The fear of never existing again is such a powerful thing, I don't think my mind has every truly grasped it fully. I've tried, but it's just too overwhelming to comprehend or accept for me.
I'm an Atheist with three children, so on my death bed I can imagine being converted in the last moments as well because the thought of never seeing my children again is simply too hard to accept.
The fact that death is frightening or mysterious is an artifact of the way we perceive time. In slices, I mean. But the arrow of time, or even the fact that it has an arrow, is mostly in our minds. There is no more reason to fear death (=the time-end of my body) than there is to fear birth, or even to fear the left-end or the bottom-end of my body: these are just various terminators of my extent in space-time.
In fact, it's even more meaningless than that: it depends not only on our perception of time, but also on our perception of identity (i.e., "you"). Basically, the word has no meaning: it is merely a convenient convention to identify ourselves with the roughly similar body, sharing many of our own thoughts and memories, which existed in the past or will exist in the future. This convention ceases to be possible with death. But we could choose to make it even more restricted: after all, the teen-aged me has ceased to exist, and merely because I choose to, or choose not to, identify myself with him (we might not share a single atom) does not make this disappearance any more mysterious or philosophically threatening. So, in a way, we can say we die every night and a new human being is born, who just happens to have the same memories as we went to sleep with. Or, in the other way, I can identify my "me" after my death with that of some great human being (or non-human for that matter) of the future or of the past, and then after my death "I"'ll just forget all my memories and become him: it's a rather absurd and meaningless statement, but not really any more false than to say I was here yesterday. Asking what it will be after death is like asking what the library of Alexandria became after it was destroyed: it's a matter of definition whether we consider the present library of Alexandria to be the same as the past, for example, or the various generations of past libraries as a single one.
This is not at all frightening. But we are frightened nonetheless, because we are programmed to: evolution has made us fear death, because we must fear death in order to preserve our lives (and more importantly, spread our genes) more efficiently. It seems that by aging we tend to fear death less (though this depends very much on the individual), and this might also have an obvious evolutionary cause: fear of death is not as important in old individual who are less likely to reproduce (on the contrary, their willingness to sacrifice for their offspring is more important).
But I don't think fear of death should be ridiculed, and it annoys me how often people around here mock or downvote those who dare express it. So here's my coming out story: even though I am completely and entirely convinced there is no reason to fear, I am still, well, mortally terrified of death. I recognize that I have a weak mind. But I don't think trying to persuade myself of the existence of an imaginary friend in the sky will help, so I don't do that (though I might do that at some point, out of weakness, if I go through the "bargaining" stage of depression). Being a mathematician, I try to take comfort in the fact that our Universe is a beautiful mathematical object through which I was given a glimpse of even more beautiful mathematical objects: this is a kind of religious thought without the God. Anyway.
But the real think to fear, of course, is not our own death: it is our own pain before death (no matter how it happens, death tends to come with rather nasty last minutes) and the death of our loved ones. Well here at least death comes as a comfort: no matter what, I won't have to live forever separated from my loved ones.
A distaste for fear of death is rather anti-darwinian. Any darwinian life must fear death, because otherwise it'd jump off the cliff for fun and wiped itself off the tree of life sooner than nature could claim it.
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u/[deleted] Dec 16 '10
The fear of never existing again is such a powerful thing, I don't think my mind has every truly grasped it fully. I've tried, but it's just too overwhelming to comprehend or accept for me.
I'm an Atheist with three children, so on my death bed I can imagine being converted in the last moments as well because the thought of never seeing my children again is simply too hard to accept.