Atheists deal with Death

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This is a timely and fascinating topic.

The main source for me would be here; please go and take a look, while I figure out what to write!

There seems to be no doubt that, when we are faced with the death of a loved one, those of us who believe in a life after death find more comfort in their beliefs than those of us who are atheists, and rationalists, and have no beliefs in the supernatural at all.  To us, the loved one is gone, and only the physical shell is left behind.

To us, of course, the physical shell is definitely a large part of what the person was; all the thoughts and attitudes and personality of the person was contained in the brain that now lies unfunctioning, and uncaring, in the lifeless body.  We should gaze on the body with more love, and more loss, than a religious person would; to them, the person was some indefinable thing that has fled, to what they deem to be a “happier place”, in what we would consider an act of sorry self-deception.

The writer of the article, however, has an angle on this that is interesting, and possibly useful.  To a materialist, who believes that matter can neither be created nor destroyed (except in very special circumstances), the loved one is never destroyed completely.  His or her matter continues to exist, and becomes part of the life of the planet.  In these sad times, however, because of how much space a body occupies in the ground, we tend to cremate our loved ones, which means they add to the pollution of the air, but in principle they fall to the ground in good time, and nourish other living things.  It is a more definite continued existence than the imaginary one postulated by the religious.

All of this does not serve to mitigate our grief very much; death is a more real thing to us atheists than it is to those who believe in an afterlife.  They are very firm about their claim that the belief in an afterlife is not merely a fiction that makes life and death easier for them.  They claim that the afterlife is real, and not merely a comfortable fairy tale.

Descartes worried about reality.  Is all our perception a mere dream in the mind of some being?  Are we all figments of someone’s imagination?  But ultimately Descartes reasoned that, if he was worrying about whether he was real, he must exist.  An imaginary thing cannot worry about its own existence; whoever is imagining it has to worry on its behalf.  So if we are real enough to be self-conscious, we are real enough for the purposes of philosophy.

On the other hand, unfortunately, if enough people imagine that there is an afterlife, that does not make it real.  We do not believe in an afterlife simply because there is no evidence for it.  We don’t find it useful to believe in anything for which there is no evidence, unless it is an actual abstract construct, such as the number 5, which is infinitely useful.  Perhaps someone can create an abstract construct which is the afterlife, but to claim that we can actually enter it is unreasonable.

So I offer no comfort, really; when they die, we lose them.  They exist as memories only, and they cannot respond to our actions or our love.  Whatever love we mean them to have, we must give it while they live.  Do not waste your time.

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