Is there really any out there or are we so different and affraid on the inside that we mask our behavior with absurd shadows called Vampires. Indeed you can live for a while but never have I seen a man or 102. Maybe Vampirism is a state of mind. To live off others because you are too weak to go on. To suck the life and fill your veins with more then your own has to offer. Fake teeth or sharpened nails are a joke. Does anyone know what they look like. It's certainly not going to be dressed in a cape with its fangs haning out and its eyes differend colors, or we would know they were real, right? They are but dark corners in our minds now. If ever there lived one, they are mostly likely died out now. To be a Vampire and live in these days is almost impossible to comsider, way back when, there wasn't as much land discovered or as many things to worry about being captured maybe then. The Vampires glory days, when they ruled secretly stealing as they willed. If anyone can enlighten me better on this topic, it would be greatly appretiated.
:meow:

Your very right.. :)
I doubt there are vampires..or ever were. Just humans trying to live forever because they're to afraid to die.
I have though, seen people who are ove 102 :)
Some people are just really afraid to die so they make up absurd stories, or even to scare their childern into being good they tell a tale of a blood sucking creature, which in turn gets made into so much more than what it is.

well,

vampirism is a disease. but not of the body, but of the mind.

i am a leader of a coven here and i have just "cured" some people of this vampirism disease from within my group.

they really tot they were vampires or were so desperate to try to be one, a few of them almost bled themselves dry and almost died. it is not a nice thing to see.

but, you never know, there may be vampires. maybe they are too strong or too clever to be noticed. maybe there aren't any, but have you ever sat down to think what would happen if there were vampires? and they made themselves known?

something to think on.

[QUOTE]
they really tot they were vampires or were so desperate to try to be one, a few of them almost bled themselves dry and almost died. it is not a nice thing to see.

What were they going to do?
What kind of animal let itself bleed?
Did you send them to an asylum?

Well, I Touch Roses (lovely name by the way), your question pretty much sums up the entire board here: We Just Don't Know. :)

Like MD, I am increasingly leaning towards the idea that it is of the mind. This raises some interesting questions: why do so many people want to 'prove' that it is a physical problem such as a virus? Would that somehow lend weight to the credibility of their arguments? Indeed it seems that people would prefer to believe it is a physical 'disease' perhaps because the suggestion it might be a mental problem brings stigma and prejudice.

Psychiatrists do classify Vampirism as a disease: a mental disorder with clear cut symptoms, popularly known as 'Renfield's Syndrome'. However I have yet to see anyone post "I have a disorder known as Renfield's Syndrome" - people always want it to be something more.

Ravager: for the background to MD's posts, see HERE.

the closist thing in this world to an immortal is a tree. I serously doubt any animal type life form has ever been immortal.

On the note of immortals. There are the Monks that spend their life meditating in the Himalayas. Some of them have been recorded to be over 150. Heh, sounds like cock and bull. Although it isn't. Then there are the Martial Art masters who constantly eat off the land, using herbsetc... But most of all, their chi. You never hear any of this on T.V or the Radio, due to the conspiracy of our government! YES! C O N S P I R A C Y. Heh, ;-P

I would have to say that vampires, in my opinion, don't exist, but here I am, at this site, reading and listening and learning. It's an interesting thing really, I think that's the point of any site online, to learn and interact. So, I'm not sure how to help you. People here claim to be vampires so if you want, they can describe themselves to you! Oh and the chi masters of martial arts, would you happen to know how long they have lived. I know good excercise and good living are key factors, but living off of yourself, I haven't heard too much of. It seems everyone here, has to live off of something else.

QUOTE:
I would have to say that vampires, in my opinion, don't exist, but here I am, at this site, reading and listening and learning. It's an interesting thing really, I think that's the point of any site online, to learn and interact. So, I'm not sure how to help you. People here claim to be vampires so if you want, they can describe themselves to you! Oh and the chi masters of martial arts, would you happen to know how long they have lived. I know good excercise and good living are key factors, but living off of yourself, I haven't heard too much of. It seems everyone here, has to live off of something else.

