An Atheist Encounters Death

I believe it is a misconception that because Christians believe in an afterlife that we don’t cherish our life here on Earth or that we don’t live it to the fullest. Our christian faith calls us to live beyond ourselves and to live for a greater purpose as part of God’s plan. If as a Christian you do that you have a full life here on earth and you have the added comfort that you will see your loved ones again.

As much as a memory of someone you love can comfort you in the time of sorrow, in my opinion it is a greater comfort to be able to say that they are in Heaven with their savior and that we will be with them again.

It wasn’t until I thought seriously about the existence of an afterlife (I don’t believe there is one) or the immortality of the human soul (it’s as mortal as the rest of me, if it exists at all) that I began to cherish not only my own life, but the time I spent with the people which really matter. Death is a tragic loss. It is also part of life. It is something each of us will face with 100% certainty.

I don’t see the point in nurturing claims based on what you would “like” to be true. Accept it: move on. I DO see the point in telling those you love that you love them each and every day, and make the very most of the time you have.

In short: if death was easy to cope with, religion wouldn’t be nearly as popular as it is.

This is one of the (many) things that the movie The Invention of Lying got really well. The main character invents religion just to comfort his dying mother.

I have to agree with Flawedperfect, though. Knowing that I won’t get a second chance to see my parents once they are gone keeps me on my toes. I make sure to see them every opportunity I get, and to tell them that I love them every time I speak to them. I know that I have to let know how much they mean to me now because I’ll never have a “do-over” in the afterlife.

It keeps my on my toes for my own life as well. I can’t afford to be lazy about accomplishing my life goals because I could be hit by that metaphorical bus Christians love so much at any moment. As a result, I try to accomplish something every day.

Atheists don’t get second tries. We know that we can’t waste the one life we have dilly-dallying about fantasizing about how much nicer the next one will be.

As much as a memory of someone you love can comfort you in the time of sorrow, in my opinion it is a greater comfort to be able to say that they are in Heaven with their savior and that we will be with them again.

What if your loved ones aren’t Christian? That would cause a lot of fear/stress/pain for the surviving believer. I can imagine a devout Christian mother is not going to find “greater comfort” if her atheist son has terminal cancer.

As difficult as it is to deal with the death of loved ones, I find comfort in knowing that my existence is finite. Granted, the process of dying is often something to fear, but I’m comforted by the thought of being dead.

Just think – if you believe in hell, then its conceivable that you’ll be tortured for all eternity. Believers all think they’re immune, but religious faiths are notoriously mutually incompatible, i.e., “we’re right, you’re all screwed.”

Even if there was a heaven, the idea of having to worship a self-absorbed asshole for all eternity sounds really unappealing to me.

Some day I will never have to worry about pain or suffering, because I won’t exist. That idea gives me peace.

I’ve never had a human close to me but my dog died a few years ago. I had the same feelings and I know he is still around just like a Christian knows, he is in my memories. Even writing this I am tearing up, remembering how much better I made his life and how he took me from a depressive type person to one full of life. Yes, I wish he were still here but since I don’t believe in an afterlife, I made sure he had the best life any dog ever had and that makes me so much happier than believing in a children’s story about heaven. I know this life is real.

In his book I AM A STRANGE LOOP, Douglas Hoftstadter has a very uplifting way of dealing with the death of a loved one. It is completely humanistic, life affirming and does not accede to the supernatural.

@ff42,

“Not that I believe in an afterlife, but must an atheist, BY DEFINITION, refuse to believe in an afterlife? In other words is the notion of God required to believe in an immortal soul?”

To answer your questions, “No” and “no”.
That being said, it would be rather unusual to have come to atheism by a way devoid of logic or evidence. I’d have to think that the overwhelming majority of those who identify as atheists by default also dismiss the existence of anything in the supernatural or metaphysical realm.

If you can give up all the good arguments provided by an atheist/agnostic world-view for a very narrow slice of theism (the consolation), how much of an atheist were you?

I think, if anything, this should remind you of the demonstrably powerful attraction that faith has over a human mind, even one that has given up the ghost of religion in days past.

Depending on your reading, it can be a little light hearted or very thoughtful, but for whatever reason this one means very much to me:

What if your loved ones aren’t Christian? That would cause a lot of fear/stress/pain for the surviving believer. I can imagine a devout Christian mother is not going to find “greater comfort” if her atheist son has terminal cancer.

All it takes is a little cognitive dissonance.

My grandfather was an atheist for his entire adult life. When he was on his deathbed, my parents stayed with him and prayed to him; they tried to “save” him. He never said anything about changing his beliefs but he was smiling the day before he died. He had a tube in his throat to keep his airway open, so he couldn’t tell them why he was smiling, but my parents were convinced Jesus visited him the night before and he got “saved”.

