It is a very consoling thought that when we die we get to be with our loved ones for eternity. The fact that it is consoling does not make it true, or even likely. We should learn how to grieve rather than lying to ourselves and to each other. We should console ourselves with how lucky we are to be here in the first place, and to experience life. As far as we know, we are the only lifeforms capable of understanding our place in the universe and how we came to be here. When we look up at the night sky we are looking at our own history, and that is a truly wondrous and majestic idea. We are all here by accident. There are any number of circumstances which could have led to my not being born, dating back to the beginning of the universe and the formation of the first stars.
People who say they can't imagine what it would be like to not exist after we die just aren't trying hard enough. It's not as though you will be stuck in an eternal state of conscious darkness. I think it was Mark Twain who said, "I was not alive for billions of years before I was born, and yet I was not inconvenienced in the slightest."
That life should begin at all was by no means a guarantee all those billions of years ago when the Earth was little more than a proto-planet. There was no oxygen atmosphere, the surface was constantly bombarded by asteroids and harmful UV rays. It is truly mind-boggling that in such a harsh environment a simple strand of protein was able to duplicate itself; and here we find ourselves some four billion years later.
So, the fact that we're all here for such a short amount of time, against astounding odds, I think shows that wasting time on wishful thinking and ancient superstition is idiotic and not in the least bit helpful. Do the best you can to ease the suffering of others, to find some joy and happiness in the world, and you will have lived an admirable life. Hoping against hope that there is something better after we die is to take your life for granted. It is to look back at the evolution and the majesty of the entire Cosmos and say, "No, thank you. I have a better explanation - I know the unknowable, because I can't imagine not existing, and it says so in my favorite book."
"Theism says that all our manifold problems; what is the good, how shall we live it, how shall we know it, how to explain suffering, how to confront the possibility of our own molecular irrelevance? All these questions that must disturb and detain us all can be solved by referring them 'upward' to a totalitarian judgement and an absolutist monarch.
ReplyDeleteBut there is no evidence for this monarchy, there is no Big Brother in the sky. It is a horrible idea that there is somebody who owns us, who makes us, who supervises us (waking and sleeping), who knows our thoughts, who can convict us of thought crime, who can judge us while we sleep, who can create us sick, as apparently we are, and then order us, on pain of eternal torture, to be well again. To demand this, to wish this to be true, is to wish to live as an abject slave. It is a wonderful thing that we now have enough information, enough intelligence, and (I hope) enough intellectual and moral courage to say that this ghastly proposition of a celestial dictatorship is founded on a lie, and to celebrate that fact. I invite you to join me in doing so."
~CH