially-based age-conditional life expectancy table -
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html. Statistics are not as simple as a simple raw ensemble average. In this case, as you get older, your conditional life expectancy (conditioned on your current age) tends to increase.
BTW - reading that SSA table, you can see that the overall population mean life expectancy in the U.S. is about 75.4 years for males, 80.4 for females. As another example of how to interpret the table, at 82, a man's probability of surviving at least one more year is about 92%.