I’m sure there are other mental gymnastics that can be employed to help Christians take comfort in the death of their non-Christian friends and family.

Robert:

I believe it is a misconception that because Christians believe in an afterlife that we don’t cherish our life here on Earth or that we don’t live it to the fullest.

It’s not a matter of how you view your life. It’s the fact that, if your life will last forever, your mortal life has no meaning at all in comparison. Being given immortality would cheapen a temporary life, even if you enjoy it while you’re having it. Life becomes nothing more than a speed bump that you have to slog through to get to the really good part, and you know that nothing you experience now could ever compare to what’s coming next.

To answer the question directly, it would break a Christian mothers heart to have a child die without being saved.

And yet she worships the being who set up the rules by which souls are judged. That god she worships? He’s the reason people need to be saved in the first place. He rigged the system so that we could never be good enough for him, then punished us for it.

Humans simply have trouble envisioning “nothing”. Literally nothing. Not just a lack of something, like emptiness, but non-existence. It’s the same problem with trying to wrap your mind around the Big Bang. How can something come from nothing and what came before? Even the most intelligent scientists can’t really do it. It’s probably a limitation of our brains and our cognitive process.

My dad passed away 2 weeks ago. I miss him. But he identified himself as an atheist and I would not wish a conversion to belief in the afterlife upon him.

As to comfort I may receive from belief in one, as arguments against Pascal’s wager show us, people cannot imply choose what they believe. I could take comfort believing in a unicorn that visited me every day and gave me money, but only if I absolutely believed in it. I don’t believe the afterlife is possible, so I can gain no comfort from it.

I miss my dad, and I do sometimes feel sad that I will not see him again. But ultimately there is nothing to be gained from wanting too as I will not. better to remember the good times I had with him and what he gave me then waste my time on unbelievable and impossible fantasies.

I find the idea of a celestial waiting room very disturbing, not at all comforting. And that’s before you factor in a praise demanding tyrant.

My grandparents died, and I miss them very much. But I dont want to think they are hanging about waiting for me to die. It is sadder, but also more comforting, to know that they are gone. They live on only in the legacy of the people who loved them. That is enough for me.

jumping in unread, i have to say: death will be a comfort to me. and i won’t mourn those whom i love who die. death is the end of pain, and suffering. what’s wrong with that? life is beautiful, but it’s also painful and difficult. and death means no more wondering, or worrying. it’s the embrace of Nothing, and Everything. which is to say: my consciousness will end, as an individual entity, but my molecules and particles? hell, they may go on to be stars, or new planets, or weird animals.. who knows? that’s sort of exciting to me, as a concept. CS Lewis was trying to convince me to be a theist when he wrote in “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” that stars are personalities, as well as fire and compressed helium and all that, but what he really did was make me more of an atheist. i can almost believe that my consciousness will be “elevated” into another state when i’m dead, and zillions of years later the stuff of my person is transformed into another type of universal matter that “transcends” my current understanding. but whatever, i don’t worry about it. I, which is to say the me of right now and until the death of this body that carries this brain, will be, you know, dead n shit. twain said it better than i can: “i was not alive for billions of years before i was born and it didn’t worry me, i don’t worry about the billions of years in which i will be dead after i die because i won’t be able to perceive that either” or something close to that.

off to read your fab comments now…

It’s rather ironic to me that you are posting this today, as I sit in the apartment of my best friend of some 3+ decades, who passed last week. The one thing she asked me was to re-examine my faith, as she was a woman of extreme faith. I still have to stand by my statement that “faith” is simply a language of “mystery” and isn’t a literal reality. It’s a product of culture which expresses those things which many people have no lexicon for… and which leads to quite a bit of misunderstanding when groups or societies attempt to make it THE language of the masses.

It’s difficult for me, because of course at a time like this I WANT to be able to believe, but simply can’t. Almost everyone around me is taking a great deal of comfort thinking that my friend is still present in some way, only waiting to be reunited with all of us (which is quite the morbid thought if you take time to dissect it) and, of course, I don’t. There are times I quite frankly feel like I’m the only one among them who has lost her forever.

Of course I KNOW that gone is gone, but they don’t.

One thing I’ve learned from all this is that the services and trappings associated with death really aren’t for the dead (who are past caring anyway) but ways for the living to deal with loss. It doesn’t make a whit of difference to me what happens to my ashes or how people remember me after I die, but it makes a great deal of difference to those who are living.

If a little religious folly gives comfort to the people I love, it seems harmless enough. It’s not like they’re taking my ashes to schools and teaching resurrection, or using the thought of an afterlife to attempt to discredit physics. All they’re doing is deluding themselves so they can cope with a loss… a comfort, as PZ Myers once referred to, like knitting.

