thoughts for the times on, well, death
even those who would lay no claim to the freudian tradition are wont to parrot his famous claim that religion will survive as long as people fear death. but it seems to me that this accompanies a very archaic, animal fear of death...a fear that would have arisen at the intersection where the animal instinct to survive met the cultural being of ideas. better stated, the conscious being, whose "i" consciousness--the one that monitors the first consciousness of pure experience, reflects on being--as a the result of these new traits of introspection the 'i' creates something called fear. fear in the cognitive/conceptual sense we speak of it to this day.
but is it necessary to the cognitive being whose self-monitoring self has now adopted the faculties of reason? because it seems to me, death under the god of theism is far more frightening (hence the urgent need to appease his wishes). under Him, you musn't merely worry about expiration, you have to worry about whether or not you've said all the right things, participated in all the right rituals that will exempt you from enduring an ETERNITY of suffering. the revelation that the myths of theism are just that, seems to afford those lucky enough to have reached this conclusion great senses of relief and solace. after all, if i was unaware that i didn't exist beforehand, i won't know that i don't exist after the fact. quite nice. life is almost like someone having stuffed a winning lottery ticket in your back pocket without your knowledge, and then (again, without your knowing) it blows away, say, into a sewer. you didn't have it before, you don't have it now. you did for a time. king of the world and you didn't even know. the exchange is irrelevant to you. the loss is trivial.
what atheism provides is the knowledge that you are, at this second, king of the world--yours, at least--and when it's over, you'll not be the wiser. it's motivating, liberating and the farthest thing from a fearful state as i can imagine. the fear, if there is any, seems to come mostly from having had those other myths well-established in the formative years, so that one is constantly trying to break with a youthful, fanciful, not-so-true picture of the world. the uncertainty is false--or at least unwarranted. to be clear though, i'm no more certain that there is NO god than i am that there are no invisible green fireflies buzzing my head the moment i'm typing this. but i see no reason to act as though either proposition is correct. atheism is not certainty. it is the reasonable exclusion of unfounded conclusions. where death is concerned, it's positively fear reducing.
but is it necessary to the cognitive being whose self-monitoring self has now adopted the faculties of reason? because it seems to me, death under the god of theism is far more frightening (hence the urgent need to appease his wishes). under Him, you musn't merely worry about expiration, you have to worry about whether or not you've said all the right things, participated in all the right rituals that will exempt you from enduring an ETERNITY of suffering. the revelation that the myths of theism are just that, seems to afford those lucky enough to have reached this conclusion great senses of relief and solace. after all, if i was unaware that i didn't exist beforehand, i won't know that i don't exist after the fact. quite nice. life is almost like someone having stuffed a winning lottery ticket in your back pocket without your knowledge, and then (again, without your knowing) it blows away, say, into a sewer. you didn't have it before, you don't have it now. you did for a time. king of the world and you didn't even know. the exchange is irrelevant to you. the loss is trivial.
what atheism provides is the knowledge that you are, at this second, king of the world--yours, at least--and when it's over, you'll not be the wiser. it's motivating, liberating and the farthest thing from a fearful state as i can imagine. the fear, if there is any, seems to come mostly from having had those other myths well-established in the formative years, so that one is constantly trying to break with a youthful, fanciful, not-so-true picture of the world. the uncertainty is false--or at least unwarranted. to be clear though, i'm no more certain that there is NO god than i am that there are no invisible green fireflies buzzing my head the moment i'm typing this. but i see no reason to act as though either proposition is correct. atheism is not certainty. it is the reasonable exclusion of unfounded conclusions. where death is concerned, it's positively fear reducing.