Is mortality our greatest flaw or greatest achievement?

Question:Is mortality our greatest flaw or greatest achievement? Every moment and breath is more beautiful and precious because we are condemn. Is God/deity/force jealous of us? The human race has a wide variety of impressive achievements and yet we can not our own demise. It's ironic and priceless....

PS: I think it's are ultimate achievement because it what keeps us human.How would we know what good is if we didn't have anything to compare it too?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Is mortality our greatest flaw or greatest achievement? Every moment and breath is more beautiful and precious because we are condemn. Is God/deity/force jealous of us? The human race has a wide variety of impressive achievements and yet we can not our own demise. It's ironic and priceless....

PS: I think it's are ultimate achievement because it what keeps us human.How would we know what good is if we didn't have anything to compare it too?

This question cannot be answered, but it can be responded to. Rather it raises the question ‘what is morality? Wikipedia tells me that morality can mean one of three things: (i) a code of conduct held to be authoritative in matters of right and wrong, (ii) an ideal code of conduct, one which would be espoused in preference to alternatives by all rational people, under specified conditions (normative and universal sense), and (iii) ethics, the systematic philosophical study of the moral domain. I suspect you’re question is directed towards (ii). As (i) would be ridiculous and (iii) is quite a claim, although having read a few works on ethics I’d be inclined to agree that it is an excellent achievement.

To expand and clarify what dude said, morality in this sense, is not something that we achieved. It is more part of something that we are. When I discussed morality with a friend who reads medicine he suggested that it could be a by-product of human evolution. Personally I prefer a different approach and would rather say that morality is one of those things that makes us human. I’d rather take my definition of human by reference to the ‘best’, the central example of what we consider human rather than a minimalist approach, and I thereby side-step the criticism that some people who are biologically human don’t have a sense of morality.

As for the other points you make, I’m not sure that I can make proper sense of them. However I can offer a few thoughts. I assume your references to condemnation and God are linked and that you mean to say God has condemned man out of jealousy. I am reminded of the start of Milton’s Paradise Lost:

That to the height of this great argument
I may assert eternal providence,
And justify the ways of God to men

The psychological problems of the Abrahamic God are virtually endless, as Christopher Hitchens and friends delight in pointing out. I’m amongst the first to accept that God doesn’t really feature much in my thinking because (i) it usually doesn’t lead anywhere productive, and (ii) I don’t think he exists. I’d therefore shelve that part of the discussion after a reference to the sacrifice of Christ.

As for our own demise, I’d point towards the Holocaust and the unprecedented ruthless, mechanised slaughter of humans. Those perpetrating the Holocaust were humans, many of them normal people. If you’re interested I’d recommend reading Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect.

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To respond to your ‘additional details’.

Firstly, no worries about the colloquial writing – I can’t say I noticed anything particularly colloquial about it. I’m no theologian but I’m fairly sure that, according to orthodoxy, Christ was both fully God and fully human and that through Christ God did suffer and feel pain.

we didn;t "achieve" mortality. All sexually reproducing life on earth is mortal

In a physical sense, are we really mortal? Matter can neither be created nor destroyed according to laws of physics and time is but a human attempt to organize and understand the world around it. We have the same atoms that were acting when Shakespeare acting currently in our very same Universe.

So my answer is neither, because mortality doesn't exist.

Good luck in your search for a satisfying answer!

If we were immortal, we wouldn't feel any pressure to get anything done, to try anything, to love anyone, because there would always be tomorrows......

How can it be an achievement if is part of a natural cycle?
We can cut short our life by suicide, but our physical body will die when the physical matter can no longer sustain itself.

Knowing we have a limited life span in our physical bodies could motivate us to try harder and get the most out of our time. Though it could have the opposite effect if a person thought there was nothing after death, they could just live for the day and have a negative attitude to life.

God's most likely not real.

There will most likely be no afterlife.

We are all destined to die, nothing in this Universe (not even the universe it self will last forever) will surive all of eternity.

We are here purely by luck of the draw. Natural selection did us well.

Evolution and such (make reference to Richard Dawkins) soon gave us the ability to reason and other logical progressions.

It goes deeper, but I want you to actually think about death.

The inability to percieve and adapt to your surroundings, motor functions seriously starting to decay as the lack of oxygen to the brain gives us comforting halluecinations (out of body experiences) in a short time our mind shuts down and dies. And with the death of our mind, we loose all preferences, memory's thoughts etc. You loose the character you have formulated though biased opinions made at various times that created your life and such is gone.

Even if we lived lasted for infinity our brains are ultimately finite. Over a period of time we would use up the all the occupency of the brain and be forced to make space for new memory's and thoughts. Ultimately losing a piece of yourself, your life.

When we die, we are done. No more. No soul. Nope, Nada

Life is what you make it.

By definition, achievement is "something accomplished, by superior ability, special effort, great courage, etc."

Mortality needs none of our ability, effort or courage to exist. The fact that we die regardless of our own efforts proves that.
Thus, it is certainly not an acheivement, but If you called it our greatest gift, I could agree.

The question of a deity's jealousy starts a whole new thought.
Jealousy being a human characteristic humanizes the deity and lowers the bar. Are we disussing a creator or a chemical reaction? And really - will we ever know enough facts to have a true discussion about that entity? Just a thought...

It's neither. Mortality is a characteristic of being human, which we all are. Also, I don't think it's possible for God to be jealous of us because, A, He created us, and B, He is almighty. If you were almighty and immortal, would YOU be jealous of mortal humans???
Mortality can't be an achievement, either, because we didn't create it.
P.S. - There is something from which we can learn what "good" is... it's just that some people know what it is, and other people are looking for the meaning of "good" in all the wrong places.