I do very much agree myself, if I didn't then that would be very hypocritical of me and I am sorry if I came off that way. I am very much, as you can tell, intrigued with Vampires, immortal, etc. but understanding is sometime a bit frustraiting. Thats why we discuss and debate, and that I do enjoy, but I have to remember to be open-minded. I do hunt the tought of immortals being real. But I have to agree with Night Vision, its a menatl illness, its not a disease to catch, but a state of mind. But thats just me. :meow:

So we're basically talking projection here then. I suppose that's true, but as in any film or legend, vampires are supposed to keep themselves to themselves "dead to the world" as the expression goes so it dont surprise me if no one ever finds one.

truthfully i may sound stupid to you people but i believe that there are vampires out there and they stay hidden for there own sake. just think with modern medicine if a vampire was found people would test him untill they found the secret to immortality then we will all be livivng for ever(for a price). not to mension the mental religous freaks that would hunt them for game. i may be nuts but thats what i think.

i think that the thought of vapirism and the idea of it may be imortal. vampires; well what we know of them portray them to be as susceptible to death as we are. True they maybe streotypically stroner but they can die.

the only thing in my mind that maybe immortal is the soul and the memories of what impact one soul made.

A zombie coul be inmortal too, but they don't think, they're stupid and they're useless...

I'd like to believe that they exist in a physical sense. But until I find out for definate I can only hope. But as I've already said before, there has to be some fact to start a myth. It's just finding out what is crap and what isn't. I also agree that if they were real, they wouldn't reveal themselves. There would be a good reason not to. Perhaps they feel that "humans" aren't capable of learning the truth yet. If they exist that is. We are too busy being at war with one another that they think we couldn't handle it. Or either that they just don't want the attention and that it's better them being not believed in. xxx

:help: I have a question for those who think vampires truly exist. In current legends, literature and movies, vampires are portrayed as being fearless of the mortal race, they have strength, speed and agility far beyond that of a human (not to mention the hundreds of years of knowledge they have accumulated), in short, superior to humans in everyway (with of course a few drawbacks, allergy to sunlight and garlic, a lack of a soul etc.). So if they are real, why would they hide? I know it was said before that humans being humans would try and capture the essenence of immortality, or hunt them down, but this indicates that vampires would be afraid of us mortals.... which is what confusses me most about the ledgends of vampires. Why would they remain hidden when they have supposedly nothing to fear from humans, they are their food afterall. Sorry if this is a stupid question but it has always puzzled me......

They like to be lonely...

:meow: To misfitted...it is fiction out the minds of very creative people. Those modern ledgends...like Lestat, or Blade...they are fiction, made up by very imaginitive people.
As much as I would like to believe in vampires...and in their existance today...I have read every vampire book ever written...and I own most...and they are just WORDS on a piece of paper...and some are just actors acting out a scene on the silver screen.

Vampires do live in our hearts I will give you that...and we can keep the ledgend alive...but as for me ...they are words on paper, legends, and nothing more.

I would like to think that everyone can believe what they want, but as we keep progressing in science we are crushing our belief systems. I think that sometimes, we need to realize that probably everything we have a faith in now, will be put out by a scientific realization or something of that sort. I'm not saying to not believe in anything, I'm saying be excepting of what may come in the future, and read the facts. It has done wonders for me.

And, in my opinion, I do not believe in vampires, I think they are lovely fantasies of the imagination that are good for books, and scaring the crud out of girlscouts.

:devilbook: I agree, science as well as enlightening us I believe it is destroying us. I know all the advantages to it, but u have a point. I don't believe vampires truly exisit but i was curious how people who did belileve would overcome the problem i have with the mythology in justifying their existance. Call it curosity

::calls:: So, why are you so interested? I know that may already be a thread, but do you have any opinion on that? Why you are interested in vampires in the first place, is it just to know?

