Peter Kirby

I think the real fears are (a) having no power over when you die and (b) just not getting enough time, 120 years is piddling and (c) cutting all the emotional ties and (d) perhaps irrational cultural and personal brooding over the D-E-A-T-H concept. None of this is waved away with "well you wouldn't want to live forever" or "well you didn't exist before you were born."

best,
Peter Kirby

Kenneth

I do, I do...and it has left a great void in me. I loved Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, it offered me many countless reading days. But like all things beautiful, it will end and it did end. Sad, very sad. I tried Agatha Cristies and Judge Moon (Ancient Chinese Detectives), but it's just not the same.

And again, it reinforces my belief that the 'end' of anything is a sad, sad thing. If only I could sit on a park's bench one day, open a book and get to know Sherlock, Watson, Moriaty all over again. If only...

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Our fear of death does not come after death. It comes before it. So the respond that " will not feel anything at all"does not work for me.

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In this way, I am very much like my ancestors. People that I once despised because I thought they were outdated, conservative, and "old". I am Mao's Red Guard. I am the destroyer of the four olds.

But....

I am the old...now. I have lived a full life. I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of leaving everything behind. And lately, I am finding comfort in an old ideas: The Spirit World. Yesterday, we celebrated "Hunry ghost days."

Unlike western metaphysics, Chinese metaphysics is very "physics." The other life is but a continuation of this life. We need money, food, clothes in the next world, just as we need them here. I, an atheist and a communist, have fallen for this.

crocodile deathroll

The biggest fear I have about death is the knowledge the death heralds to total obliteration of all my memories and thus render the life I have lived would be totally irrelevant. The state would be subjectively indistinguishable from that state I was in before I was born.

And just plain not knowing is another - the fear of the unknown. You cannot say I know with absolute certainty what will happen to your sense of self after death.

Kenneth

Another point I like to raise about non-existance is that it isn't that death is not all that bad, but that death is, unlike life, not all that good.

Heathen Dawn

Thank you. I think there ought to be no turning back. I have those bouts of wishing to return to belief, but then I remind myself I can't believe in something without evidence.

My greatest fear is plagues. I fear my life being cut short by one. There is really no appeal, and nowhere to escape.

Virgil Tibbs

Personally I don't see how death renders life "irrelevant." You may discontinue, but the species goes on, including whatever contributions you made, whether in labor, thoughts you shared, children, what have you.

Besides which, if a finite existence were irrelevant, how could infinite existence be relevant? It would just be still more of the same. I used to feel as you did, but decided it was just left over religious indoctrination and should be discarded. One thing I've realized about being a former theist is that even after you dismiss the god concept, other useless baggage remains.

Very true, and there is also the annoyance of knowing that if I am right and there is no afterlife, I won't get the chance to gloat.

Tibbs

King Rat

Precisely. Since no human has ever lived forever, there is no data to support the idea that an infinite existance has more meaning. More is not necessarily better. Take for example a fearful and dull human that lives an infinitely long fearful and dull life, how is that better?

Few people I know live their finite lives to anything even close to the fullest, how would more years add anything? More t.v. time?

crocodile deathroll

Virgil Tibbs

If you view a great movie, then while you are on you way home, you get mugged, hit on the head and as a result of your blow to the head you acquire amnesia for that entire day. Then your experience of the movie is irrelevant. So you might as well view it again on order to have it implanted in your long term memory.

Same as when you dead your experience of this life would be just as irrelevant to you as though you had never been born.

CDR

Rational BAC

What surprised me about this thread is that it seems to demolish the old truism that a primary reason for religion is the fear of non-existence. I assumed that atheists as a general rule would have no such fear. Boy was I wrong.

Now, I am not sure at all why some people fear death (=non existent death) and some don't. It seems to be a very emotional subject-----something that bothers some people for no real rational reason that I can see.

But I'm sure we should all agree that the fear of death certainly has nothing to do with being a theist or a non-theist.

Biff the unclean

The primary reason for religion is to make money by creating imaginary fears in people and then coming to their imaginary rescue. Very high profit margin, almost no over head. You have nothing, you sell it, you still have nothing to sell again.
You are afraid of dying? No problemo, our religion has conquered death. You are still going to stop breathing and we are going to put you in the ground but you aren't really dead...trust us.