Atheists/Humanists: Do you feel anxiety over death?
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Anonymous
| No, I'm not anymore. I used to be when I was younger, but after having kids and seeing how what we do influences following generations, it's made me much less anxious about my own mortality. People die, we just do. |
Anonymous
| Sure. I don't want to say goodbye to my family and friends forever. |
Anonymous
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So...whenever religious people talk amongst ourselves about stuff like this, I have literally never heard anyone put down atheists or even reference atheists at all.. Not even, "at least I'll feel smug that I wasn't an atheist!" No religious person talks like that, unless they are a cartoon on TV or an actual fanatic. Most people who are believers (and also not fanatic Christian evangelists, which most of us aren't) are happy to just let atheists do their thing and never bring it up.
So when atheists are doing the offhand-condescension move, like, "well I wish I could be dumb enough to believe in god, what a pity I'm not dumb," with the obvious implication that anyone who differs in opinion is dumb, I kinda lose respect for you guys. And I don't see a big difference between you and the evangelists. Just saying. |
Anonymous
I honestly can't find a single post above that did that. |
Anonymous
There are all sorts of variations on the idea that there are no atheists in foxholes. It comes up repeatedly. I've heard it individually as well as in movies, books, everywhere. There are plenty of religious people who are rather loud about their conviction that dying atheists find god just before death. Surely you have heard this before? |
Anonymous
Read 21:18. Anxiety over death itself? I don't think so. I do worry about my family when that time comes though. |
Anonymous
| My mom just died. We are Hindu but I am agnostic/atheist. The rituals our family does gives some measure of comfort, but my observation is that I am much more comfortable and accepting of her death and the finality of it, which ended six months of extreme suffering from cancer, than my brother and father who are religious/magical thinkers. I see her clearly in my heart and in my children, in my own habits and expressions and way of viewing the world. That is enough to give me comfort. She was a great woman, but she no longer Is. My dad paid a priest for 13 days of elaborate ritusls yo send my moms spirit to heaven. After the second day i could no longer politely participate. The explanationsvof the rituals were even more bizarre than the actual acts. I chose to clean up the house of my mothers belongings, and found that staying busy brought me peace. i have explaned to my young children that death is a natural and inevitable outcome, and posed God as a question rather than a certainty. They have taken it well, even though they were very close to grandma. |
Anonymous
I'm very sorry for your loss. While I take a different view (I actually do "bizarre" rituals myself, and have had spiritual experiences with them), I completely understand and respect why you want and need to take the stance that you have taken. There is no correct way to grieve or conceptualize death, and you are handling the whole issue with grace. I hope your family always thrives. |
Anonymous
+1000 I also note the almost militant, detached tone that agnostics here and in other posts take, a deliberate separation from themselves and God, as though they have to really work to keep Him out of their lives. What they don't (yet) understand is the way that God comes to us, lives in us and changes us, through the Holy Spirit. It's not something you constantly have to work at or try to believe, which is what they imply here |
Anonymous
No, absolutely not. I won't feel anything after I am dead. You become unconscious and then you never wake up. It's over. My work in this life will stand on its own merits as worthwhile or not. |
Anonymous
I didn't get any of that from the posts in this thread. I'm one of the agnostic PPs, and do not have to work to keep god out of my life. It is quite easy. |
Anonymous
Actually, I'm agnostic and that's precisely what I think. I think most people who believe in God don't have to work constantly at it, but I do, which is an indication that I'm unlikely to ever believe. It's your belief that I am somehow working hard not to believe that is dismissive. The point that some atheists are trying to make to you, perhaps inappropriately couched in language about intelligence, is that there is an actual difference in how easy it is for us to internalize something that feels fundamentally irrational. At the exact same time you are claiming we don't understand that it is easy for you, you are denying that it could be hard for us, and being offensively dismissive by suggesting we need to aggressively keep God out to continue to non-believe. |
Anonymous
I agree with you that the "dumb" comment above was out of line. But I also think you're putting blinders on if you don't think a huge percentage of believers are biased against athiests. See, for example, the person who +1000ed you below who has out of hand rejected a dozen people telling him it would be personally hard for them to accept God by saying they are actively trying to force God out of their lives. But more importantly, I think there's a strong argument that athiests are literally the group it is most acceptable to overtly discriminate against in public life. See, for example, polls showing that less than half of people could vote for an atheist or agnostic for president. Why? Because they don't accept one particular non-rational belief? (And yes, while I think it is offensive to call faith in God dumb, I do think it's fair to call it non-rational or even irrational. See, for example, Robert McCauley's Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not, which is an excellent defense of religion but not from its logical structure. Or see Soren Kierkegaard's explication of the Isaac sacrifice where he describes religious faith's fundamental underpinning bein irrationality. Kierkegaard, of course, was both profoundly religious and one of the smartest people ever to live, so he's surely not calling religious faith "dumb."). Presumably a large part of the anti-athiest polling stems from an appallingly large number of people, including some prominent academics, who believe that morality must stem from religion. I've always found this idea jarring. For one thing, Socrates, two millenia ago, made a pretty darned persuasive case that God must declare actions moral because of their intrinsic morality, rather than actions having instrinsic morality because God so declared them. But more importantly, I find it kind of horrifying the implication of the belief that morals exist only in God. If you believe this, does that mean, if, tomorrow, you suffer a Job-like loss of faith, you would then consider yourself free to murder and steal? That one necessary consequence of being an atheist or agnostic is that it requires you to ground your morals in universality rather than faith seems like one of those belief-systems' major benefits, not a flaw. In any case, I certainly believe you that you don't diss on athiests at your prayer groups. But you're also avoiding reality if you don't think athiests are aggressively shunned in American life. |
Anonymous
Yea, I feel anxiety, absolutely. I become sad when I think about becoming nothing when I die and the world just goes on without me. I want to know what it's like 100, 1000 years from now, but know that I very likely won't have a chance to find out. All my experiences, memories, a lifetime just vanishes and dissolves into nothing. Talking about it doesn't really change reality. We each have to find some irrational justification to get past the fear of death. For me, it's my kids. Even if I die, my kids live on. It's not the same as me being alive, but it'll have to do. |
Anonymous
To the previous PP, Here's your condescending evidence from the evangelists. To the pp, you are confused, god doesn't exist, we don't have to keep something out if it doesn't exist in the first place. There is literally no work involved to not believe in god because we are all born not believing in god - it's the default position. |