Why am I interested? Well I can tell you first off that I am not an inspiring 'REAL VAMPIRE'. I read a lot of Anne Rice, watch a lot of movies, I find them fascinating because they seem to change with every story. I'm studying psychology at university so I am intrigued by why people want to live like a vampire- hurt people drink blood or even be the victim of a vampire. I'm also fascinated by faith and belief, I am awed by people who believe blindly and completely in something other than themseleves, whether it be God, Angels, Fairies, Demons, Santa Clause, Were Wolves or, yes we know what's coming next, Vampires. As a person who is way too much of a deep thinker then it is good for me, always thinking 'now if that's the case, then wouldn't this be the result' and so forth, I get curious about different persepectives and how people justify their belief/ faith. Don't get me wrong I would never ask them to question it, turn them from it or "enlighten" them, but it is good to take a step back and get to see how other people view the world, no matter how bizzare or far out their thoughts might be, there is always an opportunity to learn something new. So in short it is just to know, my curosity often gets the best of me. I'm also doing a subject on creative writting as an elective, and I do a lot of writting myself (although I'm sure it is not reflected here because i just quickly type and post whatever without giving much thought to what it is i'm writting :cofpap: ) as part of an assignment I'm writting a short story, and guess what it is about! Yep! VAMPIRES! Only I want something original that i can maybe develop into a novel at a later date, so I am here gathering ideas and different perspectives since I don't want to re-hash the same cliques. The vampires i write about will hopefully be the old fashion horror creatures that they were inteneded to be rather then deep thinking, romanticly dark creatures u often read about these days. Not that I have anything wrong with that image, I just want to write something slightly different.

Coool. I feeel so excluded! :huh: I totally havent been talking in my own thread! Whats up. I don't think you are a Vampire, but I like your Vampire book idea, the thought of Vampires being real is a deep thinking thing, the more you think the more your mind creates more reasons to believe, or it go the other way and be so nonbelieveing that you critcise others because you've soo cross examined it so long, and lost all the doubts. I don't know I am just rambling on to act like I knowe something. :rolleyes: So whats ya'll perspective?

Does it need to be a good place in order to be inspirational? Whether u believe in vampires or not, u have to admit that people here do have some sort of imagination, are intriguing or just entertaining (I can think of no other reason as to why you would continue to put up posts). Besides anything can be inspirational, from a horrible head ache, a sunset or the dead cockroach you sprayed lasted night. If I want to write about vampires then so be it, if I am curious about them, so be that too. But if I am to write wouldn't it be an idea to go through and research? FInd out what people like, don't like? This is not the only source of information that i'm looking at either, you be surprised how texts on vampires in my university's library :ph34r:

i think there are immortals :devilnaughty: :devilflip:

We are all immortal.

don't know whether i'm immortal or not, i never tried dying. must be fun.

but seriously, i'm sure that the original post can be related to quite a number of people - people wanting to escape reality by trying to become something they're not. i don't think there are the immortal kind of vampires sitting in their red-textured cushions with glasses of blood in their pale hands, waiting for the human wannabes to come to them so they can be turned...

i know, however that there are REAL vampires, people not so different from everybody else, mortal, some skinny, some fat, some even rather hairy (hehe), people who don't really want to be tagged by any fancy sounding titles - just people. if YOU want to call these people "vampires" - i guess that's your choice.

cheers,
m.s.

I think that post was lovely m.s.
Just thought to say so, oh, and why would fat people be vampires? Maybe you mean that because english language can label anyone but whatever, just asking!

You know...after being here for close to two years, and hearing all the different theories, ideas, opinions, it's my impression that there would indeed be a lot of "fat" (god, how I hate that word...)' vampires.

One of the symptoms I keep hearing about is the hunger...you eat, but mere food doesn't qlench (sp??) the hunger. Now I know, in my case, if I kept going hungry, and what I really needed to fix that was temporarily unavailable, I'll eat something else. I sense a great risk for overeating in a lot of cases...

hmm... interesting point

I personally do not beleive in Vampires as an actual being because it just cannot be possible. It is impossible for someone to live more that they are supposed to live.
And plus Vampire myths go back thousands of years and occur in almost every culture around the world. Their variety is almost endless; from red eyed monsters with green or pink hair in China to the Greek Lamia which has the upper body of a woman and the lower body of a winged serpent; from vampire foxes in Japan to a head with trailing entrails known as the Penanggalang in Malaysia.
However, the vampires we are familiar with today, although mutated by fiction and film, are largely based on Eastern European myths. The vampire myths of Europe originated in the far East, and were transported from places like China, Tibet and India with the trade caravans along the silk route to the Mediterranean. Here they spread out along the Black Sea coast to Greece, the Balkans and of course the Carpathian mountains, including Hungary and Transylvania.

