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Having lately become something of an atheist or agnostic, I've begun to feel some creeping, existential dread. Ever since I was a little kid, one of my greatest fears was to simply cease to be, which frightens me much more than eternal torment (though, I'm sure, I'd prefer nonexistence to eternal torment if I were actually there.) I'm not the
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actually, in all seriousness, i think atheism is the brighter side. the truly life affirming side. existential dread is nothing but the hangover from years of believing the narcotic belief that god was hatching up a scheme for you. it's a hand me down from religious belief. there is no more reason to fear non existence after death than to fear the destruction of the sun billions of years from now. they are both things we will not experience. in fact, non existence after death is the only thing that adds elegance and meaning to our lives, if you look at it from a certain point of view. i'd ask myself, what's the point of discovering, when all will be revealed in the afterlife? what's the point of anything about life other than just a practical exam in order to get into heaven? without heaven we are forced to recognize the importance of life, material, practical, imperfect, often painful, complicated, amazing life. and how incredibly lucky we are to have it. think of the millions of genetic variations that could have been arranged when you where conceived, think of the billions of people that could be on this earth but are not. from a purely statistical point of view, we're incredibly lucky to be sharing this wonderful spark of consciousness. and so what if there's no set purpose to your life? it's not like something is missing, there never was a set purpose to your life. it's not like there was once something there and now it's been stolen, or broken, or disappeared. there is nothing missing. there's just a blank slate. a beautiful if somewhat harsh white canvas for you to set down your own ethics and ultimately your own meaning. and meaning is over rated anyway, if you look at an amazing landscape, a geologist could tell you how it came to be because of plate tectonics and a biologist could tell you about the ecosystem there and they could give you a lot of information about the beautiful landscape. no one can tell you the landscape's meaning, but that does not make the landscape any less beautiful or amazing. maybe asking for it's meaning is simply the wrong question to ask, like asking for the square root of a door knob or the wing span of a rock. maybe asking for the meaning of life is actually something absurd but we're just so used to it we can't recognize it. all i'm saying is, the perk of being an atheist is that you can leave aside all the worry and the bullshit about what comes after life. as soon as you accept deep down in your bones that there is nothing but life, there should not be any reason for you to be scared, just liberated and excited to get on with it.
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