Quite frankly, I had no problem at all accepting that there’s no afterlife. It wasn’t hard at all; it was just “Okay, this is what I get.”

What is a little hard is the knowledge that life is finite, and that it has to end sometime, taking my consciousness with it. The idea of no longer having ideas…? That’s a downer.

Whenever I start thinking of that stuff, however, I quickly remind myself that I have plenty of time left, and may get even more if I take care of myself. Plus — ever notice how it seems that every five years or so, the average life expectancy goes up by five years or so? And even if that’s not so, there’s no denying that we live longer now than we ever have.

And anyway, I think there is an afterlife. It’s just not the supernatural one of which theists speak. To me, the idea of an afterlife is that you live on in the memories of those you leave behind, and increase the quality of their lives in so doing. When someone close to me dies, I mourn their passing, of course, but most importantly, I take a lesson that they taught me, or a good deed they did for me, and I pass it on to someone else.

If I can manage to live long and leave a meaningful legacy, then nuts to harps and clouds, man.

I hated this article. Though, I’ve recently decided that I won’t explain why I hate things, at least, not online. Why? Because the justification for the conclusion (that I either ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ a publication) is completely irrelevant when I don’t give a shit about the intended audience.

I hated this. It was trite, juvenile and one dimensional. Maybe, at the current rate of the author’s “insightful” development, she’ll learn something worth publishing after thirty or forty more “close friends” die.

Until then, I hated this.

Death is obviously tragic and difficult. My mom died ten years ago and I still miss her every day. It has been by far the most difficult thing in my life.

One quote from Epicurus that has always given me some comfort is: ” . . death is nothing to us. For all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation. … [Death] does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more.”

If you think about it, what’s actually terrifying about not existing? Epicurus’s point is that if death is loss of the ability to feel or think, then it by definition can’t be bad for the dead person. There is also the old Stoic idea that you did not exist for eons before you were born, so why is not existing for eons after you die any worse than that?

Granted, death could be bad in that it means you have no more future experience. Most of all I think death sucks for the survivors. I’m actually very sad that someday my death will do to my loved ones what my mom’s death has done to me.

To answer the question directly, it would break a Christian mothers heart to have a child die without being saved.

Robert, thanks for answering my question. It seems like a lot of extra pain to me. Not only does she have to deal with the loss of her son, she also has to mentally wrestle with the fact that she believes he’s “chosen” to be tortured for all eternity. This blissful view of a happy family all together in the afterlife only works if each and every person the Christian cares about has been what they consider to be “saved.”

In contrast, as an atheist, I have lost people that I’ve loved, but I have never had to debate whether or not I’m going to see them again, or worried about what’s happening to them. I just don’t believe they exist anymore, aside from in our memories. Death is hard no matter what, but belief in an afterlife seems like small comfort, and to add an additional layer of worries about heaven and hell doesn’t seem like any comfort at all.

I am truly very sorry to hear about your mother. From your description of her passing with friends and family around it sounds as if she was very loved. I can tell you that the chaplain should have told her that she is saved by grace through her faith in Jesus Christ and that her works aren’t part of the equation. He should have told her she had nothing to fear because that is the absolute assurance of the Gospel. You don’t have to die thinking did I do enough.

Musing on this topic some more, I find it rather odd that Christians who believe in the whole heaven/hell scenario seem to think that this a good selling point for their religion. They want to convert me, yet they expect me to find such a barbaric system morally acceptable. Not only that, they expect me to find it personally appealing, which is strange considering that such a scenario would mean that every single member of my family is going to be tortured for all eternity, as none of us are evangelical Christians.

Of course, my “stumbling block” (as they would say) to Christianity is that I don’t believe in the supernatural, but the blatant immorality of hell certainly doesn’t make me inclined to view the belief system favorably. Even if I became convinced of the existence of some sort of supernatural realm (not likely), why on earth would I pick this belief system over any of the others? It’s wretched any way you look at it.

It’s also interesting how many atheists seem stuck on the idea of heaven/hell, too. There wasn’t a single mention of reincarnation or other afterlife scenarios on the entire thread. I guess it just goes to show how powerful Western culture is, that these silly stories have been so ingrained in our minds that we can talk about them without even thinking of other possibilites.

Not that I believe in an afterlife, but must an atheist, BY DEFINITION, refuse to believe in an afterlife?

In other words is the notion of God required to believe in an immortal soul?

ff42, interesting question. I stopped believing in the soul’s existence long after I stopped believing in gawd. It took learning more about evolution and biology to rid me of the notion of a soul. Frankly, if there were such a thing as a soul, it would be some kind of physical force and proof of it would no more be proof of gawd than the physical body would be.

The rest of your post is spot on, but the harsh truth is that almost all of us will be quickly forgotten after our deaths – just as surely as most of us are barely known by anybody while we are still alive.