Our modern concept of the vampire still retains threads, such as blood drinking, return from death, preying on humans at night, etc in common with the Eastern European myths. However many things we are familiar with; the wearing of evening clothes, capes with tall collars, turning into bats, etc are much more recent inventions.

On the other hand, many features of the old myths such as the placing of millet or poppy seeds at the gravesite in order to keep the vampire occupied all night counting seeds rather than preying on relatives, have all but disappeared from modern fiction and film.

Even among the Eastern European countries there is a large variety of vampires.



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SLAVIC VAMPIRES:
The Slavic people including most east Europeans from Russia to Bulgaria, Serbia to Poland, have the richest vampire folklore and legends in the world. The Slavs came from north of the Black Sea and were closely associated with the Iranians. Prior to 8th century AD they migrated north and west to where they are now.
Christianization began almost as soon as they arrived in their new homelands. But through the 9th and 10th centuries the Eastern Orthodox Church and the western Roman Church were struggling with each other for supremacy. They formally broke in 1054 AD, with the Bulgarians, Russians, and Serbians staying Orthodox, while the Poles, Czechs, and Croatians went Roman. This split caused a big difference in the development of vampire lore - the Roman church believed incorrupt bodies were saints, while the Orthodox church believed they were vampires.

The origin of Slavic vampire myths developed during 9th C as a result of conflict between pre-Christian paganism and Christianity. Christianity won out with the vampires and other pagan beliefs surviving in folklore.

Causes of vampirism included: being born with a caul, teeth, or tail, being conceived on certain days, irregular death, excommunication, improper burial rituals etc. Preventative measures included: placing a crucifix in the coffin, or blocks under the chin to prevent the body from eating the shroud, nailing clothes to coffin walls for the same reason, placing millet or poppy seeds in the grave because vampires had a fascination with counting, or piercing the body with thorns or stakes.

Evidence that a vampire was at work in the neighbourhood included: death of cattle, sheep, relatives, neighbours, exhumed bodies being in a lifelike state with new growth of the fingernails or hair, or if the body was swelled up like a drum, or there was blood on the mouth and if the corpse had a ruddy complexion.

Vampires could be destroyed by staking, decapitation (the Kashubs placed the head between the feet), burning, repeating the funeral service, holy water on the grave, exorcism.



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ROMANIA:
Romania is surrounded by Slavic countries, so it isn't surprising that their vampires are variants of the Slavic vampire. They are called Strigoi based on the Roman term strix for screech owl which also came to mean demon or witch.
There are different types of strigoi: strigoi vii are live witches who will become vampires after death. They can send out their soul at night to meet with other witches or with Strigoi mort who are dead vampires. The strigoi mort are the reanimated bodies which return to suck the blood of family, livestock, and neighbours.

A person born with a caul, tail, born out of wedlock, or one who died an unnatural death, or died before baptism, was doomed to become a vampire. As was the seventh child of the same sex in a family, the child of a pregnant woman who didn't eat salt or was looked at by a vampire, or a witch. And naturally, being bitten by vampire, meant certain condemnation to a vampiric existence after death.

The Vircolac which is sometimes mentioned in folklore was more closely related to a mythological wolf that could devour the sun and moon and later became connected with werewolves rather than vampires. The person afflicted with lycanthropy could turn into a dog, pig, or wolf.

The vampire was usually first noticed when it attacked family and livestock, or threw things around in the house. Vampires, along with witches, were believed to be most active on the Eve of St George's Day (April 22 Julian, May 4 Gregorian calendar), the night when all forms of evil were supposed to be abroad. St Georges Day is still celebrated in Europe.

A vampire in the grave could be told by holes in the earth, an undecomposed corpse with a red face, or having one foot in the corner of the coffin. Living vampires were found by distributing garlic in church and seeing who didn't eat it.

Graves were often opened three years after death of a child, five years after the death of a young person, or seven years after the death of an adult to check for vampirism.

