So in a way you believe in some sort of form of reincarnation?
That is probably the closest existing thing to describing it. Usually, though, reincarnation is thought of as a way to keep going.
My thought is that when we're gone, we're gone. But we have all had the panic: what happens to my perspective? What happens to this consciousness from which I observe the world? My thoughts on that are that the thing you feel and the thing I feel are the same entity. There is one source of consciousness and, from our perspective, we never die. We just wake up someone else. No, we don't take any memories with us, or our personalities, or anything, but this conscious identity we feel is an eternal, perpetual thing, and it is all of us.
capable of thinking of things that do not exist yet before even most of us realize we need them or that they could be. That's what true genius is to me.
Damn. That's a great way of putting it.
does it justify the monstrous, disgusting ways they made her suffer while she was waiting for her death? I don't think so.
The prison system, at least there, is made to break and dehumanise people. They are given numbers and uniforms and menial, unfulfilling tasks to complete. They are presented with a broken economy as their only legitimate option to purchase things that are essential to quality of life. They are treated like dog shit. They are mocked, shouted at, threatened, raped, and manipulated for fun and profit. And if any of them acts on their natural impulse to escape, they are shot dead if they are lucky. Otherwise they're locked in a concrete room for 23 hours a day.
Then there is the death penalty itself. There's a reason most of the civilised world has done away with it. Aileen Wuornos killed seven people. Those killings were homicides, but were they murders? Did she fully understand what she was doing? Was she being honest about feeling threatened? We'll never know.
There's only one certainty here: Aileen Wuornos was murdered, in cold blood, after over a decade of torture, in a very questionable state of mental health, by a representative of the government of Florida. I hope that person knows what they did, and I hope it haunts them, not because I want them to suffer, but because maybe they'll feel regret and share that regret with others. Then maybe there will come a day when the judge who hands down a death sentence has nobody to do their dirty work for them.