I disagree. It’s the rare person who doesn’t live on in the memories of people near and dear to them. I can also remember stories handed down from previous generations of my family by the generation before me and their generation. My grandfathers both died before I was born but I was told enough of them for them to be as real to be as famous people in history. We really do live on in people’s memories. Even if it only last a generation or two, it’s still good. (And doesn’t really matter since we no longer exist to appreciate it or not.)

jen, nice! I like those lyrics.

Am I the only person who finds the idea of eternal life or endless phsyical ones (nods to Anna) utterly horrifying. Just the tedium alone… Ewww.

I don’t find death scary. Dying sounds painful and hard but once it’s over, it’s over. I’m over. End of my story. And since I’m a loud pushy, person ( 😀 ), I know I will live on in others memories. lol! No, not really. As my grandson would put it, I’m just joking you. I know I will live on in others’ memories because I have given of myself to them. And that part of them I have given, they will keep and hold near and cherish all their lives. That thought makes me very happy. I have enriched lives just by being.

I’m sure my grandson will be telling his grandchildren stories of me when he’s old and gray and I’m long gone.

Anna, that’s exactly where I got — eventually.

As you surmise, it has to do with growing up brainwashed. It took me 10 years once I really started asking questions at 17 to get from Christian to Atheist. When I was small I did but also accepted the premise of gawd.

I stopped questioning when at the end of plaguing my mother with how could this be’s, I begged forgiveness and salvation from Jesus and was “saved” just before turning 8. I think at 16, I started having some niggling questions again but, in addition to going to church as my mother would have insisted even if I had resisted, I was listening to Garner Ted Armstrong (cringe) on the radio voluntarily and squelching those but they kept coming back. Finally, at 17, I decided that I just wasn’t understanding God’s plan and decided to read the Bible to get closer to Him and understand Him better. I prayed and promised him, I’d devote an hour a day to this task and Him. And then I did just that.

lol, that did not turn out as planned. It only convinced me that Jesus could not have been the Messiah at first. As I said, it took me 10 years (I went from Christian to Jewish to Agnostic then to Atheist) to break free of religion. After that, it took several more years to let go of the notion of an immortal soul.

I always sucked at science but discussions with other nonbelievers first in real life and then on the ‘net was an edcuation in both evolution and biology (and Atheists being Atheists, they tend to back up what they say with links and books and articles to read) and that got me to where you’re thinking even though if I had to really quote the science, I couldn’t since I’m horrible at it.

Also, my schools taught only the minimum on evolution that they were required to by law. I’m 52 years old so that should let you know not very much was required. I honestly don’t recall much beyond that chart of the evolution of man from prehistoric man to modern man. I vaguely had some sense of cavemen and really couldn’t even give you the different phases of man that chart depicts. Until recently, I thought evolution claimed we descended from apes rather than we and apes descending from the same ancestor.

I still suck at science (and thus avoid debating or even discussing it for making a fool of myself) but I have some better comprehension and that has, indeed, made the idea of a soul seem an absurdity.

I believed my whole life in some sort of afterlife. I was brought up Catholic until i was 12, my mum got a divorse from my dad and the church thought this was a imortal sin. After that my mum said i could still go to church if i wanted but me and my brother were more than happy to stop going!
When i was 14 until around 21 i had dreams about my spirit leaving my body. I honestly was terrifed it felt so real. I could see my body still lying on my bed as i floated up in the air!!!
I read books on astral projection and then ended up buying a book called mind magic by betty shine. Betty was a meduim and talked of the after life and was a healer and talked to dead people. So the explanation for my dreams … was that they were real! I believed this for years too!
Ok so i am 34 now, I lost my beautiful mum on the 5th July last year. I was with my mum at the end and excepted 100 percent she was gone and was at peace…… that was until the day after my mums friends and family talked of my mums spirit being around. She knocked on peoples doors and visited them in thier dreams. The relgions people telling me my mum was still watching me from heaven smiling down happy with angels.so this went on for months, i couldn’ t except any more she was gone and searched for the place people told me she was now.
I can tell you it has taken months of sleepless nights and hours of contemplation for me to realise there is no after life, my mum has gone forever. She is not around me, i will not meet her in heaven. It like i was brain washed my whole life!
I think i nearly cracked up facing the truth, but at least i know whats real now and can begin getting on with my life.
I have courage for facing the truth.

Atheists have to keep talking – incessantly. They fear the grave-like silence that reflects the emptiness of their souls when they stop. They have to keep thinking up excuses for their unbelief; they fear the intuition which quietly, yet eloquently and forcefully, speaks to them of the unvarnished truth when they stop putting it through their distorted, prejudiced, intellectual strainers. They have to constantly engage in revelry, which they call “enjoying life” because they no longer know how to be happy through simply being.