Measures to prevent a person becoming a vampire included, removing the caul from a newborn and destroying it before the baby could eat any of it, careful preparation of dead bodies, including preventing animals from passing over the corpse, placing a thorny branch of wild rose in the grave, and placing garlic on windows and rubbing it on cattle, especially on St George's & St Andrew's days.

To destroy a vampire, a stake was driven through the body followed by decapitation and placing garlic in the mouth. By the 19th century people were shooting a bullet through the coffin. For resistant cases, the body was dismembered and the pieces burned, mixed with water, and given to family members as a cure.



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GYPSIES AND VAMPIRES:
Even today, Gypsies frequently feature in vampire fiction and film, no doubt influenced by Bram Stoker's book "Dracula" in which the Szgany gypsies served Dracula, carrying his boxes of earth and guarding him.
In reality, Gypsies originated as nomadic tribes in northern India, but got their name from the early belief that they came from Egypt. By 1000 AD they started spreading westward and settled in Turkey for a time, incorporating many Turkish words into their Romany language.

By the 14th century they were all through the Balkans and within two more centuries had spread all across Europe. Gypsies arrived in Romania a short time before Vlad Dracula was born in 1431.

Their religion is complex and varies between tribes, but they have a god called O Del, as well as the concept of Good and Evil forces and a strong relationship and loyalty to dead relatives. They believed the dead soul entered a world similar to ours except that there is no death. The soul stayed around the body and sometimes wanted to come back. The Gypsy myths of the living dead added to and enriched the vampire myths of Hungary, Romania, and Slavic lands.

The ancient home of the Gypsies, India has many mythical vampire figures. The Bhuta is the soul of a man who died an untimely death. It wandered around animating dead bodies at night and attacked the living like a ghoul. In northern India could be found the brahmaparusha, a vampire-like creature with a head encircled by intestines and a skull from which it drank blood.

The most famous Indian vampire is Kali who had fangs, wore a garland of corpses or skulls and had four arms. Her temples were near the cremation grounds. She and the goddess Durga battled the demon Raktabija who could reproduce himself from each drop of blood spilled. Kali drank all his blood so none was spilled, thereby winning the battle and killing Raktabija.

Sara or the Black Goddess is the form in which Kali survived among Gypsies. Gypsies have a belief that the three Marys from the New Testament went to France and baptised a Gypsy called Sara. They still hold a ceremony each May 24th in the French village where this is supposed to have occurred.

One Gypsy vampire was called a mullo (one who is dead). This vampire was believed to return and do malicious things and/or suck the blood of a person (usually a relative who had caused their death, or not properly observed the burial ceremonies, or who kept the deceased's possessions instead of destroying them as was proper.)

Female vampires could return, lead a normal life and even marry but would exhaust the husband. Anyone who had a hideous appearance, was missing a finger, or had animal appendages, etc. was believed to be a vampire.

Even plants or dogs, cats, or farm animals could become vampires. Pumpkins or melons kept in the house too long would start to move, make noises or show blood.

To get rid of a vampire people would hire a dhampire (the son of a vampire and his widow) to detect the vampire. To ward off vampires, gypsies drove steel or iron needles into a corpse's heart and placed bits of steel in the mouth, over the eyes, ears and between the fingers at the time of burial. They also placed hawthorn in the corpse's sock or drove a hawthorn stake through the legs. Further measures included driving stakes into the grave, pouring boiling water over it, decapitating the corpse, or burning it.

In spite of the disruption of Gypsy lives by the various eastern European communist regimes, they still retain much of their culture. In 1992 a new king of the Gypsies was chosen in Bistritz, Romania.



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BATS:
No discussion of vampires is even thinkable without talking about bats. They are integral to the modern day concept of the vampire, but this was not always the case.
Many cultures have various myths about bats. In South America, Camazotz was a bat god of the caves living in the Bathouse of the Underworld. In Europe, bats and owls were long associated with the supernatural, mainly because they were night creatures. On the other hand, the Gypsies thought them lucky - they wore charms made of bat bones. And in England the Wakefield crest and those of some others have bats on them.

