On the 14th of July in 1789, a crowd of nearly one thousand protesters stormed the Bastille in Paris, France, a major event in the French Revolution, commemorated annually as “Bastille Day”.
In the months running up to the uprising, the people of France were facing a dire economic crisis, food shortage, and increased militarization of Paris on orders of King Louis XVI. The Bastille was an armory and prison, perceived by many as a symbol of royal authority in the city.
On the morning of July 14th, a crowd of approximately one thousand people surrounded the Bastille, calling for the surrender of the prison, the removal of its cannon, and the release of the arms and gunpowder stored there.
After negotiations stalled, the crowd surged into the courtyard of the Bastille and were fired upon by troops in the garrison. In the carnage that followed, ninety-eight protesters and one defender of the Bastille were killed.
Governor Marquis de Launay, fearing his troops could not hold out, capitulated to the crowd and opened up the Bastille doors. He was captured and dragged towards the Hôtel de Ville in a storm of abuse. While the crowd debated his fate, the badly beaten Launay shouted “Enough! Let me die!”, kicked a pastry cook in the groin, and was then promptly stabbed to death.
As news of the successful seizure of the Bastille spread throughout the country, revolutionaries established parallel structures of power for government and militias for civic protection, burned deeds of property, and in some cases attacked wealthy landlords.
King Louis XVI first learned of the storming the next morning through the Duke of La Rochefoucauld. “Is it a revolt?” asked the King. The duke replied: “No sire, it’s not a revolt; it’s a revolution.”
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i’ve been thinking about death and what comes after a lot recently
i was raised christian and really believed in it until entering my twenties, then i became an atheist and have been one for the past almost 6 years, but recently i’ve started to become kind of spiritual i guess?
i’ve convinced myself reincarnation is real. it’s an idea that really comforts me and seems like the best possible outcome for life, getting to live forever but not knowing that you live forever so life stays interesting and you can rediscover all the beautiful things about this world over and over again
i have no basis for this, but it’s something that’s impossible to prove isn’t real. like there will never be evidence or proof of reincarnation, but there also won’t ever be proof that it isn’t real. so i just like subconsciously chosen to believe it because it makes me feel good and there’s no way to prove i’m wrong
this probably isn’t the best way to think about the world, just believing in stuff cause it sounds nice rather than believing in things cause you’ve got reasons to believe. but at this stage of my life i just really need some hope, something that’ll tell me that it will get better
i don’t believe in anything else spiritual/supernatural and i don’t adhere to buddhism or any other religion that has reincarnation in it, i just believe in the idea of reincarnation and that’s it. well i guess i believe in souls now too because there’s got to be something beyond my body that is the thing that actually gets reincarnated?
idk maybe i’ve just been doing too many drugs recently. maybe i’ll go back to being an atheist after this dark chapter of my life is over but for now having some non falsifiable hope is exactly what i need
i hope to be a great blue heron in my next life
Like a kind of psychological opium perhaps?
opium of the masses? hell yeah i want to do a massive amount of opium
I think reincarnation is a cool idea. I particularly like Andy Weirs super short story The Egg (https://galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html) which is like reincarnation taken to the extreme
i liked that story
it’s still kind of horrifying to think what happens after you live through every life though
Presumably you get to be the other guy in the egg story
I don’t talk about my weird as shit spiritual beliefs often (ever), but I don’t think death is truly the end. I believe we will all be brought back, physically, bodily and that humanity has a role in how that will happen - there was a Russian philosopher that talked about it Fyodorov that I vibed with. Douglas Hofstatder talked about how we don’t exist purely in the heads of our bodies, that our psyche is kind of smeared out across your loved ones - his example is the passing of his wife and how he felt her so close, like she was alive in his head, or perhaps you have had an elderly loved one going through dementia where their brain is gone yet their mind is still so accessible (“grandpa would have loved this”). Even in a physically infinite universe, by the pigeonhole principle another you are reading this some finite (but massive) distance away and similarly in a conformol cyclic cosmology - you will exist again in the future. Reincarnation is probably real in that very basic sense then, although it’s more of a Neitzchean eternal reccurance reincarnation which I guess is good or bad depending on how you feel about your life.
Which does nothing to assuage the terror and finality of death, of course. Nor it’s inevitability. It is gonna happen, and it could be frightening.
reliving the same life over and over with no variations sounds pretty awful, even if i don’t remember it
i really hope it’s not recurrence reincarnation
the idea that’s i’ll get to be something else after this makes death a lot less scary imo