Death

[Mark]

As an atheist how do you cope with death?
Does death challenge your views as an atheist?

My fears concerning death mostly concern the welfare of those that I love and will survive me. I admit that I do not find pleasant the realization that some day, my mind and all of its perception, appreciation and hard-won understanding of this world will vanish into nothingness, but it is something that I accept. In an A.E. Housman metaphor, an entire universe dies with the death of its beholder. But I have the strong belief that the entire universe will not die with me, and that things will go on. That is a kind of comfort. Yet it remains a fact that in the current most widely accepted account, the Cosmos itself will eventually dissolve and burn out.

What anyway is the alternative, to take comfort in a fraudulent promise of immortality from an false religion?

I have a religious friend who says that she finds incomprensible the notion that she will one day not exist. I said, "What, do you find incomprensible that there was a time before this, when you equally did not exist? Why should the one be different from the other?"