So how did bats end up becoming associated with vampires? There are only three species of vampires bats in the entire world, all of which occur in Central and South America. During the 16th century the Spanish conquistadors first came into contact with them and recognized the similarity between the feeding habits of the bats and those of their mythical vampires. It wasn't long before they began to associate bats with their vampire legends. Over the following centuries the association became stronger and was used by various people, including James Malcom Rhymer who wrote "Varney the Vampyre" in the 1840's. Stoker cemented the linkage of bats and vampires in the minds of the general public.



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EIGHTEENTH CENTURY VAMPIRE CONTROVERSY:
Today everyone is familiar with vampires, but in Britain very little was known of vampires prior to the 18th century. What brought the vampire to the attention of the general public? During the 18th century there was a major vampire scare in Eastern Europe. Even government officials frequently got dragged into the hunting and staking of vampires.
This controversy was directly responsible for England's current vampire myths. In fact, the word Vampire only came into English language in 1732 via an English translation of a German report of the much publicized Arnold Paole vampire staking in Serbia.

Western scholars seriously considered the existence of vampires for the first time rather than just brushing them off as superstition. It all started with an outbreak of vampire attacks in East Prussia in 1721 and in the Austro-Hungarian empire from 1725-1734.

Two famous cases involved Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Paole. Plogojowitz died at the age of 62, but came back a couple of times after his death asking his son for food. When the son refused, he was found dead the next day. Soon Plogojowitz returned and attacked some neighbours who died from loss of blood.

In the other famous case Arnold Paole, an ex-soldier turned farmer who had been attacked by a vampire years before, died while haying. After death people began to die and it was believed by everyone that Paole had returned to prey on the neighbours.

These two incidents were extremely well documented. Government officials examined the cases and the bodies, wrote them up in reports, and books were published afterwards of the Paole case and distributed around Europe. The controversy raged for a generation. The problem was exacerbated by rural people having an epidemic of vampire attacks and digging up bodies all over the place. Many scholars said vampires didn't exist - they attributed reports to premature burial, or rabies which causes thirst.

However, Dom Augustine Calmet, a well respected French theologian and scholar, put together a carefully thought out treatise in 1746 which said vampires did exist. This had considerable influence on other scholars at the time.

Eventually, Austrian Empress Marie Theresa sent her personal physician to investigate. He said vampires didn't exist and the Empress passed laws prohibiting the opening of graves and desecration of bodies. This was the end of the vampire epidemics. But by then everyone knew about vampires and it was only a matter of time before authors would preserve and mould the vampire into something new and much more accessible to the general public.

They say that DNA is immortal as there could be a fossil from a million years ago and you can still find DNA even after so long. But that is just ridiculous it is not even living it is not living and plus it is just wrong. The DNA itself is not living though. But I beleive you have a time and you have to go . Wheteher you are 24, 109 72 or even 6 months

I personally think that vampires do not exist and never have. However, the idea of being one can seem appealing. The lifestyle....the realisation that you could live to see the next millenium, that you are safe in the knowledge in the fact that there are so few people who believe in your existence...your safe.

someone mentioned that it must be bad being a vampire....having to kill and murder the innocent...well thats a rather sad thing to say....we eat meat of living creatures to survive (apart from me and other veggies) so what you say is rather hypocritical.

If I was a vamp...I would just do what lestat does in the anne rice novels....target some crims....make yourself feel good.

I thing it would be good if genetic engeneering/cloning and health care becomes sooooo good they could genetically create a vamp...that would be cool

Ahi Hay Lilitu

::hides at the thought of there being no vampires:: "I think well I am not sure. Everyone had their belifs, but I do believe in many thigns other wouldn't even think twice about, but that it me and not anyone else.

vampires do exist, but the definition of a vampire is contorversial (discussed in another part of forum)

if you believe hard enough in something, it may exist. and there are many things in this world which we do not understand or even begin to comprehend,

so i say Yes, vampires do exist.....

Comprehension, the human race- we're working on that.
That fact that we keep killing new species, maybe a long time ago we accidently ran the last vampire over with a bulldozer and a large tree from the rainforest. You never know now do you?

Inmortality will be real soon with the dreams of a lot of people, d.n.a. will be modified and inmortals and vampires will be real soon!

:meow: I will give you this...though by beliefs prohibit me from believing in immortality per se...I do believe that as medicine advances and improves the quality and extent of life...our perception of immortality will be somewhat realized. Our lifespans will grow to a couple of centuries rather than at most a dozen decades.

But that is all you will get out of me.

They would need to find a way to keep cell-reproduction at a constant rate for that to happen. Our bodies aren't designed to outlast approximately 120 years.

Ravager, you've been linking a lot of things to technology lately, biotech to be specific.... any reason?

and what Clearwitch says is true.. ourr bodies are just not designed to do that......... but genome research IS advancing, and sea turtles live to be 200..............

maybe there will be a new breed of humans with the age-length gene from sea turtles......... just an idea.......... *laughs at turtle-man hybrid*

:meow: Quit spamming you two...it is getting annoying. I was just stating a personally belief...After all modern medicing has double our lifespan in the last two hundred years. I am speaking from a viewpoint of if that happened then...and medicine is advancing by leaps and bounds...I personally forsee another doubling in the next two hundred.

You will have to forgive me Clear...but when you referenced that our bodies were not designed to live past one hundred years...were you referencing a creator...or is my hope misplaced? Yes or no will suffice.

No, not a creator, but scientific research. I read an article a while back that I've been trying to find again, that mentioned those studies. It explained which parts of our body would cave in first, and why, for instance the way our spines are curved, creating an excessive amount of pressure on it. Knees as well, being erect as we are we get all our weight on a few joints only.

(just yes or no is so boring)

well, i agree with nightstalker, medicine is going forward, but you never know when we may hit a block............

you know, is the joints ad backbone thingy is all that is keeping us from living longer, there are great tech advances in prosthetic limbs and surgery to enhance the knees and stuff.................

No, that was just examples. Internal organs as well, heart, liver, kidney...you'd wind up replacing 80% or more of your body...is it worth it?

:meow: I don't know...some people do just about that anyways in the plastic surgeons room...hee hee.

But seriously...I already have stated that the Bible states that God restricted our lifespan to 120 years. But it is a novel idea. Yes I do believe medicine has increased the extent of life...but cannot extend it past 120 years...per God's decree. Call up scientific reason and you will see proof that man is no longer capable of living past 120...but it is a novel idea.

But mankind sure would like to try.

Just to be on the safe side...these are my beliefs...do with them as you will.

P.S. Clear...I had hoped I had a convert...should have known better huh?

god made man. man killed god. man made god. start over.

i think the only path to true immortality is somehow learning to "cut and paste" a human brain into electronic form. sounds very sci-fi but i can't think of no other way at the moment. a human shell is way too fragile.

after all, we're just our minds wrapped in skin and bone.

cheers,
m.s.

::raises hand:: Yes, I've seen it, it's quite a wonderful movie.

And M.S. I do agree with you on one point, we really are just a mind wrapped in skin and bone, but doesn't that mean that when we are unwrapped we're just a mind. When the bone and skin disolve and all we are is a mind, we've got to go somewhere, or we could just float in the sky, or maybe take over another creature. We don't know, so yes, we make religions and reasons as to what happens when we die. So, on topic here (yes, I'm thinking I'm managing this) with our body comes immortality because the body just holds our mind to interact with words for the world to hear. In that sense. We truly are immortal.

it's a religious concept. i think the only thing seperating us from animals is our power of choice. our consciousness, self-awareness. maybe "souls" in one form or another are possible, but not to everyone. not yet.

cheers,
m.s.

New concept of inmortality:

A photo, you're now inmortal, welcome

nah, a photo is too stiff! how about a dvd on urself and in the future maybe a hologram?? lol

but a photo, or a video, will never capture or represent who you really are inside, it's just the casing that is shown, the shell, and the shell doesnt really matter that much...........

i mean, The Morbid Darkness, will still remain The Morbid Darkness when transfered into another body, so will all of you guys........

and yes Draq, we trully are Immortal............*smiles*

If body you mean like another form. Because our physical body changes quite often. Decaying into the soil, becoming a nutrient then a flower, it's really quite an endless cycle. Simply because, you can't destroy matter.